AC Milan travel to face Napoli this weekend in a crucial showdown at the top of the Serie A table.
The Rossoneri currently sit joint top of the standings with the Partenopei on 57 points, while rivals Inter are two points behind but have a game in hand.
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With 11 games to go, none of these three sides can afford any slip-ups in the Scudetto battle, while there is no guarantee yet of a top-four finish either.
In turn, Milan will be desperate to secure a positive result on Sunday, but there is one glaring issue that Stefano Pioli needs to find a solution for.
Milan’s blunt attack loses edge at bad time
In our last four outings across all competitions, Milan have scored just four goals. While we managed to strike twice against Salernitana, there was no real sense of a consistent level of pressure or quality in the final third to break through and make the task easier.
The Rossoneri haven’t produced anywhere near enough creativity to open sides up in recent weeks, and they have been missing a cutting edge and a clinical end product to our play in front of goal.
With the likes of Brahim Diaz, Messias Junior and Alexis Saelemaekers all struggling to offer enough, that in turn has a direct impact on Olivier Giroud who with a lack of service, is unable to either feed off anything or hold the ball up to bring others into play.
In turn, Milan have become over-reliant on Rafael Leao to provide a spark for us, and while his form and growth this season has been a big positive, we need more from our attacking unit as a whole to cause our opponents problems and make it easier to kill games off.
Instead, we’re finding ourselves in positions where the opposition is still in the game in the second half, and that eventually invites pressure and the threat of conceding, and so we have to break out of this rut soon.
With Zlatan Ibrahimovic still not fully fit and Ante Rebic struggling to find his form since returning from injury, it doesn’t appear as though Pioli is blessed with an abundance of options.
It seems as though it will be down to the same individuals to find a way to spark themselves into life as Milan will stick with the same system, and time will tell if we have the quality in the side to start things with a pivotal win over Napoli.