How the Dutch midfielder is fitting into Pioli’s team.
Tijjani Reijnders arrived during AC Milan’s summer revolution as replacement for Sandro Tonali. A 25-year-old Dutchman, with just one season as a first-team starter at AZ, showed up at Milanello with a backpack full of exceptional statistics accumulated over the last 12 months. In the external pocket, easy to reach, a series of YouTube clips in which he affects the opposing defenses with filters resulting from a prescient vision of the game, bordering on fortune telling.
In the presentation press conference Reijnders was very clear right from the start: “I am a modern midfielder, a player box to box who likes to play attacking football and create chances for my teammates, or for myself.” With a calm but resolute tone, wide cheekbones and an elegant side parting framed to perfection in an emerging lawyer look, the new Milan midfielder reiterated several times what he would bring to Pioli’s team: creativity and defensive dribbling. He wanted to give certainty to the fans right from the start, to reassure them of the fact that he would dry the tears of Tonali’s orphans, taking handkerchiefs in the shape of low-ball passes between the opposing centre-backs from his sleeve, perhaps after avoiding the pressing and accelerating in the lead for thirty meters in the opponent’s half of the pitch.
The first half hour of the American friendly between Milan and Juventus was enough to realize that what Reijnders had promised, perhaps, wasn’t so far from reality. He receives the ball from Theo Hernandez on the left side of the midfield circle, controls it with his inside right and keeps his body oriented towards the sideline. He seems to want to close the triangle with his partner, but McKennie approaches him under pressure and with a lateral leap cuts the passing line towards Theo. At the exact moment in which the American stands in front of him, Reijnders rotates his torso ninety degrees and with his right wing quickly moves the ball towards the Juventus half of the field.
Once the pressure has gone to waste, the new Milan midfielder is free to accelerate with an open ball towards the opposing midfield, raise his head, look at Giroud’s positioning at the edge of the area and serve him with a low through ball sharp enough to pass in between Danilo and Bremer and arrive undisturbed at the French attacker, who sees it slide a few centimeters from his foot but is unable to hook it.
However, summer friendlies are deceptive creatures, spiteful bearers of fleeting feelings, of falling in love as intense and sudden as the melancholic fear of seeing them evaporate in the space of a few days. However, the championship match with Tijjani Reijnders didn’t change anything. The first match vera it unfolded before him like a geographical map on which he himself drew the roads that his companions had to travel. With your arms always in motion he indicated spaces and passage lines to anyone gravitated around him.
Ten minutes were enough for him to provide the first assist: in Leao’s position wide on the left, he pretended to center himself and then ran behind Posch, before attacking the ball in flight on the back line and returning it to the area for the Giroud’s support in the net. He’s done with 28 passes completed out of 28 attempted: the first midfielder in the history of Milan – since Opta collected this data, 2004/05 – to play an entire match in Serie A without missing a single pass. Seeing him play in these first few days, like all of Milan, was a liberation, a release from the tension, it loosened the knot that tied AC Milan fans to the more recent past and to the fear of having taken a step backwards compared to recent years.
Such a fluid insertion into Milan’s maneuver underlines how comfortable Reijnders is in a hyper-dynamic and vertical context that allows him a lot of freedom and allows him to often come into contact with the ball. To express himself at his best, the midfielder from AZ needs autonomy, to be able to shape possession by following his own rhythm. In his own half of the field he never forces the pass: It’s fast but tidy. In the construction phase the first option is always a simple play or a quick triangulation in the strait. Once he jumps the first line of pressure, he raises his head in search of hidden paths that allow him to give speed to the maneuver and develop it vertically.
In the event that he is unable to come out easily with his teammates, however, he is also very skilled in using his body, which he has excellent control over, to cover the ball and disorientate the opposition’s pressure. With a simple movement of his, he manages to bend the pressing in his favor and gain the space to quickly move the ball with the inside or outside of his right foot, depending on which side the pressure comes from. Reijnders’ ultimate goal is to carve out a niche in the opponent’s frontline in which to accelerate and tilt the game plan towards the opponent’s goal. If he is free to attack the opposing defense with the ball open, he gives vent to all his creativity, finding lethal tracks across the last line of defence, both towards the first striker and towards the wingers, especially in the transition phase .
In the absence of exhaust solutions, it is not uncommon to choose the conclusion from afar. Although he was unable to demonstrate it in his first outings with the Rossoneri, Reijnders has an excellent shooting technique, which he knows how to combine power and precision to find poisonous shots from distance, with high and slightly flattened shots that are difficult for goalkeepers to intercept. .
In the first three games we saw how, between Loftus-Cheek and Reijnders, it is often the latter who holds a position closer to Giroud. Pioli’s choice probably arises from the evaluation of the defensive characteristics of the two midfielders: Reijnders naturally tends to exploit his skills in reading the game to reduce the opportunities for physical contrast as much as possible. He doesn’t like to defend body to body, so he uses his intelligence and his physical intensity (in the first two championship matches he was the player with the most kilometers covered, against Roma only Cristante took the record away from him by a few metres) to defend in dynamically around the field.
Most of his recoveries are interceptions, favored by a good ability to find the right pressure angles, to cut the passing lines and anticipate the opponent’s reception rather than looking for the ball with the tackle. Milan’s proactive defense is undoubtedly the most suitable approach for him, and playing in a more advanced position allows him to mask his gaps in defending the position. Reijnders is the ideal player to cut the thread of the opponents’ counterattacks and immediately restore electricity to Milan’s attack: keeping him too pressed on the defense during negative transitions could send him into difficulty.
This will certainly be an aspect on which he will be asked to work but, as he underlined as soon as he arrived in Milan, part of the reason why he accepted the transfer to Italy is precisely the possibility of being able to compete with a championship with more rigid tactical structures and more demanding consequence: “Dutch football is freer, the positions are freer. Here I can focus more on the tactical part and become a more complete player.”
It will be interesting to watch Reijnders’ development in our league closely, if he succeeds add a more solid defensive dimension or if he will prefer to slide further forward for specialize in finishing. To truly be a box-to-box midfielder like he says he is, he still lacks something, but at the moment he doesn’t seem to have structural limits that prevent him from becoming one and the prospect, for Milan, can only be attractive.
2023-09-15 07:58:11
#Reijnders #settled #Milan
