Barcelona failure shouldn’t overshadow Roma’s achievement
Barcelona crashed out of the Champions League with a 3-0 defeat away to Roma. The reaction has focused on the Catalans, but Roma deserve the spotlight.
When Edin Dzeko scored at the Camp Nou last week, the solitary goal in a 4-1 thrashing, few expected it to mean anything. As it turned out, the goal was the difference in a remarkable tie, as Roma scored three without reply in the second leg to advance on away goals.
Barcelona came into Tuesday’s match on the back of a routine 3-1 win over Leganes that saw them match Real Sociedad’s record of 38 consecutive Liga games without a loss. With the Madrid derby ending in a stalemate, they stretched their lead at the top of the table to 11 points.
Outside of back-to-back defeats to Real Madrid in the Spanish Super Cup at the beginning of the season, Barca had only lost one once this season, away to Espanyol in the first leg of the Copa del Rey quarterfinal, a tie which they won anyway.
Europe had been much the same story in the lead-up to their visit to Rome. They were unbeaten despite Juventus and Chelsea causing them problems, and after a comfortable, if slightly fortunate, first leg win, it seemed they were trundling toward another treble.
With most of the soccer world focusing on Manchester City’s chances of a comeback against Liverpool in Tuesday’s other quarterfinal second leg, the idea of Barca throwing away such a big lead was scarcely considered.
Not only because this was Barcelona, or because they were facing a Roma side they’d outscored 15-7 in their previous six meetings, but because they had first-hand experience of sides throwing away even bigger leads than theirs.
Just last year, eight of Barca’s starters in Rome lined up at the Camp Nou needing a miracle to overturn a 4-0 deficit against PSG. Somehow, they did it, scoring twice in stoppage time to complete the biggest comeback in the tournament’s history.
Ernesto Valverde had said in the lead-up to Tuesday’s game that “10 bad minutes could knock you out of the Champions League.” As it turned out, it was 90 awful minutes that dumped Barcelona out.
They had, it must be said, been fortunate to gain such a commanding lead in the first place, with two own goals (their second highest scorer in the competition, after Lionel Messi) helping them on the way to their 4-1 win.
And so perhaps Roma’s second-leg heroics shouldn’t have come as such a surprise. Eusebio Di Francesco’s side went through only on away goals, but the truth is they could have easily won by more.
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The xG charts shows Barcelona were outscored 3.9-2.5 over the two ties. And yet in the buildup to the game, the question in Italy was whether Di Francesco should even bother playing a competitive starting lineup, with the tie dead and a massive derby, with Champions League implications, against Lazio coming up on the weekend.
So often when a team of Roma’s stature are down big, they do just as the pundits predict, they tank the second leg so as to focus on securing qualification for the tournament next season. There’s little value on the pitch in this approach, however, and thankfully Di Francesco saw it the same way.
The Roma boss revealed in his post-match press conference that his choice to ditch his preferred 4-3-3 and line up with three at the back came to him following defeat to Fiorentina at the weekend, at five o’clock in the morning. “Had it not worked, you would have killed me,” he said.
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Di Francesco may never have felt more alive than he did on Wednesday morning. This is Roma’s first ever Champions League semifinal, and with absolutely no expectations on them, they’ll be confident against whoever the face next.
Another two men who will be feeling very much alive on Wednesday are Daniele De Rossi and Kostas Manolas. It seemed they had doomed their side to defeat as the two of them put the ball into their own net in the first leg.
Following Dzeko’s opener, it was De Rossi’s penalty and Manolas’ late goal that saw the hosts complete the comeback. “This is also very important for me too as I am 34 years old,” De Rossi said following the game. “This win is one of the best I have ever experienced since joining Roma.”