Serie A powerhouses AC Milan run rings around Perth Glory in 9-0 demolition

AC Milan have ended their WA stay on a high as the European giants put Perth Glory to the sword at HBF Park, steamrolling the A-League Men wooden spooners 9-0.

In front of a crowd of 19,226, the gap between the Serie A’s biggest team and the A-League’s cellar-dwellers was there for all to see as Milan dazzled and ran rings around the Glory.

In a game which felt akin to the Harlem Globetrotters’ meetings with the Washington Generals, the star-studded Rossoneri ran riot, as Noah Okafor’s quickfire double helped Milan to a 5-0 lead by half-time.

The deluge of goals continued after the break; this was less death by a thousand cuts and more suffocation via avalanche as Milan refused to put the cue in the rack.

Even when the Italians slowed the game down, their ability to flip the switch and hit sixth gear so quickly allowed them to leave Glory in their wake, while their fluid movement had Perth chasing shadows.

The hosts huffed and puffed, but an inability to take their chances coupled with the sheer class and weight of possession of Milan spoke volumes about the gap between the two sides.

But Glory coach David Zdrilic said he and his side were not too despondent despite the lopsided scoreline.

“I‘m not going to read too much into playing against AC Milan. I’m a little bit disappointed when we did have a couple of good chances at the end that we were not clinical enough to finish.

“We don’t want to just rely on Tags (captain Adam Taggart) and to create two very clear opportunities couple in the first half, but those two late, they’re very clear and we should at least score one of them.

“We have to add a couple more players as well, especially up front, to help Tags, because every time the ball went up, if Tags is flicking it on, we lost the ball...it’s not sustainable.”

Milan’s supremacy in almost every aspect of the game was obvious from the opening whistle, and it took them just three minutes to make it count on the scoreboard.

Okafor’s clever flick found Filippo Terracciano in space and the full-back fired underneath Mark Birighitti’s body to open the scoring.

Up the other end, Adam Taggart was inches away from tucking Arion Sulemani’s low cross home, but that was as close as the Glory got in the opening 45.

Milan were playing with their food and the biggest gulf between the two teams was the Italians’ physicality and acceleration off the dribble, which allowed them to shrug off any attempted interventions by Perth’s defenders.

This was best illustrated by Alex Jimenez’s electric run in the 23rd minute, which saw him hold off Trent Ostler and glide past three opponents before his square ball wrong-footed Brian Kaltak and Okafor made it 2-0.

Four minutes later, Jimenez’s dangerous pass across the face of goal was only partially dealt with by Scott Wootton, and although Wootton deflected Ruben Loftus-Cheek’s follow-up, the ball rolled to Okafor for the easiest of finishes.

It was 4-0 before the half-hour mark when Kaltak clattered into Comotto in the box and the midfielder converted his penalty with a classy ‘panenka’, before the lively Samuel Chukwueze finished off a counter-attack with a rasping strike.

Less than 15 seconds after the restart, a completely fresh Milan line-up made it 6-0 as Portuguese star Rafael Leao raced onto a flick-on and coolly slotted home.

Milan fans were in party mode in the stands, and found themselves in seventh heaven when Samuele Ricci fired home a bullet before the hour mark.

Joel Anasmo and Nathanael Blair had Perth’s chance of the second half when Glory caught their opponents on the break, but the former lofted his chance well over the bar and the latter shot straight at Pietro Terracciano in goal.

The icing on the cake was applied by Yunus Musah, who arrowed a shot into the roof of the net from an acute angle, before Leao grabbed a second with five minutes to play.