Despite a strong pre-season, Yacine Adli has failed to appear in either of Milan’s opening two matches, surprising fans.
The 22-year-old French midfielder was officially signed by the Rossoneri from Bordeaux last summer in a deal worth around €8m, but he didn’t join up with Stefano Pioli’s squad until earlier this summer. Adli had a fairly convincing pre-season with Milan, even scoring in a friendly against Wolfsberger.
Despite this, Pioli has left Adli on the bench for the opening two matches against Udinese and Atalanta. Fans have been left scratching their heads, especially considering how naturally he seemed to slot into the system during the pre-season.
The reason is because Pioli seems to see the Frenchman as a trequartista or a winger, two roles where there’s significant competition. He’d need to displace either Brahim Diaz or Charles De Ketelaere to start behind the striker, and on the wing he’s facing competition from Rafael Leao, Divock Origi, Junior Messias and Alexis Saelemaekers.
In a 4-2-3-1, the Milan coach doesn’t want to deploy Adli in front of the defence, where he’d need to play a more defensive and anchoring role. The 22-year-old will need to work hard to convince Pioli to give him a strong chance in the coming weeks, as things look a little tough right now.
He will climb the pecking order over Diaz soon enough.
Seriously, Diaz is already back to his old ineffective self. ATP it should be between Adli & CDK.
Diaz was great in the 1st game, far better than some of the favoured sons like Leao. He must be delighted Pioli isn’t as fickle as some of our fans are.
Um, what’s exactly fickle about 1 good performance in 1 year? I really don’t understand. Even counting his early good games last season, that’s like 7 or 8 matches out of 45 or something. Pioli rightly wants to reward the old guard initially, but soon will return to benching him like he did last season. Diaz is not going to become a great player over night through some miracle.
Mark my words, he will drop down the pecking order behind CDK and Adli, then he’ll go back to Madrid at the end of the season, and eventually ends up in a club like Mallorca.
Football fans are fickle, if its not Diaz being ushered out the door for some new signing, it will be someone else soon. You’re farming him out to Mallorca FFS. A growing mentality. Tonali seems to be the only one immune from it. It’s the ridiculousness I have a problem with, not which players someone prefers, myself included.
If Diaz plays like he did in the 1st game, and I fully expect him to, he’ll get plenty of time. We’ve bulked the squad out with the likes of Origi and Adli but I doubt Pioli plans to start them very much. His lineups have shown that.
Maybe Diaz does go off the boil again but with his obvious talent he really shouldn’t, unless he gets a bad dose of COVID again. It’s as if some people are hoping for him to fail but we should all be delighted with his start to this season, he could be very important to us again, like he was before he got ill.
I disagree.
The club was willing to use all their budget into buying a player in his position, so clearly they knew something was seriously wrong and that’s the biggest hole in the squad, so it was not only the fans. I mean he was so bad for a long time that we had to play Kessié and Krunic in his place to win the title.
Technically he is not even our player. He would be back in Madrid right now if it wasn’t for his two year contract.
I’d love for him to always play like the first match, but by now it’s pretty clear it’s not going to happen. I was happy with his performance the first week, but I can’t consider one good game followed by a bad one a great start to the season and be delighted with it. Sorry.
Origi and Adli are new, they will play in time. At least Origi will get plenty of playing time going forward, I’m sure. Diaz could be sometimes useful off the bench too, but that’s about it imo. Let’s see.