Milan, because the Conceiçao bench is at risk

Milan is clinging to Thursday recovery raft at Dall’Ara against Bologna. Another defeat would reduce hopes to hook fourth place and the relative qualification for the next Champions League to the minimum. Bologna has the same points as Milan – there are 41 and the seventh -eight place are worth – and it does the same ranking calculations. It will be a recovery with a playing appearance. A tie would make the game of those in front of them, even if in this weekend Florentine and Lazio have lost blows. Sunday evening, three days after Bologna, Milan will host Lazio in San Siro. There is enough to believe that the devil has a crucial week in front of a crucial week. Champions or non -Champions League? We will soon know. How did Milan do this? The team is not bad. Indeed, many players, I took one by one, are strong. The coaches understood us little, neither Paulo Fonseca nor Sergio Conceiçao found the formula. Conceiçao won the Italian Super Cup and entered the Italian Cup semifinals, but lost to Zagreb against Dinamo and Rotterdam against Feyenoord, and came out of the Champions League. Fonseca, if nothing else, had given Madrid’s great night, the victory at Bernabeu against Real. A beautiful optical illusion, with hindsight. Both Portuguese is curious that neither Fonseca nor Conceiçao have tied with the compatriot Rafa Leao. Fonseca collided and has the impression that Conceiçao is one step away from the front with the strongest striker of the deck: Saturday in Turin he replaced him at the interval for little performance. Milan should have changed Leao, bring out the champion who is in him. The opposite happened, Leao attracted AC Milan in the limbo of elderly, of what could be is and that for mysterious reasons is not.

Conceiçao’s problem is the opacity of the tactical-strategic project. It is not clear which Milan has in mind. Joao Felix’s arrival forced him to broaden the team’s offensive base. Reijnders and Pulisic have been affected by side effects. The first had to lower its range of action, to think backwards. Pulisic perceives Joao Felix as a competitor, like one who more or less frequent the same clods and with the same creative intent and who tends to shade him. Conceiçao changes formations and modules, corrects himself during the game, but a stable set -up is beyond coming. The defense at four as the only certainty. Not even the motivational aspect seems to work. Conceiçao is the count of Portugal, it was said, but the character thrust seems intermittent and with a decline tendency, as if the team no longer responded to its stripped minutes. Saturday, his body language in front of the bench was eloquent. In the unfavorable moments of the lost match against the bull, Conceiçao widening his arms. A gesture of sincerity and dissociation at the same time, as if to say: are these, what can I do?

Conceiçao signed a contract until June. The eventual success in the Italian Cup would not be saved, however much Simone Inzaghi built his first season at Inter, in 2021-22, on the brace of the national cups, a double in the possibilities of Conceiçao. Inzaghi, however, had arrived second in the championship, had pocketed a qualifying in the Champions League and had received the same criticism, for having made the Scudetto from Milan blow. Situations that are comparable. The Europe that counts the most and best pays is the frontier of Conceiçao’s contractual renewal. The short horizon of the bond, 30 June 2025, grants AC Milan a considerable freedom of maneuver. Let’s imagine that in place they have already started reconnaissance, cognitive research. Milan cannot afford to make a mistake another coach and throw away another season.