[ad_1]
When Rome and Milan first met in the post-covid world, they were two different teams. Rome was still struggling to find an identity, a compromise between the ambitions of Fonseca’s ideas and an inadequate squad; He played with the four behind and came out of a difficult victory against Sampdoria. Milan, for their part, still sported a mediocre team, who in the umpteenth year of transition had bet that a 38-year-old MLS forward would return at least some illusion.
It was a tired and sleepy match, won by Milan thanks to a few episodes. From that time on, everything changed. Two games later, Roma switched to the three-man defense, became a more upright and attentive team, and found a way to hide the gaps in their squad by providing more defense protection. In this new world, Milan has found a new balance, it has taken an increasingly convincing form: Ibrahimovic, totem in the center of the attack, has taken his performance far beyond all expectations. Around him, each player has found his own meaning: Ismael Bennacer and Franck Kessie in midfield, Leao and Rebic in attack; while on defense came another veteran in January, Simon Kjaer, he immediately proved to be one of the league’s most dependable center-backs.
Last year’s game.
Roma and Milan are two of the three Serie A teams, along with Atalanta, to have scored the most points after the lockout, and yesterday’s match came after a convincing start to the season. Roma remained unbeaten (they have 13 league games); while Milan even reached the highest score. But in the 2020/21 season we must also consider the Covid-19 variable, and if Roma already had Amadou Diawara out for weeks, Milan lost Hauge and Donnarumma a few hours before the game, positive results for the buffer. The absence of the goalkeeper created a potential structural problem for Milan, both because of the reliability between the posts and the ability of Ciprian Tatarusanu to start the action from below. Two aspects that quickly brought the Rossoneri into account.
Tatarusanu was much less involved with his teammates on the back start: he touched half the balls Donnarumma touches on average, and offered fewer solutions, forcing Milan to play even more directly. But above all, it was his mistake that allowed Roma to get back into the game after the perfect departure from Pioli’s team. Tatarusanu missed a cross from the corner, allowing Dzeko to score on an empty goal. According to Marchigiani, who was commenting on Sky, the less easy kind of solution to train for a goalkeeper not used to match situations.
AC Milan had only taken a few minutes to expose all of Rome’s structural problems. The dilemma for Fonseca was defensive: how to mark Ibrahimovic and at the same time protect the weak link par excellence of Roma, which is the right back, where Milan lined up Theo Hernández?
Like other times, Fonseca made a counterintuitive decision, deploying Mancini in the center and placing Ibáñez in the center of the right. On the one hand, he wanted to secure a stronger head and a tougher center on Ibra; on the other, a faster one, Ibanez, to help Karsdorp – the chosen one of the day in the Russian roulette of the right backs of Giallorossi- on the outside. The Theo-Karsdorp mismatch was expected, but if Fonseca’s solution did not work, it is above all because of Rafael Leao’s great game.
Leao as Hannibal in Rome’s right wing
After a minute and a half Leao received a diagonal pass from Calhanoglu. He was 40 meters from the rival goal, but by his physical means the field has the domestic dimensions of a football field. Roma struggled to cover the width and was able to accelerate, instead trotting a bit; Hernández fits deeply, he doesn’t need it. However, this move lengthens Giallorossi’s defense a bit and creates space. Leao has glimpsed Ibra running on the other side, a mental magnet for the thoughts of all Milan players. He returns to the right, Karsdorp for some reason leaves him space, and puts a sweet ball behind the last defender of Roma, which is Kumbulla, through which Ibra enters, who scores the first ball touched. This is helped by the misinterpretation of the central Albanian, who perhaps should have held the line and made the offside, or continue to follow the trajectory of the ball. In any case, he remained insecure and the ball ended up precisely on the tip of Ibrahimovic, who naturally passed Mirante with the save.
On the occasion of the second goal, Leao showed another nuance of his repertoire. He received the ball on the sideline and carried it forward sliding between the Roma defense shirts, leaving them to crumble. Leao is one of those players who does not seem to touch the ground and who only needs to walk to go faster than the others. He ran down the line, then came and found himself in front of Karsdorp again, and there he really sped up, before hitting a perfect ball for Saelemakers’ 2-1 goal. The third assists in two games, also calculating that, nice, in the derby.
