AC Milan were able to celebrate a derby win on Sunday night for the first time in seven meetings with Inter, but now work must continue ahead of Friday’s game against Lecce.
As Tuttosport (via MilanNews) write this morning, the derby win tasted even sweeter after a very turbulent and disappointing start to the season and after such a dominant performance where – if the chances had been taken – it could have been a far wider margin of victory.
It is right to get excited, but at the same time – precisely because before the victory against Inter several difficulties had emerged – it is also necessary to keep everyones’ feet on the ground and to turn this into a run of positive results.
The newspaper writes: ‘Fonseca, now we need this Milan to become a habit’. Then they add: ‘Ship refloated, but it is essential to change course definitively’.
The subtitle goes on to say: ‘The group is compact around the coach and there are shared playing principles. The watchword at this point becomes consistency’.
As mentioned, the opportunity will arrive immediately when the Rossoneri will take on Lecce on Friday at San Siro, a game in which another convincing display will be demanded.
Cautiously optimistic about the new showing. Hope the morale is back…I like Abraham’s energy, Gabbia’s starry eyedness, Puli’s enthusiasm…we need a few Milanistas to take us forward…
On paper we’re huge favourites, but gotta be focused, you never know.
Morata, Abraham and Pulisic seem to be motivated, the other players and especially our super star need to remain sharp.
Ideally, we manage to seal the deal soon enough to allow for early subs and get some rest before going to Leverkuzen.
I’m very happy with the victory against Inter; down to tears of joy. However, for me, there are a few concerns:
1) 4-4-2 worked and two strikers is the way to stretch Inter’s 3-player back line; they’ve been eating our lunch with their 3-5-2 and this time we got tactically better; but we can’t play Morata + Abraham every game; one is older, the other one is injury prone; they will need rest. And the replacements for that position, Jovic and Okafor, are not as good. So even if we move to this formation, it is a hard one to sustain over a long period.
2) Even though we did great in most sectors of the game, we still failed again in a goal that came from the right side of our defense. We can’t continue to leak goals from there. We don’t have a problem with scoring, as we now have multiple scoring players, but the problem is the goals conceded. Since Florenzi got injured, since Calabria is in decline, and since Emerson even though he did better against Inter, is still unreliable and leaves too much space to the opponent’s left winger, we are very bad on the right side of the defense. And God forbid Theo gets injured or suspended because there is no good deputy for the LB position either.
3) While we tend to play better against teams that attack us, we have paradoxically more trouble with lesser teams that practice a low block and park the bus. So, given that all games in Serie A are worth the same 3 points, we need to see if we’ll be consistent and will also beat the midtable teams and the bottom feeders. In the first 3 games we didn’t do well against those. I think the Lecce game will tell us a lot about whether or not the improvement we saw against Inter will hold.
4) We still don’t have a good DM. Fofana has improved against Inter as compared to his first games, which is natural because he joined late and off match form after long inactivity while Monaco negotiated his sale. But Fofana is not a DM specialist. I think we have been botching the mercato every time since Kessié left. Replacing Kessié with a proper and good DM should have been a priority long ago, and is still not fully addressed.