friendly summer games

Originally Posted by Del Piero

It's because Giovinco is injured. He will be out for a month.

http://www.football-italia.net/aug12p.html

G. Giovinco is his brother, thats the guy who played yesterday.

Thanks for that, I feel really stupid, haha.

I was about to say, because when I saw "Giovinco" and his number was not 20, but 37, I couldn't help but think "they even made him drop from 20 to 37, how can we not jump on that?!"

Thanks for the clarification, but at the same time, I'm mad, because now my little fantasy of Giovinco coming to Milan to become our new hero is dead.

Sebastian Giovinco is really an amazing prospect! But still they are not playing the kid enough, he gets very little playing time for the talent he has.


I wonder what will happen if we have the same match form and results in the official games...

I think there is far too much negativity here. The game against Inter was a massive improvement over previous friendlies, we did lose but Inter scored from their only chance.

We made do with a midfield without Pirlo or Seedorf, one of those two is needed to link the attack, we also missed Zambrotta and even Janku who are our only full-backs with the technique and intelligence to produce something when given the ball in the final third. Inter's marking of Ronaldinho was very tight and the fact that we were missing Pirlo and Seedorf meant that really stopped us attacking, but he still supplied Antonini on several occasions. If Zambrotta or Janku had been there we would have had chances. Huntelaar was not on the same wavelength as Ronaldinho and Pato which is understandable. So we were essentially missing three key parts of the team and still outplayed Inter, there are a lot of positives there.

Our weakness is certainly at full-back and we really need a player there. I'm a bit worried about the midfield when Pirlo comes in, it was very strong today but I'm not sure if it can accomodate Pirlo and Abate with only Gattuso or Flamini as the true ball-winner. Still, Abate was so good that he deserves to keep his place. I'd use Gattuso or Flamini in front of the defence and Pirlo further up. Gattuso clearly can't distribute the ball well, but it's better to have him further back and Pirlo further forward as long as Gattuso can just give Pirlo the ball instead of trying to pass himself.

Originally Posted by Samaldinho

Kaka might have complained during his usage in the 4-3-2-1, but he won his FIFA World Player of the Year and Ballon D'Or in the 4-3-2-1 system and won his Champions League using that system as well. So, I'd debate whether he really played his best football in the 4-3-1-2.

That was only based on 2-4 games. He played great in a few games, most notably against ManU. Meanwhile he did pretty much nothing in the league in the same formation for that season and the season after. while he with 4-3-1-2 had been great for 2-3 seasons both in the league and in UCL. If you don't think we played much better and Kaka was much better between 2004-2006 then you can't have watched many games then. We scored considerably more goals in 2005/06 than in 2006/07 too.

World player of the year you win just by playing good in a few years, just watch Ronaldo that won it after hardly not having played for the whole season, but then played really well in the world cup.

As for Ronaldinho distributing well. Lets just say we disagree on that one.

Any highlights for this game ?I was a local game and missed this .From what i read around here we did not play that badly ,but still not good enough to challenge for honors .

I was hoping to read some good reviews about Huntelar ,but i guess it was only a slim chance for him to do really well in his first friendly against top teams .

I hope by the end of next week we will sign some full backs. A creative midfielder would be the cherry on top of the cake ,but lets not get greedy.

I was more pleased with the match against Inter than Juve. Despite Inter winning relatively comfortably on the whole, we limited them and they didn't tear us apart, which is a bad sign ahead of the new season given we're not able to compete with these teams yet.

Our problems stem from the back. We have incompetent fullbacks that leave acres of space ready to be taken advantage of. The defence in general looks out of sorts with players getting drawn out of position far too easily.

I don't blame Leo for trying Rino in Pirlo's spot (it worked last season) but it was the wrong choice yesterday. What worries me is Leo looks like he's getting forced (or is doing it himself) into playing a very similar system to Carlo given what he has. Our midfield simply didn't hold it's shape which allowed our opponents, especially Juve, to cut through us with ease.

As for the attack, without support it's useless frankly. Dinho did nothing in these matches and his 1-2 decent games in preseason don't make up for the rest of the mediocre performances. Given he now has the responsibilities Kaka had before, he really needs to step up, which he's been a massive let down so far.

The fact is, Leo at this point needs to work tactically with the team and get them into shape. Right now we're lacking organisation or structure and this hurts us in defence and attack. Ideally, we'd be playing Leo's desired 4-3-3 but we can't with what we've got. We desperately need fullbacks to come in to start with. If I was Leo I'd talk to Galliani and Berlu about Dinho. Until now he's not shown enough to be trusted as a leader of this side.

Originally Posted by Az.

Any highlights for this game ?

Here's highlights of our game against Juve:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VzKj6t4Swt8

Originally Posted by Cristina

Here's highlights of our game against Juve:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VzKj6t4Swt8

Tanks ,so glad you registered here to

And the game against Merda:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qF3-OVPDBko

Can anyone tell me about Leonardo's masterplan? Couldn't see much in the last few games about his vision he told us at the beginning of the preseason friendlies. Too much space between the three sections.

Wasn't the second goal against Juve like the one we conceded against Bayern. R80 lost the Ball and 10 seconds later the ball was in the net...

Originally Posted by Cristina

Here's highlights of our game against Juve:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VzKj6t4Swt8

Highlights?

Thank you for posting.

Originally Posted by M.O.I.

anyone but him mate!!
not rajkard..

wow.. u would still prefer a man who lost 9 out of 10 preseason games over a man who won the league & champions league ? u must be smoking some heavy stuff.. share pls..

Originally Posted by SkyEdge

wow.. u would still prefer a man who lost 9 out of 10 preseason games over a man who won the league & champions league ? u must be smoking some heavy stuff.. share pls..

It isnt a fair comparison. A fairer comparison would be the pre-season of Ancelotti's debut season and Leonardo's pre-season.

Having said that, any comparison would need to consider a whole season so lets wait until Leonardo either gets sacked or has a full season. Then we can evaluate his performance.

Originally Posted by K77SH C

It isnt a fair comparison. A fairer comparison would be the pre-season of Ancelotti's debut season and Leonardo's pre-season.

Having said that, any comparison would need to consider a whole season so lets wait until Leonardo either gets sacked or has a full season. Then we can evaluate his performance.

Ancelotti's debut season with us didn't have a pre-season. If I remember it correctly, Ancelotti took it over from Terim in October (or November) of 2001 after Inzaghi missed the penalty at the last minute and Milan lost 0-1 at Torino.

Here's the list of the ones called up for tomorrow's game, from acmilan.com:

Storari, Roma; Antonini, Favalli, Jankulovski, Kaladze, Nesta, Oddo, Onyewu, Thiago Silva, Zambrotta; Abate, Flamini, Gattuso, Pirlo; Borriello, Huntelaar, Inzaghi, Pato, Ronaldinho.

Just four midfielders, five if you include Jankulovski? Don't Leonardo trust the youngsters like Di Gennaro, Cardacio and Viudez? Are they unavailable for certain reasons?