An identifiable weakness and structures: Tactical analysis of AC Milan 2-1 Red Star

AC Milan made it four wins in a row in the Champions League as they came out 2-1 winners against Red Star at San Siro on Wednesday night.

Paulo Fonseca made two changes to the team that lost against Atalanta on Friday, with Ruben Loftus-Cheek coming in for the injured Christian Pulisic and Davide Calabria taking the starting right-back role from Emerson Royal.

There were a couple of forced changes due to injuries early on with Loftus-Cheek and Alvaro Morata coming off, which led to further reshuffling on the fly. Things took a turn in a more positive direction for Milan when Rafael Leao scored the opener.

The former Torino man Radonjic came off the bench to score a rocket of an equaliser in the second half, and in truth the Serbian side looked like potentially the more likely to go on and grab a winner.

Just as it looked like the game was drifting towards a draw, Tammy Abraham was there in the right place at the right time to lash home a rebound as Francesco Camarda came close to scoring again, making it 2-1.

That’s how the score would stay and although it was an ugly victory, it continues the push towards the top eight spots. Below is a tactical analysis from the game, courtesy of our writer Rohit Rajeev.

Opposing structures

Milan’s on the ball structure was a 2-3-5/3-2-5 structure on the ball.

Red Star sat back in a mid block using a transitional 4-4-2 using a man-oriented pressing system as we can see below.

Milan’s structure dictated by positional tried to break this down using two methods:

One of them was Theo Hernandez’s deeper position and Rafael Leao playing wide, creating space for Tijjani Reijnders to play it through the half spaces.

Another tactic was to use positional switches, such as below where you can see Leao occupying the left position of the double pivot.

Reijnders them moves up to fill the left inside forward role with Theo occupying the left winger role, effectively filling where Leao would be and causing confusion.

Weakness identified

A perceived weakness of Fonseca’s team is that with Leao stating forward as an outlet to start quick counters, it means that there is a man less to protect the left flank.

In the example below Theo pushes up, so Malick Thiaw goes to cover for him and Matteo Gabbia goes to cover for the German, leaving Davide Calabria is confused about what to do. The gap was enough for Red Star to get a man through on goal but their striker missed.

The two goals

What eventually cracked with Red Star’s mid-block was the fact that in their quest to be compact, they pushed up the field. The high line then creates space behind the defence, with Leao running off the shoulder of the last man and finishing Fofana’s brilliant pass.

Although it might have seemed a bit like chaos with Francesco Camarda’s header hitting the bar and bodies falling all over inside the box, the routine for Milan’s winner was actually well executed.

On the front foot?

In the game, Milan made 396 passes from 446, as quoted from UEFA, which averages at about an 89% completion rate but this is not the piece of information we need to focus on. From those completed passes, almost a tenth were passes into the final third.

Furthermore, less than half of these passes were into the ‘key play area’ (15) and only nine passes were actually played into the penalty box.

Of course, the Diavolo got the win, but with 20 shots in the game, perhaps there could be better usage of the ball in some situations beyond shooting. Context definitely adds difficulty to the situation, because there was probably some internal desperation, but it could be seen as wasteful in the future if the trend continues – narrow wins with only a 10% conversion rate.

An understandable rant

Once again using stats provided by UEFA, we can also look at one of the big things from Fonseca’s post-match press conference.

In this game, Milan ran 113.1 km as a team, which averages at around 10km ran per player, and we just want to focus on this figure, rather than the in-depth figures of it, such as the intensity of runs etcetera.

Compared to the Rossoneri’s opening four Champions League games, Fonesca’s side are generally running less per game (and it is worth mentioning that this was the case against Slovan Bratislava too).

Whilst the difference may only be by a few kilometres per game, there is an issue with this and partnered with things such as the intensity of runs, then we could start to understand why the Portuguese was so frustrated by things in midweek.