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Although we repeat to ourselves that football cannot be reduced to the sum of the individual duels of individual players on the pitch, in this Milan Derby we have been repeatedly invited to do so. It was because of the monstrous performance of Ibrahimovic, of course, that for 90 minutes he intimidated the Inter centrals, jumping on their heads, without even letting them get close to the ball, acting as an absolute reference in the center of the trocar, controlling the ball with almost every possible part of the foot, almost dislocating the hips, approaching – with 9 out of 10 aerial duels won – to the closest thing in a field to a lion devouring its prey, although the metaphor is objectively kitsch.
Fame pic.twitter.com/it69cGTEZk
– Zlatan Ibrahimovic (@Ibra_official) October 17, 2020
But I also think of the defensive mistakes of Kolarov, who directly or indirectly helped AC Milan’s momentary 0-2 by sparking the discussion about how appropriate his use as a center-back, the speed challenges on the wing between sports cars dressed as wingers like Hakimi and Theo Hernández, and the home fight between Lautaro and Kjaer, and between Lukaku and Romagnoli, the competition for who covered the most ground between Kessié and Vidal, the amphetamine progressions of Barella and Calhanoglu.
Now I would like to tell you that in reality yesterday’s game cannot be reduced to just this, that football is always more than individual individual duels, but the reality is that both Conte and Pioli have both focused on match plans that in final they took the whole game to its most primordial dimension: a continuous one-on-one. A challenge for those who jumped higher, for those who ran faster, for those who managed to coordinate in the most unthinkable way. It was the tactical context itself that made the game decide on this basis.
A direct Milan
Take Milan, for example. Pioli’s strategy was to liberate Calabria under construction in the lower right through a system essentially composed of two elements: on the one hand, a rhombus under construction made up of Calabria anchored to the two defense stations and also by one between Kessié and Bennacer as a high reference; and on the other hand by the low and very wide position of Saelemakers, who during the construction phase placed his feet almost in the line of the lateral phallus, behind Perisic.
If the rhombus allowed Calabria to receive in the correct position (the right middle back), Saelemakers’ position instead gave him enough time and space to play the ball forward, creating an ambiguity that was never really resolved at Inter about who. should. pick it up between Kolarov and Perisic himself. In this way, the Croatian winger always came up late over Calabria in the pressure phase, or sometimes did not even go up at all, forcing Kolarov to come off the defensive line in a very dangerous way.
In the second case, Inter will be surprised even with the kickoff immediately after their 1-2. Fortunately for the Nerazzurri, the Calabria diagonal was prodigiously intercepted by Kolarov.
Once Calabria was liberated during the construction phase, Milan tried to reach the barter in the most direct way possible: that is, through a long diagonal that skipped midfield and reached the head or chest of Ibrahimovic, or put them in vertical Calhanoglu. The two were obviously combined often, with the Turkish attacking midfielder sometimes lifting the banks of Ibra and attempting to tilt the field towards Handanovic by throwing Saelemakers or Leao deep.
A fairly simple tactical weapon, to be honest, but in the hands of Ibrahimovic it has become very close to Thor’s hammer. De Vrij, in fact, was tight throughout the match in the dilemma between trying to get ahead of Ibrahimovic, opening the defense in the center to cuts from Calhanoglu or Leao, and being condemned each time to lose the individual duel, or stay in the garrison. zone, leaving the free reception of the Swedish number 9 in the trocar, behind the Nerazzurri midfield.
De Vrij’s difficulties in understanding what to do created a cascade of conditions for Ibrahimovic’s first two goals. In the first case, the Dutch center-back was precisely halfway between the Swede and Calhanoglu, served in the barter obviously from Calabria, which caused Kolarov’s desperate and ruinous recovery attempt.
On the action that leads to Ibrahimovic’s penalty, all of Inter’s pending problems in the defensive phase: the ambiguity between Kolarov and Perisic about who has to go up to Calabria and who has to go up to Saelmaekers; De Vrij caught between Calhanoglu and Ibrahimovic; Kolarov was slow to catch up.
In the second case, in an action started again from the feet of Calabria and started by a great turn of Saelemakers on Brozovic, De Vrij tried to support D’Ambrosio, who was burned in speed by Leao, being outnumbered in Area of Kolarov. The Serbian defender, who was left alone, had to watch over Calhanoglu’s insertion into the area and Ibrahimovic’s play at the far post, ending up not doing both.
Kolarov was accused of carelessness, but the same would have happened if he had covered the far post and Leao had served the Turkish attacking midfielder, with a relatively simple passing line. In reality, Inter’s defensive woes seemed more structural than just a defender on a bad day, with Ibrahimovic’s overwhelming athletic and technical power over Conte’s defense doing the rest.
