AC Milan Club Focus: Is Adil Rami the answer at centre-back?

Watching Milan play this season at best has been tedious, at worst it has been downright miserable. The sluggish football, the abject effort and aimless possession have combined together this year to create the closest thing to sporting purgatory outside Curling.

If the 2013/14 AC Milan was a vintage wine, it would be called “a bad year” by tasters around the globe, scowling as the sludge escaping the bottle meandered onto their lips.

The defending has been at the forefront of this flagship of despair, repeatedly reminding viewers of its incompetence and mocking those fans who could count on a Alessandro Nesta-Thiago Silva defensive pairing just two years ago. Domenico Berardi’s four-goal rout proved to be the poster advertising the most depressing show on Earth, and nothing looked like stopping it.

However, the January arrival of Adil Rami has gone someway to changing that. The 27-year-old Frenchman has actually been at Milanello and training with the Rossoneri since October, but due to transfer regulations was only allowed to make his debut when the January transfer window officially opened on New Years Day.

He played the final seven minutes against Atalanta on the 6th of January and made his full debut in the Coppa Italia against Serie B side Spezia. Since then he has started every match for Milan, playing every minute and offering increasingly solid performances after another.

Aside from the blip against Napoli (where the Frenchman was still rated higher than every other Milan defender according to WhoScored statistics), Rami has brought stability, strength, charisma and confidence to a central defence that has not boasted either characteristic at any point this season.

His game against Sampdoria has highlighted everything positive his eight game stretch as a starter has brought to Clarence Seedorf’s Rossoneri. He won 100% of his aerial duels, touched the ball 53 times with a pass accuracy of 93%; able to bring the ball out of defence and easily alleviate pressure by starting attacks. It is with a touch of sadness to point out that Rami’s basic traits are reminiscent of a Brazilian defender who left Milan in the last couple of years: Thiago Silva.

While not quite blessed with the mind-bending anticipation that Silva was able to utilize to stop attacks before they began nor as quick or athletic as the Selecao captain, Rami brings a solid, dependable presence who is comfortable on the ball and has good positional awareness. Compared to the depth of talent alongside the former Valencia stopper, Rami may as well be Franco Baresi.

Like Silva, Rami brings a goal-threat to match his defensive prowess. Blessed with a blistering right foot capable of unleashing shots of thunderous magnitude like the goal against Torino, Rami also possess a dominating physique able to cause issues for opposing markers on set-pieces, shown by his leaping effort against Sampdoria at the weekend where the Les Bleus centre-back managed to aerially shove both the ‘Doria goalkeeper and surrounding defenders to nod the ball into the back of the net.

Eight games is too small a sample to crown Adil Rami as Milan’s defensive saviour and it must be reiterated that this article is not placing that title upon him. But it is fair to say that Rami’s eight-game stretch in Italy has been better than any eight game stretch from Philippe Mexes, Cristian Zapata or Daniele Bonera this season. It’s probably not even close. In fact, you could probably pick Zapata/Mexes/Bonera’s eight best games of the season and they’d arguably be inferior to the period of solidity Adriano Galliani’s January addition has brought.

Rami’s positive attitude and good temperament belie the worries about discipline and character that followed his acquisition (being available to join a team for free in October and train with them despite being under contract to another is never a good indicator) but so far the defender has nothing but good things to say about his new team and coach and is also yet to pick up a yellow card in Serie A, further underlining his success in adapting to Italian football so far.

With a period of change sweeping Milan from hierarchical shifts to coaching adjustments and new players still finding their feet in a chaotic and underwhelming Rossoneri season, it is rather refreshing to experience a tasty new flavour swirling around in the “AC Milan 2013/14” vintage.