Well a good morale booster for the team tonight, however the overall performance was not perfect. After such a great first half of the season defensively we are now conceding goals we shouldn't; weak goals that we did not give up before. The past few matches we have seemingly forgotten how to defend, however our attack has improved somewhat over time.
Today we were helped by Zeman's stupid tactics for Lecce in which they made a comedy routine out of defending. Lecce tried to catch us offside on the offside trap several times, however it failed miserably. We were able to capitalize on their defensive weakness and Zlatan in particular had his shooting boots on today.
Even though we were missing Emerson our midfield play was not all that bad, however we let Lecce have a few too many runs at our defense. The passing in midfield was actually nice compared to what it could have been, and there were some nice link up plays across the pitch. The long ball worked well today because Lecce is not a team to sit back against us, clearly a wrong move because when teams do that we seem to struggle. Our attack is not improving that much and our defense seems to be becoming weaker. Hopefully we can straighten the two out before Inter on Wednesday.
Buffon did not have to do much however in the first half made some good saves.
Pessotto filled in fine for Zebina however he had a hard time containing Vucinic on the left. Most of the time the latter was caught offside anyway.
Thuram made some mistakes once again tonight and he continues to fall downhill. He should have done better in the build up to Vucinic's goal and could have gotten a piece on the final overhead kick before it went past Buffon.
Cannavaro was solid apart from when he ran into Konan to give Lecce a penalty. Other than that good match from Fabio.
Zambrotta was quiet on the night however was solid defensively and made some usual runs up the left flank.
Camoranesi was good today and made a couple nice long balls up to our forwards.
Tacchinardi was good today and gave us some hard work in midfield.
Appiah actually played very well today and was not a bad fill-in for Emerson. He did not give the ball away too much and of course he finished nicely on his breakaway. Hopefully this match will give him some extra confidence.
Nedved came to life in this match, certainly his best performance since he came back from injury. Nedved made two crucial passes for goals and scored a beauty himself. Hopefully he can continue like this because we need him.
Ibrahimovic was fantastic today and scored his first hattrick in Serie A. Over the past three matches he has scored 5 goals and hopefully this is the beggining of a more lethal and consistant Zlatan.
Del Piero was not really with it today and squandered a few chances unfortunately.
Zalayeta came on for Del Piero and did not affect the match a whole lot.
This was also a good match for us in terms of goal differential, as now we have a better tally in case we draw level on points with Milan at the end of the season.
I just wish we could have scored only four goals today and one on Wednesday.