Clearly you mean DS. I was meaning Urby because DS is injured.

Yeah, it's ridiculous how Milito is his kryptonite


As long as doesn't have attacking duties to worry about all he needs to take care of is marking Neymar, which he can do imo.

So Abate to mark Neymar? And with no attacking duties is expected to shut him out? Yeah ok.

Guilty as charged! And well, my opinion or Urby is, shall we say, in one word, mediocre. But he's very useful in moments like this, as a utility player when we have our first choice injured and all that.


Totally man, pretty neat player this Milito chap. And it's like he particularly studied Abate, he his number like there is no tomorrow. One chance, and bam, it's back in the net. Too bad he's injured, long term.


Touché.

I agree with you. I hope Abate can handle him, but it's not exactly as likely as han is making it out to be.

And our left side is indeed much weaker.

Urby isn't terrific but he's been known to even the balance when he's come on and give a different option. He's certainly in better form than Constant is.

DS of course I'd choose over both but that ain't happening for obvious reasons!

Thank heavens for Real Madrid and Barcelona have pathetic, nonexistent defenses! And thank heavens for the Juventus freak Chiellini for bringing his shirt pulling shtick to Europe! And thank heavens for Ibra, a better scorer of goals than CRON and Messi combined, and multiplied by two!

Oh, and thank heavens for Chiellini also bringing his elbow smashing shtick to Europe for a red card!

He's finally got penalised for all his dirty elbowing

Zlatan is so good.

Yeah, corrupt (or lenient, depending on who is doing the talking) Italian referees. I am pleased with today's show, just can't want to download the high lights. Much better day in Europe than yesterday.


Fixed it for ya!

Anyone saw Zlatan's strike from outside the box? Holy crap!

By the way, did anyone notice that Juve have played all first three group games away? So weird.

Every passing match in the CL that Juve fail to win I feel increasingly smug after being derided for saying they weren't up to it.

Well even at their best, Juve were never really a "CL team"

Why did we ever sell Zlatan ... He r@ped Anderlecht without even breaking sweat. And we have 12ml Matri , Parma defenders must be sh!tting their pants .

Yeah, awesome strike.

They played at home vs Galatasaray (ended 2-2).

Oh, right. I thought the Galata game was away for some reason.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CNriiZMS9-s

And Vidal was asking for a penalty after this

Hahaha

NASA is suing Ibrahimovic for imitating their devices...

His 9m salary. I think selling Zlatan had become a necessity at that point, but to sell him for 24m?? Still can't get over that. And to top it off we had to sell Silva as well because that's who PSG wanted. Easily the worst deal ever to be made by Galliani, and there were a couple of stinkers which would give this a run for it's money

i don't follow the transfer window but let me get this right... we sold ibra for 24mil while madrid just bought bale for 100?

We sold both Silva and Ibra for 60m or so plus some bonuses. It was understood that the fee for Ibra was around that mark yes.

Galliani was just desperate to get his wage off our bill, so he struck this deal with PSV after renewing Silva's contract and also increasing his wage so that he could also blame selling Silva on his wages.

But really what happened was that PSG initially came in for Thiago, they wanted him badly, so after a lot of dramatics and media extravaganzas from Galliani he said Silva was staying, renewed his contract for 6m a year, suddenly a couple of days later it was revealed that a deal was struck for both Ibra and Silva, with their wages being used as the reason for the sales. Mostly Galliani just wanted Ibra out, PSG didn't even ask for him initially, he was being mostly linked to City at that.

It was just an all round mightily idiotic deal on Galliani's part.

He could have easily sold both of them SEPERATELY for double what he got.

That I dont understand. Milan spend 12ml for matri , they could have paid zlatan a years salary with that. (even tough matri came some time later ) Plus , balotelli doesnt play for free either, i dont see how his 9ml a year salary was a problem for Milan while buying balotelli wasn't. How much did pazzini cost ?

It really irritates me how a 9m salary for a player like Zlaten is a problem while he is the one player that made a difference and spending money for balotelli , matri , pazzini is perfectly normal

Easily one of the worst deals. I find it weird how other teams manage to not sell to Milan by just saying he's not for sale or playing hardball but when some team tries to buy one of ours its mostly a done deal.

Why would you sell your absolute top players in the first place. There were enough worse players that could have been sold. Who like i said above , dont play for nickle and dimes either.

The sad truth. Our worse players were so bad, we didn't have buyers.

I'm against the deal. I understand how it went down and I understand the desperation but I still think it was bad. You could have sold one or the other. Not both. It wasn't worth it. Quite literally we risked a CL place for a few 10s of millions.

Plus we officially left the group of world class teams. Like Maldini said , Milan is slowly becoming an mediocre team.

I remember Galliani saying it was a shame Ibra came so late during his carreer, cause he was almost our after juve went to serie B. Just to sell him 2 seasons later...

This is a good point, i dont know how accurate this is but these are the figures according to wikipedia. We have already earned 10mil...

Playoffs: €2,100,000
Base fee for group stage: €8,600,000
Group match victory: €1,000,000
Group match draw: €500,000
Round of 16: €3,500,000
Quarter-finals: €3,900,000
Semi-finals: €4,900,000
Losing finalist: €6,500,000
Winning the Final: €10,500,000

It wasn't just 9m, it was 18m a year just for Ibra, add to that the 12m a year for Thiago after the increase in his wages and you had a situation where just 2 players earned 30m a year.

