AC Milan fell to a narrow defeat in the Netherlands on Wednesday night, and the frustrations have been magnified because it has already happened.
No, not in the sense that Milan have lost 1-0 to the Dutch outfit because of an error already this season, but because the Rossoneri have played out the same blueprint game too many times. It can be 1-0, it can be 2-1, the picture remains the same.
The Rossoneri cannot be classified as a top team due to a consistently frustrating amount of errors. Sergio Conceicao’s appointment was hoped to be the key to stopping the errors, but it has not, and it shines a light on personnel, rather than management.
Gazzetta dello Sport compares the two games and finds four errors that do not change.
Firstly, Milan missed the attitude required to play in Europe once again. As we have already seen with the Rossoneri (and others), quality is not enough if it is not matched with intensity and the right attitude. Once again, the Rossoneri were their own killers in this sense.
Then, the report goes to the actual ideas of the game – not only did the Diavolo sometimes look confused, but Feyenoord’s game plan was basic but effective due to the failure to catch on. As a result, the paper states that Milan were lazy and boring – harsh but fair given we have already seen this playbook fail before.
The final two points have been raised several times already, and there is no sign of this changing: mistakes and key players. Once again, the Rossoneri made a big mistake, which they failed to recover from, which has now happened in both of their last two European away games.
Then, the big players cannot get them out of the situation or have already put them into a situation where a mistake would not matter.
Unfortunately, the same problems repeat regularly, and this is why frustrations are so high once again, after all, Milan continue to ‘learn nothing’ from their mistakes.
This is a bit exaggerated. So, Gabbia makes a mistake, slips, gifts a ball to Zagreb, and Zagreb scores a goal. How would “learning from that mistake” prevent Mike Maignan from eating that howler? One thing has strictly nothing to do with the other.
Both are psychological situations which do not happen in a training session for example.
And in fact in Zagreb were two big mistakes: the Gabbia gift and the Musah’s red card which was even worse…
Sure, I agree with Musah’s red card being even worse, but again, what does it have to do with not learning from the mistakes in Zagreb, for Rotterdam? Musah didn’t even play (he was disqualified; so, yes, his mistake spilled over the Rotterdam game, but it’s not like Milan did not learn from his mistake; nobody got red carded in Rotterdam).
My point is, whatever the head coach and the other players did wrong in Rotterdam, Mike Maignan’s howler is exclusively on Mike Maignan, and not on some mistake in Zagred that we didn’t learn from. So, this article is absurd.
If the policy is to buy only very young players, mostly not over 1015 million euro, you will always get some (maybe) talented but no experience in UCL and no experience to be the follower in the game. You need someone with history of champions to raise up the level of game in the field.
10-15 million euro.