Milan leap back into reckoning and stake claim as real ‘anti-Inter’ team | Serie A

The talk before Juventus played Napoli on Saturday was all about which of these two teams would establish themselves as the “anti-Inter”. Thiago Motta’s Bianconeri were the only team yet to concede a goal in Serie A and had started their Champions League campaign with a confident win over PSV. Antonio Conte’s Napoli were second in the table.

Here were the two presumed contenders to dethrone Inter as champions. Juventus because they are Juventus, the most successful club in league history, led by an up-and-coming manager who just got Bologna back into the European Cup for the first time in 60 years. Napoli because they are still only 16 months removed from their third Scudetto, and Conte retains his reputation in Italy as a serial winner.

Milan were supposed to be a part of this conversation too, Paulo Fonseca embracing high expectations when he named a league title as his objective after taking over from Stefano Pioli in the summer. Yet nobody was talking about that as his team prepared to face Inter in the derby on Sunday. The Rossoneri had collected just five points from the opening four games.

Instead of questions about Milan’s title credentials, Fonseca was asked whether he had heard the reports that he could soon be sacked. “No, and that’s the truth,” he insisted. “That stuff is not important. If I worried about that, I could not do my job calmly. The only important thing is what I hear from the people I’m working with.”

The outward signs have not been encouraging on that front, either. The choice by Rafael Leão and Theo Hernández to go to the far side of the pitch from their teammates and manager for a cooling break during a draw against Lazio this month was interpreted by many as evidence of disharmony in the ranks.

Regardless, the pressure on Fonseca was real. Milan fans were lukewarm on his appointment from the start, and already demonstrated their influence this summer with a pressure campaign that helped dissuade the club from hiring Julen Lopetegui. Neither name captured the imagination of supporters desperate to see their team respond after Inter beat them to a 20th Serie A title.

The team’s failure to win any of their first three league games hardly reassured them. Before the fourth, at home to Venezia, more than a thousand fans waited to meet the players’ bus outside San Siro, with a banner that read: “Enough excuses, this is the last call.”

Milan thrashed the newly-promoted side 4-0, yet any positive feelings were dispelled by a Champions League defeat by Liverpool three days later. It was not the fact of losing that provoked a reaction so much as the meek nature of it: Fonseca’s team taking the lead in the third minute only to surrender a pair of soft set-piece goals before half-time. The game ended with home supporters chanting for their team to “show some balls”.

Hopes were not high for a better showing against Inter, far more impressive in their own Champions League draw at Manchester City. The Nerazzurri were chasing a record-setting seventh consecutive derby win. The aggregate scoreline for the previous six meetings was 14-2.

Juventus’s game against Napoli on Saturday finished 0-0, neither team seizing this opportunity to put themselves forward as the No 1 contender. That result meant a win for Inter over Milan would return them to the top of the table.

It all felt so inevitable. But it wasn’t. Backed into a corner, Fonseca came out swinging with a starting XI that included summer signings Tammy Abraham and Álvaro Morata together for the first time up front, with Leão and Pulisic on the wings. Notionally, this was the same formation they had used against Liverpool, but introducing the Spaniard at No 10 made the interpretation more attack-minded, a 4-2-3-1 becoming a 4-2-4.

Pulisic opened the scoring in the 10th minute, picking Hakan Calhanoglu’s pocket in midfield before carving a path between three Inter players and jabbing the ball beyond the goalkeeper Yann Sommer. The lead lasted little more than a quarter of an hour, Inter responding through Federico DiMarco.

To the more fatalistic Milan fans in attendance, this felt like the Liverpool game on repeat. Yet Inter, for all their quality, have not fully hit their stride yet either.

Lautaro Martínez, Serie A’s capocannoniere last season, has only scored once in a competitive game for Inter since February. There are more strings to his bow, and it was he who set up DiMarco’s equaliser, drawing three defenders before returning the ball to the full-back. But he is lacking the ruthless sharpness that might have helped Inter to convert the momentum of that equaliser into a winning position.

Instead, Inter allowed Milan to retake the initiative after the interval. The second-half began with Sommer blocking a close-range Leão header and continued in a similar vein.

Simone Inzaghi’s decision to substitute his entire three-man midfield, and one wing-back, between the 63rd and 74th minutes may have destabilised things further, but his team was hardly exerting control before.

Only Milan’s profligacy kept the scores level, Leão and Abraham each failing to convert when put through one-on-one in two separate moves in the space of three minutes. The game would be decided instead by the only Italian in Milan’s matchday squad.

Matteo Gabbia grew up in Busto Arsizio, less than half an hour by car from his boyhood team’s Milanello training ground. He joined the Rossoneri’s academy at 12 and made his first appearance for the senior team in a Europa League game at 17. Now 24, the centre-back has never quite made that final step from a potential talent into a fully realised one, but a winning goal in the derby will cement him in fans’ affections forever.

Gabbia got it by showing the composure his attacking teammates lacked, timing a front-post run to meet Reijnders’s free-kick and head the ball into the near corner. “A dream come true,” he called it before offering his support to Fonseca, adding: “We stand beside our manager, regardless of what is getting said outside.”

It was another comment he made that felt most telling, Gabbia adding: “A match like this needs to be the norm, we need to go out on to the pitch giving everything to help each other.” He noted that Fonseca had brought players together for a 90-minute meeting before training on Wednesday to restore that focus on the collective.

Will this result help ease the pressure on Fonseca? Before kick-off, Zlatan Ibrahimovic spoke in his role as operating partner for Milan’s owners Redbird, insisting the manager’s future would not be decided by the derby. Still, Daniele De Rossi’s sacking by Roma last week, four games after he signed a three-year extension, was a reminder of how quickly knees can jerk.

“This was an important match,” Fonseca said. “Both because Milan had not won the derby for a while and because we were not going through a good spell. “I can’t remember a team in recent times that gave Inter so many problems.”

Perhaps they may make a case yet to be the “anti-Inter”, after all.