Balo took up the wages that Pato was earning. Matri is on something like 2.7 or 3m, Pazzini is on 2.7m, you have to double those figures as they don't include the taxes, which is why Zlatan cost 18m a year for the club, not the 9m he himself received.

My problem is that, if they KNEW they could not afford to keep Zlaan, why get him in the first place? And then to lose Silva on top of that because of it is an even bigger blow. And the problem has never really been about the transfer fee, we can pay around 20m for a player easily, the problem comes about when we have to offer the player big wages which are exacerbated by the taxing system in Italy


Because of the reason above. We simply had to sell Zlatan at that point, but we could have gotten around 45m for him easily if we had not gone into that stupid and desperate cut price deal with PSG

@ Jack, that is not necessarily true, we only made a 6m loss last season because we removed Ibra and Silva from the books AND had that huge CL windfall come in. We were getting CL money each year and were still making nearly 60m in losses, so something had to give.

Oh, I guess, the letter V is near to the letter G on your keyboard. Total typo!!

Oh, snap, just saw it, it's right on top of the letter V.

Selling Silva for €40 million was a good deal IMO. The real problem, like han said, is that we only got €65 million for both. The best defender in the world and one of the 4-5 best strikers in the world, just for €65 million is insane, when players nowadays are being paid for €30-€40 million on a regular basis. And to top it all, we barely invested any of that money in new signings. It all went to cover that year's loses. Whoop-de-fucking-doo!

Um... look down bro


I feel sorry for you today...





The thing with Silva is he shouldn't have been sold AT ALL. He's a once in a decade type of CB. And we had him in our team, and he was happy to be here. Selling him was the biggest mistake they could have made, especially since we'd just lost Nesta that summer

Yeah, I agree. I was just talking from an economical point of view.

We sold Zlatan, because of his wage, as we placed a wage cap at 4M.

Zlatan would have been very useful and more effective, IMHO, than Balotelli. On the flipside, Balotelli came in at a very reasonable price and within our new wage cap.

It's all different now friend, its no longer the European heavyweight Milan. More a project under construction. Give it three more years, excluding this one. Yep, very long time.

Yeah, well you can't blame me! Had a pretty nasty day yesterday, with a bit of freaky stomach bug. Ate some stuff that I never should have, and particularly in that capacity. Almost back to full fitness, but man, am I feeling weak. Should take another day, and that should do it. Still, I regret nothing. Not one thing!

Anyway, you really should look into getting a new keyboard. Or a pair of eyeglasses at the very least.

Well, it's not really a project now, is it, when there is a clear and distinct possibility that the coach will not be here in eight or nine month's time. More of a paddle up job, to keep the fans, media, management, funds, sponsors, hacks and jacks that masquerade as players, and other such elements quiet for another year.

Because really, the masterstroke of signing Ibra may have been a project but that unraveled the moment after we got Robinho. He is just a rotational player, and if we were looking at a long term plan we should have directed that money towards many other individuals that were snapped up by rival clubs for not all that much $$$.

But you can say that if this is a project (that is still under construction) than it is the worst managed one in history!

Can someone explain to me why is Guardiola playing Lahm as DM and benching Javi Martinez? I've seen this happen more than once this season, but I don't know if he does it on a regular basis. What the hell!

He does it quite regularly. He plays Lahm on the right side though in the mid three. Something about how he feels Lahm has the best capability of assessing the game or something.

It's connected with his fondness of Rafinha. He likes the Brazilians pace and attacking skills, while trusting Lahm to be a good second metronome and a additional tackler.

If you ask me, it's like this: Heynckens did a superb job, everything was logical. Now that Guardiola came in, he had to change something. Since Götze is only slowly coming into form and Mandžukić still plays good while Thiago is out, the only option was to bring in Rafinha.

I shall start blaming it on stomach bugs as well...

And FYI, I do have glasses, but you know how it is when you're speed typing on the job

Well, its a new direction. We previously would buy top players on the market and pay astronomical fees in wages to compete .. All that, as we all know now, at the expense of having a net loss of 70MM (give or take) annually.

The new direction was to build from scratch, a solid backbone and one the club can actually afford. That, is where our problem lies acid. Not Galliani nor Berlusconi, as no matter how much Silvio would shovel into the club coffers, the global appeal to the Milan brand was not as attractive as EPL teams or La Liga. You can even draw a correlation with Alitalia in that sense (airline is weak in comparison to competition like Lufthansa, British Airways, Air France ..).

We will only know what the outcome is after a few seasons. Technically speaking, this is only the second season under FFP. Hence, too early to conclude. Especially since we are not even at the half way point of this season.

It takes time acid, some have patience and lower their expectations to match the changing times. Others believe Milan is great and this is all a conspiracy. You choose the flavor i guess

Ronaldo is clearly the best right now, though when talking about "genius", I still would give it to Messi. Ronaldo is like the Paul Newman of footballers while Messi's more of a Marlon Brando (if you get what I mean ). he really worked up his way to this.

If anyone but him wins the golden ball, it's clearly a complete farce.


-


Wow Bale!! living up to the price tag.

Varane tonight proved that while he's talented, he's really overrated.

Soo, where does this leave Juve in terms of qualifying?

My question too. the players didn't look unhappy with the result. I guess they still got some chance.

Sure. Copenhagen and Galatasaray still ahead. A win and a draw and they still can be second.

If anyone but Ibra wins it, then it's a complete farce.

Ibra should be second but Cristiano deserves this one more I think.