AC Milan/Barcelona Recap

Part I:

The Stalemate

Milan fielded a talented 4-3-3 that was flexible and pragmatic; they didn't worry about their formation so much as about their fundamentals.  They also fouled, wasted time, and played 73 long balls to get out of their half, pulled offside traps and mixed up their high pressure and back line locations.  There wasn't much defensively that Milan didn't use to throw Barca off.  Cynics will claim, of course, that there could have been two PKs awarded to the Catalonians, and more sinisterly, that the surface was of such low quality the game should never have been played in the San Siro.

On the more interesting side, Milan nearly never left players without cover, using their three attackers (much less so Ibrahimivich than Robinho and Boateng) to support the midfielders as we see here.  Being able to so quickly prevent Barca from establishing numerical advantages saved Milan time and again; how difficult this is to do against such talented players is almost in-describable.   A fine job of organizing by Allegri, getting his group of thoroughbreds to gut out 90 minutes of such hard work.  Sadly, they may be undone by their failure to score.  Getting a goal at the Camp Nou may be out of even their immensely talented reach.  Though they can take heart that a draw (other than 0-0) of any score sends them through to the semis.

In these three slides, we can see how hard Boateng works to stifle the Barca attack, and how Milan get enough players in front of the attackers to thwart the move...