Gasperini reacts to Juventus v Roma

Here's what he had to say:

The positive aspect tonight is that in a match that was very difficult you managed to stay in the game until the end. The negative is perhaps the lack of accuracy, too many misplaced passes – much more than the average.

“In attack yes, otherwise we wouldn't have had... We had all the conditions to create more of a threat. Obviously we needed a bit more quality in the service we gave to our forwards. And maybe towards the end when we had a lot of energy we could have been more precise. But that's something we know about. I'd like to improve the level of lots of players. It wasn't easy to produce a big performance today against a great team like Juventus with the players we were missing. Roma can take a lot of belief from this game. Roma need to build a strong squad. We have very good foundations. We'll see. I'm convinced we can do well.”

You struggled more than usual with some of those runs by Kenan Yildiz, Francisco Conceicao and Weston McKennie, don't you think?

“You're talking about some top players... Yildiz and Conceicao do make dangerous runs. Unfortunately we let a goal in at the end of the first half but we did a lot of good things ourselves. For long spells in the first half we played well. We gave very little away. Of course once we were behind, Juventus had a bit more space, but overall as a team there were some top performances, including from guys who haven't played much like [Devyne] Rensch and [Jan] Ziolkowski. I think we have a core we can work with.”

The stats say you've earned very few points against the big teams...

“I think I need to work harder at finding more solutions in attack because I think we've had a solid, compact team since the start of the season. We need a few more goals, a few more more spurts, one-on-ones – that can make the difference, as Yildiz and Conceicao did tonight down the other end. I don't know but the head-to-heads we've lost, apart from Juventus, have been against teams above us. We've beaten Como, Lazio, Bologna – teams that are right behind us. I think if you lose three or four head-to-heads against teams like that it means you're a notch below them. That said, we're still at the start. We have a strong club behind us and some core players who have held their own in these top-level matches. We only started a few months ago. I'm confident Roma can build a great future with what we have now.”

Roma were very good in the first half, better than Juve. Did you not have regrets thinking back to how you played against Como, with Evan Ferguson up front, instead of having two players like Matias Soule and Paulo Dybala, who are more penalty-box players?

“No, because I'm not convinced by Ferguson – in the second half too, when he came on for a long time – but it's not his ability. He hasn't got the right mindset yet, though he's by no means the only one – the same goes for some of the other new signings. However, we have a very good team, very solid. We did well with Dybala and Soule but they're technically superior players. We can't compare them to others. I'd repeat the same choices I've been making for a while.”