Milan v Torino: More Booing

By: Martha | November 3rd, 2007

Dead Ricky Once again, Milan fail to score at home and, once again, despite vocal support during the match, the Curva did their share of whistling when the game ended. To be fair, though, not giving up any goals should probably be seen as progress, even to a team with firepower as limited as Torino’s.

On the other side of the ball, Walter Novellino should be fiercely proud of his team for calmly sticking to their game plan and never panicking under Milan’s nearly constant second-half pressure. Torino were incredibly organized, playing with the midfield sitting very deep and just refusing to let Milan break them down. There were a couple good chances early for Gila — he missed one and had the second saved by Matteo Sereni, who was fantastic on the night — and one great one late for Pippo, but Sereni and the Toro defense were equal to the task, soaking up pressure and dealing reasonably well with every attack.

As the second half wore on, Torino started to counter a little more aggressively: Eugenio Corini left the comfort of the box for the first time in the match, and Rosinaldo and David Di Michele (who looked sharp and went the full 90 in his first match of the season) created a few moments of tantalizing potential, but they were never able to get the last ball quite right.

For Milan, Clarence Seedorf was incredible as usual, doing pretty much whatever he wanted, apart from scoring, and his team kept the ball a whole lot better than they did at the start of the season. Part of that was to do with Torino sitting back, but Milan did look consistently threatening, which is something you couldn’t have said about them a month ago. Interestingly, all of Carlo Ancelotti’s substitutions with the score 0-0 were attacking — he went for broken with Serginho (a back, but a wildly attacking one), Pippo and Yoann Gourcuff (for Seedorf), but even all that skill and attacking prowess couldn’t break down the Toro backline.

Lucky for Milan, though, they’ve got Champions League on Tuesday, so they’ll score four goals in Ukraine and everyone will be happy for the rest of the week.