Inter’s problems
Conte’s problems also extended to the ownership phase, beginning with construction. If we exclude the first minutes – in which Milan seemed not to have understood how to mark Brozovic, who along with Vidal was placed in front of the three centrals to favor the rise of the ball – Inter was unable to overcome the high pressure of Milan and go up the ball field and chain in a reasoned way, at least in the first half.
Pioli’s team managed to rule out Conte’s building pentagon with relative ease, with Ibrahimovic protecting De Vrij, while Saelemakers and Leao went to the man respectively in Kolarov and D’Ambrosio, and Bennacer and Calhanoglu instead in Brozovic and Vidal. . As Barella never managed to break free from this first block, Inter had no choice but to go straight for the coordinated movements of their two forwards, often starting directly from Handanovic’s feet.
In this case, Barella is released on the right when D’Ambrosio has already turned into the field. The Nerazzurri defender will launch straight at Lautaro, who went down to midfield, followed by Kjaer.
A strategy that theoretically made sense, calculating how much difficulty Kjaer and then Romagnoli had in maintaining the progressions of Lautaro Martínez and Lukaku, but which ended up excessively lengthening the field on which Inter attacked. In this way, the Nerazzurri ended up breaking in the first half, making the context even more favorable to the very fast transitions of the Pioli team.
More generally, however, Conte’s team seemed very involved from a positional point of view, with Vidal and especially Brozovic having no role in recovering the ball, simply moving to clear the passing lanes for the Nerazzurri centers. . The two midfielders dealt almost exclusively with the defensive phase, and in this sense it gives the impression that Inter was long and fragile in the defensive transition even with two players like Vidal and Barella who were able to play with the same intensity even in a field two. times. bigger – and the ball reached the opponent’s trocar only with the verticalization directed towards the two forwards or if someone brought it directly to us with the ball and chain. Barella has done it often, for example, who in himself loves to order chaos by transforming the second balls into a ball and chain running towards the opponent’s trocar.
Perhaps the moment when Inter’s positional difficulties were clearer: Vidal and Brozovic both get down in the ball zone to receive but are too crushed to be taken out and for Milan practically only one man is enough to score three opponents. The two Nerazzurri midfielders can’t help but watch Kolarov verticalize towards Lukaku.
In this context, it is not surprising that, despite being vilified for his lack of defensive attention, a player like Kolarov, who often tries to create opportunities directly from defense, immediately assumed a crucial creative centrality. Most of Inter’s chances came from the feet of the Serbian defender (second only to Hakimi in passing attempts), who was in fact the real manager of the team with Brozovic watching him set the pace from behind. Besides, of course, the goal, which saw Kolarov climb up behind Saelemakers giving Hakimi a horizontal pass line, the Serbian also unleashed the opportunity that occurred to the Moroccan winger at 59 (born out of his career). to the midfield a long horizontal circulation) and the wasted in extension by Lukaku to 93 (born of its verticalization towards the Belgian). Three occasions that yielded most of the 3.1 Expected Goals created by Inter as proof of the great quality of the squad, capable of becoming very dangerous despite tactical imperfections.
The trigger for Inter’s last great opportunity, with the classic dialogue between Lukaku and Lautaro that puts the Belgian forward one step away from 2-2. It should be noted that the midfield, formed by Eriksen, Sánchez (who joined in place of Vidal and Brozovic) and Barella, is completely marginalized by the midfield and by the direction of the action.
In the same way, it is not surprising that in a match of this type Eriksen continues to fight, even on Saturday he appeared disoriented in the few minutes that Conte allowed him. The Danish attacking midfielder, in fact, does not have athletic qualities that allow him to physically carry the ball vertically and prefers to make the ball travel in the short, ordering the team to dribble in the short. The Salento coach, however, seems to have focused on an increasingly direct game that, if we exclude the low construction to attract the opposite pressure, tries to activate the coordinated movements of the points in the shortest possible time and many times directly from the defending.
A game, that is, one that bets on the athletic qualities of its most exceptional players – from Vidal to Barella, from Lukaku and Hakimi – stretching the field to the point of drowning all the others who do not have those qualities or do not have them. they have more, from De Vrij to Kolarov, through Brozovic, Eriksen and Lautaro himself, who after a long time dealing with Kjaer seemed to have great physical difficulty.
The problem, for Conte and Inter, is having found a team that in that long field now knows how to slide almost with their eyes closed, with some of the few interpreters in Italy who know how to cope with those athletic skills. And with one of the few in the world who at 39 still has the strength and class to face an entire defense on his own.
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