GdS: Gimenez ‘sucked into the black hole’ – why he has stopped scoring recently | OneFootball

Santiago Gimenez scored his last AC Milan goal nearly a month ago, and it seems that he has fallen victim to the same issues as his team-mates.

As La Gazzetta dello Sport write, Gimenez too was ‘sucked into the black hole’ which nobody has managed to emerge unscathed from at Milan this year. When the curtain fell on the winter window, the faces of the transfer campaign for the Rossoneri were Gimenez and Joao Felix.

They made a red hot start, but then Joao ended up ‘the whirlpool’, before Santiago joined him. Zlatan Ibrahimovic, on the day of his official presentation, said it clearly: the team must help him express himself at his best.

From light to darkness

Gimenez brought with him a very impressive goals per game average both in the Eredivisie and in the Champions League. He thus arrived with the tag of being the striker that Milan ‘had been missing for years’.

However, he comes from a lower level league than the Italian one, he is 23 years of age and found himself in a chaos that he probably never would have imagined of this magnitude. So, he gradually disappeared from the scene.

An assist on his debut, in the Coppa Italia vs. Roma, a goal vs. Empoli and one vs. Verona in the two subsequent performances in the league, and the equaliser against his old side Feyenoord in the second leg at San Siro. After that, more or less total darkness.

In the last four league games there is no trace of him in the scoresheets, if we exclude the assist to Rafael Leao in the defeat in Bologna. In Lecce the planets aligned on the wrong side: a goal disallowed by the VAR after 47 seconds for a matter of centimetres, then hitting the woodwork.

Choices and the paradox

The rest was a concomitance of negative situations that are starting to drag on beyond what is expected in an adaptation period. Partly it depends on him: sometimes wrong choices in the final pass or in the search for the goal, some technical blunders in the opponent’s area (11 balls lost).

Much, however, depends on the overall context. Simply, the team is not able to support him as it should and as his characteristics require. Gimenez is a centre-forward who wants to be found in space of in behind, and not a striker who will hold the ball up in the area.

He does not have the dribbling of Christian Pulisic or Rafael Leao, but rather the positioning and anticipation to put service away. It’s a paradox, because Sergio Conceiçao’s style suggests the team should move quickly up field, but instead they get stuck in patterns of horizontal ball circulation.

The Mexican’s impact on the Rossoneri world remains very good and the general growth prospects are what paints the horizon to be sunny. Milan, forced to start again next season, will hope to really see the best from Gimenez.