Riccardo Montolivo says Milan’s target is to ‘immediately’ return to Champions League qualification, as he stresses the importance of a solid defence.
The midfielder, who missed a majority of the first half of the season recovering from his broken leg suffered in May, is back among the starters and looking to drive his team back to European levels – starting from the friendly against Real Madrid tomorrow.
Riccardo Montolivo says Milan’s target is to ‘immediately’ return to Champions League qualification, as he stresses the importance of a solid defence.
The midfielder, who missed a majority of the first half of the season recovering from his broken leg suffered in May, is back among the starters and looking to drive his team back to European levels – starting from the friendly against Real Madrid tomorrow.
“Our objective is to return immediately within the top three positions,” said the soon-to-be 30 year old in quotes run on Milan’s official site today.
“It will take time to get back to the levels we were at a few years ago. This team is in a phase of construction.
“It won't be easy to make the first three spots because there are a lot of challengers, it will be up to us to give continuity to the results.
“That's the secret, that's all there is to it.
“Roma and Juventus proved that they were stronger than us over the last couple of years, but in the direct confrontations the difference was not so obvious.
“We came up short in terms of continuity. The games against Napoli and Roma gave us great self-awareness, in football you get your confidence out of results.”
The Italian international, true to his Azzurri roots, stressed the importance of a solid defence towards reaching these targets.
“It's the best defences that win the Leagues. At the beginning of the championship we were conceding a few goals too many.
“I think this aspect has improved over the last few games, though we may have lost something on the opposite side of the pitch in terms of attacking prowess. We'll work on that too.
“We are more balanced, that's for sure, you could see that in the last half-hour that we played in Rome, when we were down to ten men.
“We had the right attitude. We want to be playing like a team in every moment of the match.”
But Montolivo believes that credit for the change in mentality should go to Coach Filippo Inzaghi.
“Our Coach experiences the game on a visceral level.
“That was his strength as a player, and from what I've seen over the last few months, he is the same as a Coach.
“Now we always play to win.”
As for the game against Real Madrid, Montolivo refused to approach it as a mere friendly.
“We must play this game with our minds to the championship. We must rediscover our charge after the Christmas holidays so we're not behind when facing Sassuolo – the game against them is going to be extremely important.
“The team is coming back well, we don't want to break the positive moment.
“Tomorrow's game pits the two teams with the highest number of Champions Leagues trophies against each other, you can hardly call it a normal friendly.”