Amorim’s Milan beat Inter 3-1 at San Siro in first derby as Rossoneri boss
Ruben Amorim’s Milan defeated Inter 3-1 at the San Siro on Saturday in the manager’s first Milan derby, a victory that handed Inter their first league defeat of the season.
Amorim has long cherished Milan from his youth and told Portuguese newspaper Expresso in 2017: “I remember watching tapes of that Milan team with [Paolo] Maldini, [Franco] Baresi, [Ruud] Gullit, [Frank] Rijkaard, [Dejan] Savicevic,” adding, “My childhood dreams were to play for Benfica and Milan. I’ve fulfilled one. Now I suppose I’ll have to become a coach for the other!” He took charge of the club in June, inheriting a squad that had missed out on the Champions League for a second consecutive season and with Rafael Leão linked to a move amid questions over his potential; Milan’s owners backed Amorim with more than €160m in summer transfer spending. “Everybody knows Milan is one of my clubs since I was a boy,” said Amorim. “In my time as a young boy, Milan was the strongest team in Italy. And calcio was the best league in the world.”
Serie A’s season has produced an average of 3.18 goals per game through almost 10 completed rounds, with only two 0-0 draws and a string of high-scoring results such as Udinese 2-5 Roma and Milan 3-1 Inter. Milan themselves arrived at the derby having suffered a 4-2 home defeat to Bologna in midweek, a game Amorim attributed to exhaustion, a factor that influenced selection decisions for the weekend fixture.
Inter entered the match having dropped only two points all season, their solitary draw coming from a two-goal deficit against Roma, and the reigning champions strengthened in the summer with Curtis Jones, John Stones and Djed Spence. Amorim reversed his midweek omissions by starting Luka Modric and Christian Pulisic against Inter, and brought back players who had been deemed unfit for even the bench at Bologna — Mario Gila, Adrien Rabiot and Diego Moreira — while selecting 20-year-old Sankhoun Diawara at left wing-back after his only previous start had been at centre-back.
Tactically, Amorim used a 3-4-2-1 and reverted to familiar patterns; Inter’s manager Cristian Chivu mirrored the switch as he dealt with frontline absences. Lautaro Martínez was sidelined with a hamstring strain and Francesco Pio Esposito and Ange-Yoan Bonny were unavailable due to a virus, prompting Chivu to push Andy Diouf into a more advanced role on the right of Marcus Thuram with Petar Sucic on the left.
The match settled early: Christian Pulisic opened the scoring in the fourth minute with a header from a Diego Moreira cross after 80 seconds of continuous possession, and Adrien Rabiot made it 2-0 in the 10th minute with a first-time flick at a corner. Alessandro Bastoni pulled one back from a corner and Djed Spence forced a spectacular save from Mike Maignan, but Milan won a free-kick 20 yards out on the right; Moreira asked Modric to let him take it, then struck a left-footed shot over the wall into the near side to finish the scoring as Milan won 3-1. The result represented Inter’s first league defeat of the campaign.
Questions remain about Milan’s consistency even after the victory: Gonçalo Ramos, the club’s record signing from Paris Saint-Germain for €73m, has scored twice in 10 starts and is criticised for dropping deep rather than providing a consistent presence inside the box. Amorim cautioned against overreaction, expressed delight for supporters and described his first derby experience as unlike any other while saying the team had been good rather than great and that the three points here were the same total they would have secured by beating Bologna.
Milan have now won the last four derbies across all competitions and have gone eight matches unbeaten in the fixture, but they have not finished above Inter since the 2021-22 season; owner Gerry Cardinale told La Gazzetta dello Sport he was “all in on ‘Amorim ball’”, and in the week Milan and Inter jointly unveiled plans for a new stadium to replace San Siro in 2031 this victory added weight to the suggestion Milan can contend for the Scudetto.