Gasperini’s comments following Como v Roma

Here is what the Roma coach had to say.

You played a certain type of game up until the 59^th minute. Then there was a defensive mistake, Donyell Malen’s failure to provide an assist and a second yellow card to a rather reckless Wesley.

“All three moments were important. The first two were our shortcomings. In the first, there was a bit of fatigue in our defence; our players are recovering, but they’ve had various physical problems and when your opponents have fresh, quality forwards, we suffer a bit. We should’ve done better. What happened with Malen was a shame, as we could’ve taken the lead again. I’d rather not talk about Wesley.”

Can we show you again what happened with Wesley?

“Go ahead, that’s not the issue. There is other footage where you can clearly see that he doesn’t do anything, he even moves away. Then the game changed, as we had to play with 10 men. It’s not the first time that Como have found themselves in this type of situation. It’s something they tried to create. A bit too much. This is what football has become. We’ve said that many times and I won’t get into it; today we were affected by it. I’ve talked about it on other occasions, but I won’t today.”

You had prepared for this game well despite the few days at your disposal.

“These players are giving it everything, including when things get hard. [Stephan] El Shaarawy was out for 40 days, just like [Mario] Hermoso. I can’t hold anything against them. This isn’t a good period for us. Against Genoa there was a blatant penalty for us that would have won us the game. We know that we have a very important game coming up on Thursday, then we’re up against Lecce and after that there’s the international break. We hope we’ll be able to recover what we haven’t recovered over the past few weeks.”

You had to adapt a lot in Rome; is that your biggest disappointment?

“[Lorenzo] Venturino and [Robinio] Vaz were about to come on and I would’ve made those changes. I had to adapt a lot more in Rome; I wasn’t always able to do this elsewhere either. Finding players was hard, but we adapted well in our other matches. We’re still on track to meet our objectives and we must be focused on Thursday. These players are outstanding in terms of unity. We also have a lot of young players and they struggle a bit in these situations, but now we need to think about Thursday as it will be another important match.”