Improved movement and a clear regression: Tactical analysis of AC Milan 1-1 Inter | OneFootball

AC Milan and Inter played out their second consecutive 1-1 draw on Wednesday night at San Siro, this time in the first leg of their Coppa Italia semi-final tie.

It was a cagey and feisty first half that didn’t yield any goals, but the game burst into life after the interval. Tammy Abraham kept his positive derby trend going by turning and firing a shot inside the far corner to put Milan 1-0 up.

At the midway point Hakan Calhanoglu levelled with a rocket of a shot from range that went in through a crowd and under Mike Maignan, and both sides had their chances to win it from there.

In the end though Sergio Conceicao and Simone Inzaghi would have to shake hands and accept a draw, meaning the second leg in three weeks is very much a one-off game.

Conceicao made three changes to the starting line-up from the team that lost to Napoli on Sunday, with Malick Thiaw coming back in at centre-back, Alex Jimenez on the right wing and Rafael Leao on the left. Below is Rohit Rajeev‘s tactical analysis.

Off-ball shape

What stood out the most in the game was Milan’s off the ball shape. The Rossoneri adopted a narrow 4-4-2/4-5-1 shape with a zonal approach, choosing to be narrow and compact between the lines giving very little space.

To disrupt Inter’s build-up, Milan overcrowded the middle of the park by using a five-man midfield, thus creating a 5v4 in that area and not giving any space.

One of Inter’s main strength is the left flank, where Inzaghi allows Alessandro Bastoni to make overlapping runs. This was one of the main reasons for Milan to play Alex Jimenez ahead of Kyle Walker, so that the latter did not get outnumbered.

An obvious regression

One area where Milan have regressed from Paulo Fonseca to Conceicao is in terms of set pieces. De Vrij was very close to taking the lead for Inter due to some poor defending from Milan, who looked totally confused in terms of their assignments.

Improved movement

We criticised Milan quite a lot for their lack of movement against Napoli. However, against Inter, the Diavolo upped their game with amazing off-ball movement. In this sequence, you can see Pulisic making a run which gives Walker a vertical passing lane directly to Abraham.

Youssouf Fofana dropped deep pulling Mkhitaryan towards him and creating space between the lines for Reijnders to occupy and then switch to Leao, who got a shot on target.

Pulisic’s off-ball run was crucial in Milan getting the goal, but there is certainly a lot of credit due to Abraham for great centre-forward play. He received the ball, dropped the shoulder and that created the space with Bisseck.

Another interesting observation is that Fofana and Abraham had a lot of vertical interplay between each other, so much so that it seemed a rehearsed move where as soon as the Frenchman received the ball Abraham moved into his vertical passing lines.

For Inter’s goal, Barella – who made the run through the half space – was completely unmarked. He allowed Inter to evade Milan’s horizontal press and the move led to a goal, with Calhanoglu completely unmarked.

A worrying thing about Milan’s attacks is that when Reijnders got into a dangerous position to cut-back, nobody was there to attack it aside from Abraham. Theo ran onto it and his shot flew well over.