Goalkeeper Yann Sommer is making Manchester United’s Andre Onana into a distant memory at Inter Milan this season.
Today’s print edition of Milan-based newspaper Gazzetta dello Sport, via FCInterNews, highlight the 34-year-old’s start to the season.
When Onana departed in the summer, there were big questions regarding how Inter would replace him.
The Cameroonian had been a key player for the Nerazzurri last season.
Particularly in the Champions League, it is hard to imagine Inter reaching the final without Onana’s heroics in goal.
There was the financial side to selling Onana. Inter cashed in on a player who had arrived twelve months earlier on a free transfer for a huge fee.
But for that fee, the Nerazzurri were giving up a key player to Manchester United.
And there were doubters regarding Inter’s strategy to replace Onana.
Rather than going for a young keeper with a lot of potential – Anatoliy Trubin was linked throughout the summer transfer window before eventually moving to Benfica – Inter went with experience.
Yann Sommer Erases Memory Of Andre Onana At Inter
Veteran Swiss international Sommer arrived for a relatively modest fee from Bayern Munich.
Sommer is certainly a known quantity. His performances in the Bundesliga and for Switzerland had made him a big name in European football long before his arrival at Inter.
However, Sommer’s age in particular raised eyebrows.
The ex-Borussia Monchengladbach veteran will turn 35 in a couple weeks.
Even for a goalkeeper that is a lot closer to the end of his career than the beginning.
Moreover, the Gazzetta note, Sommer is not the tallest of keepers.
Therefore, there were many who felt that signing the 34-year-old was nothing more than a stopgap solution for Inter.
The Nerazzurri had sold a modern, technically gifted and athletic keeper with bags of personality in the form of Onana. And they had replaced him with a short-term reliable option.
But Sommer has not really been a step down from Onana.
The Swiss’s massive saves against Napoli over the weekend offered a further demonstration of this.
There has been one major error from Sommer. He allowed Sassuolo’s Nedim Bajrami to kick off a comeback win at the San Siro.
But the feeling is that Sommer has earned Inter more points than he has lost them, by far.
If some Inter fans will have worried that they were heading into the season with an uninspiring temporary solution in goal, that’s not what Sommer has been at all.
Like Onana had been in last season’s Champions League, the 34-year-old is a talisman in goal for Inter.
