Saturday’s Serie A action concludes at the Stadio Artemio Franchi with a handsomely-looking encounter between Fiorentina and Milan. It’s time to preview the game and take a look at the expected lineups.
La Viola were minutes away from recording their first draw of the Serie A season last time. However, Juan Cuadrado made sure to hand Juventus a 1-0 victory via a last-gasp winner. Consistency has not been Fiorentina’s strong suit this term. Yet, they are still only four points adrift of fourth-placed Atalanta.
On the other hand, Milan shared the spoils with fierce rivals Inter in a 1-1 draw before the international break, maintaining their unbeaten start to the new Serie A season. Alongside fellow league leaders Napoli, the Rossoneri are the only time across Europe’s top-five divisions yet to lose a league match this term.
Fiorentina vs Milan Head-to-Head
Milan completed a league double over Fiorentina last season, including a hard-fought 3-2 victory in this exact fixture back in March. Though they have now avoided defeat in five consecutive Serie A visits to Artemio Franchi (W2, D3), the Rossoneri haven’t won back-to-back league matches here since April 2011.
Fiorentina last won a Serie A home match against Milan in August 2015. Since then, they have scored one goal or less in four of their subsequent five top-flight H2Hs on home soil. Moreover, the home side’s slow starts in the recent meetings have seen Milan find the opening goal in their last three visits to Florence.
Across the last 11 Serie A duels between Fiorentina and Milan, La Viola have only won twice (D3, L6), both times away from home. That should be an added incentive for Vincenzo Italiano’s team to try and return to winning ways here.
Fiorentina Form Preview
The abovementioned lack o consistency has seen Fiorentina alternate between winning and losing across their last five Serie A outings (W2, L3). Interestingly, each match won/lost during that stretch saw the winner on the day keep a clean sheet, with three of them yielding the identical 1-0 scoreline.
On a positive note, though, Fiorentina have gone from back-to-back Serie A home defeats to a brace of 3-0 wins over the likes of Cagliari and Spezia. Albeit both those triumphs came at the expense of the bottom-five sides, they should serve as a confidence booster heading into this fixture.
However, Italiano’s men have developed a habit of falling behind without recovering, which could pose a threat to their hopes of beating Milan for the first time in six years. Having surrendered the points in all four Serie A games when conceding first this season (L4), Fiorentina are one of only two teams in Italy’s top-flight yet to rescue a single point from losing positions.
Milan Form Preview
A hard-earned stalemate against Inter on the eve of the international break brought Milan’s seven-game winning run in Serie A to a halt. Yet, the Rossoneri have everything to play for at Artemio Franchi. They could become only the second team in Serie A history to win 16+ away matches in a single calendar year since Napoli in 2017.
Since playing out a 1-1 draw with Juventus in Turin back in mid-September, Stefano Pioli’s men have won their last four Serie A travels despite failing to keep a clean sheet on each occasion. But, since beating Sampdoria 1-0 in their inaugural road trip this season, the Rossoneri have conceded at least once in each of their subsequent seven away games in all competitions.
Milan head into proceedings unbeaten in their last 17 Serie A fixtures on the trot while they’ve amassed a staggering 32 points out of the 36 available this term (W10, D2). The seven-time European champions have never returned more points at this stage of the season in a three-point-per-win era.
Fiorentina vs Milan Predicted Lineups
Fiorentina (4-3-3): Pietro Terracciano; Alvaro Odriozola, Lorenzo Venuti, Igor, Cristiano Biraghi; Giacomo Bonaventura, Lucas Torreira, Gaetano Castrovilli; Nicolas Gonzalez, Dusan Vlahovic, Riccardo Saponara.
AC Milan (4-2-3-1): Ciprian Tatarusanu; Pierre Kalulu, Simon Kjaer, Fikayo Tomori, Theo Hernandez; Sandro Tonali, Franck Kessie; Alexis Saelemaekers, Brahim Diaz, Rafael Leao; Zlatan Ibrahimovic.