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MOTD: Real Madrid 2-0 AS Roma

By on March 8, 2016

Cristiano Ronaldo and James Rodriguez bagged to two second half goals against Roma to secure their position in the Champions League Quarterfinals for the sixth season in a row with a 2-0 win at the Bernabeu. The tie ended 4-0 on aggregate, an apparently smooth result for Madrid on the face of it, but Roma made Zinedine Zidane’s more difficult with a valiant performance, and with sharper shooting up front the Italians might have given the crowd more to worry about.

Roma came into the Round of 16 tie facing a 2-0 deficit from the first leg, and while it was a comfortable result for Madrid, Roma pressured high up the pitch and exposed Madrid’s shaky back-line at times. Edin Dzeko and Mohamed Salah both put one-on-ones with Keylor Navas wide of the target and with every wasted chance, a sneaking sense of frustration replaced that of hope, until Ronaldo and Rodriguez put the tie to bed with two goals in the space of just four minutes.

Roma boss Luciano Spalletti wanted to see less complacency from his players. “We are weak and at the first sign of difficulty we cannot be the team that we need to be,” he said, per the BBC. “It is not as if Real Madrid are going through a great period of form and at the moment they are not irresistible.”

It’s a sentiment that Roma’s performance proved.

Spalletti continued: “When I come back into the dressing room after the final whistle and see the players satisfied because they will get compliments for the performance, this creates a disappointment and pain in me that I cannot reconcile.

“When you go into the dressing room after a 2-0 defeat, you need to be angry and realise the chances you have thrown away over these two games.”

Real racked up thirty-seven shots throughout the ninety minutes, but they were contained to mostly speculative efforts from range (more than half of their efforts were from outside of the box) and Roma had the better of the chances. Spalletti’s men launched dangerous counterattacks down the wings, rarely cutting through the middle, and they came close thirteen minutes in when Salah cut in from the right. The midfielder squared the ball to Stephen El Sharaawy, who dummied it and let the ball roll across the edge of the box to Dzeko, who used his first touch to take the ball it into a wide open pocket of space down the left side of the box. Yet the Bosnian forward couldn’t cannot wrap his foot around a finish and missed the target altogether.

In the twenty-sixth minute, Dzeko slipped Salah in down the right channel with a lovely through ball, but Salah’s first-time finish from fifteen yards hit the side netting. On the other side of the half, Salah wasted yet another golden opportunity when he caught Sergio Ramos out for a lunging tackle down the right. The Spaniard could only poke the ball as far away as Dzeko, who played Salah in behind. Again, however, the Egyptian couldn’t find the target.

Ronaldo put to bed any hopes of a comeback in the sixty-fourth minute, nipping ahead of his marker to poke Lucas Vazquez’s cross from the right into the back of the net with a near post finish. It was his fortieth goal in all competitions this season. Four minutes later, Ronaldo slipped Rodriguez in down the left side of the box on the overlap and the Colombian tucked a cool near-post finish between the legs of Wojciech Szczesny.

The shutout was Keylor Navas’ eighth consecutive Champions League match without conceding, one game short of Jens Lehmann’s record in the 2005/06 season. However, that streak should have been broken by Roma, and Madrid will need more solidity at the back to advance into the final stages of the competition.

Photo credit: Chris Deahr (Ronaldo vs. FC Schalke 04) [CC BY 2.0 (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/2.0)], via Wikimedia Commons

About Alex Morgan

Alex Morgan, founder of Football Every Day, lives and breaths football from the West Coast of the United States in California. Aside from founding Football Every Day in January of 2013, Alex has also launched his own journalism career and hopes to help others do the same with FBED. He covers the San Jose Earthquakes as a beat reporter for QuakesTalk.com and his work has also been featured in the BBC's Match of the Day Magazine.