De Ketelaere flop. And in Pioli’s Milan 3-5-2 there is no room for him

The more the season progresses, the more De Ketelaere runs backwards. Take the derbies: in September Charles was AC Milan’s starting attacking midfielder, he came on after more than an hour in the Super Cup, 2-0 up for Inter, in last Sunday he watched the whole game . Three flashes are enough to frame a parable, and perhaps also to guess its direction from now to May: to date, the all-in of the Milan transfer market is increasingly on the margins of Milan. It is not a definitive sentence – and God forbid, we are talking about a boy who will turn 22 in a month – but one that tells the story. And in the Devil who molts to get out of the crisis, the spaces available could shrink even more: Charles, we have a problem. Indeed, more than one.

fast

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The most obvious is in front of goal: 17 different players have scored in Milan, but not De Ketelaere. Someone who is a striker by trade and who in the last season, at Bruges, had thrown him in 18 times in 49 appearances: the Belgian championship will not be Serie A, but it is undeniable that the Rossoneri technical area expected everything another contribution in terms of realization. Let’s say in the order of 8-10 goals. Today we are far, far away from the expectations of the summer, and in the end it doesn’t add up even if you look back: with the exception of Mandzukic (11 appearances without scoring in 2021), in the last 10 years no Rossoneri striker had remained dry after his first 17 appearances in the league, as happened instead to the blond from Bruges. From Cerci to Castillejo, from Hauge to Piatek, up to Leao and Rebic, everyone unlocked earlier. Including André Silva, a center forward with no feeling for goal in the “Chinese” Milan but still capable of breaking the ice on his seventeenth attempt in Serie A (in Europe, on the other hand, he scored like a striker). Here, De Ketelaere has no rivals here – unfortunately for him and for Milan – and the plate cries further if the field is widened to include cups: the count rises to 24 appearances without scoring. Goals aren’t everything, the point is that this CDK also lacks the rest: never a vertical play, dribbling with a dropper, worse for shots and inventions. The assist for Leao in the 2-0 win against Bologna in August is a faded memory.

benches and millions

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The present are the benches (Pioli has never fielded him as a starter in the last three months of 2022) or the failures in the running (the last one, in the interval of the defeat against Sassuolo). The quality-price ratio is disastrous from whichever side you look at it: every minute of the Belgian on the pitch is costing AC Milan 6,100 euros, against 1,200 in Kvaratskhelia for leaders Napoli. The comparison becomes merciless if we weigh the contribution of the two born in 2001: not only was the Georgian paid much less than CDK (10 million against 32), but he made the Azzurri rich with 10 goals and 14 assists in 22 appearances overall. The gap in the standings between Naples and Milan also photographs the one on the market: Kvicha and Charles are two sides of the moon, the symbols of two antipode signing campaigns in terms of yield.

loss exchange

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Could it get worse than this? Yes, if the change of formation that Pioli has launched against Inter will be followed up in the next matches. The clues arriving from Milanello confirm what the coach announced the other evening: the three-man defense will also meet again against Turin, any corrections will be designed to find a place for those who were left out in the derby and proved to be too important anyway. see Leah. For youngsters in crisis of confidence and tactical identity like De Ketelaere — in Milan he made the “10”, but also the false 9 and the second striker, always without success — there will most likely still be a long wait: Pioli is convinced that he has an excellent raw material in his hands, but he is equally convinced that it takes time to get to the finished product. And the crisis does not wait.