AC Milan had the chance to prove they belong in the Scudetto discussion on Tuesday night, but the 2-0 defeat to Napoli simply reopened old cracks.
La Gazzetta dello Sport (seen below) have a rather provocative headline: ‘Milan, have you seen Conte?’. Who knows how the match would have ended with Conte in charge of the Rossoneri instead, but he certainly gave the management something to mull over as they moved 11 points ahead in the league.
With this defeat, Milan are ‘unofficially out of the Scudetto race’ in October as per the paper. The team need to discover a consistency that has not been there for a long time and even if they win almost all the games they are now relying on others declining.
Despite the absences (and the defeat), last night we still saw a proud Milan that played the style that Fonseca wants, conditioned however by too many individual errors that inevitably affected the final result. Chances were missed which – coupled with defensive mistakes – meant the game was only going to go one way.
Fonseca remarked that he has ‘never seen it won or lost’ after 10 games, referring to the Scudetto battle. At this rate, and with this consistent inconsistency, it will be very hard for Milan to have a say in matters.
They keep saying that Rafael Leao is not a saga at Milan, but yesterday’s exclusion against Napoli says otherwise, even more so if we consider the absence of Christian Pulisic.
Something seems to have broken, and if Milan don’t have their best and highest-paid player out there producing, a title challenge is impossible.