For quite a long time (or maybe it just seemed incredibly long), I felt like Roma’s season was collapsing under the weight of its own contradictions. Como, an opportunistic and annoyingly resilient team backed by Italy’s richest owners, looked set to turn Roma’s recent stumbles into something more permanent. And yet, the door to salvation has been reopened. just a pinch. As it has failed, crowned by a defeat against Sassuolo, and now we return to our usual programming: looking at the table.
The thing about the last gasps of a season is that momentum is not generated in this environment. Instead, it feels like there’s a limited amount of hope allotted, and when one side loses that hope, the other inevitably gains it. With this in mind, the fact that the Roma get some respite doesn’t feel earned, but inherited; Still, the opportunity is real. With Roma just ahead of Atalanta and still within reach of the top four, while Juventus occupy that fragile final spot in the Champions League, the math has been simplified. Win and the conversation changes. Lose and the death spiral becomes a little more permanent. The margins are that narrow and the stakes are that overwhelming.
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If Roma are, in any meaningful sense, the team they once hinted they were earlier this season, then this is where Real Roma need to pick themselves up (to paraphrase Marshall Mathers). They can only do this through execution. Any belief that once surrounded this team has eroded and been replaced by a more familiar uncertainty and sense of doom about the club’s long-term potential. The table offers them one last invitation to change the script: enter the fight with Juventus or get out of it. Will they lose themselves in the music the moment they want it? Will they never let it go?
What to take into account
Can we get Wesley and Pisilli back?
If Roma are to get a win in this match, they will need two of the only players on the team to consistently make things happen without needing the entire system to click first. Wesley is still dealing with a hamstring problem and looks unlikely to be at risk, while Niccolò Pisilli is stuck in that late-test limbo with an ankle problem. Even if one of them makes it to the bench, it’s hard to see any of them being anywhere near 100 percent. That’s a problem, because Roma don’t exactly have redundancy in those roles. Wesley gives you a directness that no one else on this side offers right now, while Pisilli’s value is different but just as important. He speeds things up. He plays as a forward. It turns stagnant possession into something that at least resembles the intention, something that has been in short supply since long-term injuries to MatÃas Soulé and Paulo Dybala neutralized Roma’s creative power.
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Against an Atalanta team that will be out for blood and a chance to enter Europe, those skills are not optional. You’re not going to plod through them for 90 minutes. You need players who can break the structure, who can create something out of nothing when the game starts to tilt. Without Wesley and Pisilli, Roma can still compete. But they’re starting to look more like a team waiting for the game to come to them, rather than one capable of winning it.
Can Gasperini end the drama with a victory against his former employer?
The most annoying part about the last few weeks of Roman drama is that this didn’t have to be a story. Not like that.
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Instead, Roma heads into one of the most important games of their season with attention divided between the field and a very public fracture between Gian Piero Gasperini and Claudio Ranieri. What began as a disagreement over team decisions and messaging has spilled into the public eye, culminating with Gasperini visibly emotional at his pre-match press conference after reportedly being caught off guard by Ranieri’s comments. This is how things are now: there is tension, there is noise and now we have a game that suddenly seems to have more than three points.
Ignore the drama, because reality is simpler than that. This dispute between Ranieri and Gasperini, two icons of Italian football, should not be resolved in press conferences or clarified through intermediaries. Roma did not hire Gasperini to navigate internal power struggles. They hired him for what he did at Atalanta: nine years turning a club without traditional resources into one of the most consistent teams in Italy and a regular presence in the Champions League. He built something there with parts that most managers wouldn’t have known how to use. That is the curriculum with Atalanta and that is the project with Roma.
This is the moment when that resume has to be translated. Not in the end, not in the course of a long reconstruction: now. Because whatever tension exists, whatever frustration bubbles beneath the surface, it will all look very different if Roma walk off the field tomorrow with three points. Win and the noise calms down for the moment. Win and the idea behind the hire starts to seem real again. Lose and everything gets louder. Nobody wants that. Nobody needs that. I certainly don’t, because I want to happily return to podcasting.