Besides these two actions, there is not much in Leao’s game, if we exclude some races with which he allowed Pioli’s team to take the field. He is a player who expresses himself through moments, but who in each game is able to find at least one capable of folding events.
He had arrived at Milan as number 9 but it was the arrival of Ibrahimovic that unleashed his potential. Back in goal and in tight spaces he is a normal player; when he can play in front of the door it is devastating. The way he partners with Ibra, then, cannot be limited to his assists from the left. Even yesterday with his runs he covered much of the field. He often came to create central density, also to free Theo Hernández on the left. When the ball went long to Ibra, who was once again dominant yesterday in aerial duels and in the wall game, he launched himself behind him with blind confidence. From the banality of this scheme, Milan came close to scoring in the first action of the second half.
A type of situation that expresses well the effective, pragmatic and simple game of Pioli. Milan is a smart and balanced team that knows how to balance high aggression with positional defense; who prefers to run vertically to the reasoned attack, or to go directly to Ibrahimovic, an unreadable sphinx so far for any opposing defense. The identity of the Rossoneri goes through the alchemy between their protagonists, in the balance of their characteristics. If the left wing is unscrupulous and vertical, with Theo and Leao, the right is solid and disciplined, with Saelemakers and Calabria. These characteristics coincided well with some congenital defects of the gypsies, which in fact the Milan exposed all. However, just when it looked like it might collapse, Fonseca’s team showed more stamina than perhaps we could have imagined.
The perseverance of Rome
After Ibra’s 3-2 on a penalty, which came minutes after Roma’s second draw, Fonseca asked his players to stay calm and keep playing. Even yesterday the team faltered at various points, but never really collapsed, continuing to insist on its principles. The aspect that perhaps most identifies the Roma game is the patient exit from the bottom that later becomes a fast attack in transition. A situation in which yesterday the team had the strength to insist even in the moments of greatest difficulty. Specifically, yesterday Roma packed many men on the right wing, the one most built by the presence of Ibáñez, Karsdorp and Pedro. Also looking for brave solutions, Roma managed to beat Milan’s pressure and gain space to attack from the other side, the left.
After Milan’s second lead, Roma managed to evade Milan’s pressure with increasing insistence. In this case the team forms a diamond on the right side, from which they come out with a couple of tricky plays and then go to the left for Mkhitaryan and Spinazzola.
Even Roma, therefore, in their own way sewed the game around the characteristics of their players, and a right side better in building the action better counteracts a left side in defining it. In the second half, Mkhitaryan’s performance went up a lot, he always received from the center-left after a diagonal pass. Roma were imprecise in the last meters, as Fonseca also pointed out after the game, and Spinazzola almost always lost the duel with Calabria. However, it was precisely from a reception by Mkhitaryan that the pain of the momentary draw was born.
It was the second 3-3 of the day of a championship in which we continued to score a lot. It is difficult not to relate the number of goals to the absence of an audience, even if we still do not have precise explanations for the phenomenon. It is as if the emptiness of the stands favors a dispersive effect on the pitch, on the concentration of the players or, more generally, on their emotional energies. It is an invisible level and therefore we can only speak from impressions. The games, however, take enigmatic trends, in which it is legitimate to expect something more or less at any time.
But the script for yesterday’s game was also favored by two teams that never managed to have real control over the game. Two teams that do not like to handle the ball, that know how to go almost only vertically, and that have their only form of control in the management of spaces. After 50 minutes the teams were completely divided in two, chasing each other between attack and defense like in a basketball game. And in a context like that, neither of us was good at turning episodes on their side. Both showed players in a state of grace and structural fragility, such as the defense of corner kicks, fatal for Milan, almost for Roma, who were saved a couple of times almost by chance. One in ninety seconds, in a Romagnoli header a few inches from the door.
The 3-3 confirms that Roma and AC Milan are two of the healthiest teams in Serie A, and the ones that have perhaps best known how to embrace the chaos and unpredictability of the new football without an audience.
