Very interesting thread, to say the least. Why ??
Remember how we started our season this year. The defense was horrible and the offense was doing a marginal job, not too savvy but at the same time not too shabby.
Slowly, the defense started getting even worse with the dead ball situation and offense started to become more mediocre.
Who picked up the slack?? Of course DIDA.
I remember the CELTIC and SHAKTAR matches (first round) where DIDA kept us in CL. If we couldn't have garnered 6 points out of those two matches, can you imagine that we might not even be in the knockout round of CL.
Then slowly but steadily, our defense started to put a decent show by closing on both the ground movements and the set piece movements. But still they were in constant pressure of getting too many red or yellow cards. KALADZE, PANCARO, AMBROSINI and NESTA comes to mind. At the same time offense were getting worse and worse with both injured INZAGHI and SHEVA (even though off and on, not continuously) being out.
But for the last month, the offense has gone even worse, or should I say the worst (barring the MAN U and MESSINA games).
Then why we are still winning ?? Because MILAN has gone back to its own shadow of 2002-2003 season, when DEFENSE was just simply the best in the WORLD but the offense wasn't so great.
So throught the season, I have seen some ups and downs of the team along the individual players.
But if I have give them a number or rank them according their performances then I would say in the following order:
SHEVA > DIDA > MALDINI > NESTA > COSTACURTA > CAFU
Rest of them had either been too inconsistent or didn't play sufficient amount of matches.
But as the season progresses, both NESTA and MALDINI are increasing their stock by quite a bit by every game. I suspect that both of them would become best two performers of our team for the season if we have to win anything, particularly CL.
Because that was the way that we won the CL last time.