AC Milan coach Stefano Pioli has ruled themselves out of the title race.

Sunday's win against AS Roma has Milan nine points off the summit.

But Pioli says: "No, take us out of that. We have to focus on ourselves and the objective is very clear, we did fairly well in the first half of the season and want to do better in the second half. I don't think 39 points is too bad a tally at the midway stage, but we've got to step on the gas now.

“Considering all that we had said over the summer, we believe that we could've had more points. The games where we dropped the ball were against Juventus, Napoli, Udinese and Lecce, picking up only two points despite not playing all that badly.

“There is no point thinking now about what might've been, we have Serie A and the Europa League and can still have our say in those competitions."