I said this too, I said the performances are good and I didn't expect it. But I also said that they are friendly matches and that we will therefore see the real test during the championship.
Obviously we cannot rely on these matches to understand how the team will fare in the championship. They are batches of experiments.
I can't say no, because their performance is good in this pre-season match, but I agree that we have to lower our expectations of them. Pre-season matches are unpredictable matches, I mean sometimes they are good in pre-season but not in the competition, and there are also the opposite, they are bad in pre-season but they are good in the competition.
Now it is AC Milan's job to answer all of that, they have to answer that their performance in pre-season is a true picture of their performance in the competition. And the answer we will only get when Serie A starts. We have to be patient first to see their performance in Serie A or other official competitions.
AC Milan have been successful in all the matches they have played in the beginning of the season. In the warm-up matches AC Milan did not play against easy opponents but they played against tough opponents and they won. Although the strength of a team is not really known in the preliminaries, AC Milan's attacking style of play gives some idea that they will surely compete with Inter Milan next season. The teams of the Italian league are not very strong, that's why the competition with AC Milan and Inter Milan is high every season and one of these two teams becomes the champion.
Last season Inter Milan were champions and AC Milan were runners up but there was a lot of difference between champions and runners up. Inter Milan won by a lot of points, on the contrary, Milan had less points despite being the runners-up. However, I think AC Milan will improve their performance significantly in the next season and they will have a tough competition with Inter Milan.
It must be admitted that AC Milan journey in the pre-season tour was impressive, but personally I assume that the performance cannot necessarily be repeated in the official match later. The pre-season tour seems easy because there are no targets and pressures, each manager can freely determine the starting XI, without having to worry about the opponents they will face, that's what we understand. We know that AC Milan is able to beat heavyweight teams like Man City, Madrid and Barcelona in the pre-season tour, but if Milan faces these three teams in the Champions League next season, the final result of the match is likely to be the opposite.
The appointment of Paulo Fonseca as Pioli successor has changed AC Milan style of play a little, they look more aggressive, and that's good enough to overcome every challenge next season. The competition for the Scudetto will be more difficult than last season, I predict Inter Milan will no longer be alone in topping the Serie A standings. We are all certainly very curious about AC Milan performance when they have to compete with Inter Milan, Juventus, and Napoli in the top four of the standings. Not to mention if Atalanta, Bologna and Roma appear surprising, they also should not be ignored.