A Monday match against a mid-table side is, in theory, the kind of night Roma should use to exhale: rotate a little, take the points, move on. At first glance, tomorrow looks like that kind of fixture. It’s at the Olimpico, against a team that would happily leave with a point and doesn’t have the talent to bully you into chaos. But that framing only works if you have room between where you are and where you need to be. Roma don’t. They’ve stuttered enough to slip out of the top four, and while the injury
crisis explains plenty, the table doesn’t grade on a curve. Roma need the win tomorrow to keep the chase for fourth honest and to keep the pressure where it belongs: on Juventus as much as on Roma. Anything else starts to tilt the season into a worse shape, where i Lupi aren’t hunting fourth so much as waiting for teams above them to drop points at the right time.
So why isn’t this match a true reset opportunity for the Giallorossi? The complication here is obvious: Roma are trying to win with authority without a huge portion of the squad that normally supplies goals, invention, or both. Mario Hermoso, Evan Ferguson, and Paulo Dybala were doubtful until today and are now confirmed out for tomorrow’s match. Artem Dovbyk is still out. Manu Koné is out. Robinio Vaz is now out for several weeks. Stephan El Shaarawy is out. You can survive one or two of those absences, even three, if you still have the little bits of chemistry and muscle memory that let you fake normality. But when the injury list gets this long, a match stops being an opportunity for rotation and starts being a simple question of “can we get out of this one alive?” When playing against a smaller side like Cagliari, the laundry list of absences Roma are enduring right now arguably matter even more because the Sardinian side will happily take a draw out of a visit to the Olimpico.
Match Details
Date: February 9th
Kickoff: 20:45 CET/2:45 EST
Venue: Stadio Olimpico, Roma
Referee: Matteo Marcenaro
Cagliari don’t need to dominate the ball, or even threaten often, to make this a miserable evening for Roma. All they need to do is play compactly, keep Roma in front of them, and stay calm while Roma do the predictable thing the backups for a big side often do: circulate the ball safely, look up, see nothing, and take another touch. If Roma let frustration dictate the tempo, they’ll play right into Cagliari’s hands. With that in mind, the question for Gian Piero Gasperini is not whether Roma can produce a beautiful performance with half an attacking line missing. It’s whether he can get a functional win. If his backups can control this match, that’s all we need. If this side’s backups can come to play in a mature way, the three points to keep the pressure on Juventus shouldn’t be that hard to find.
What to Watch For
Zaragoza Begins
The first thing to watch tomorrow is that Roma’s newest signing might not get the debut from the bench that you’d script for a deadline-week arrival. Bryan Zaragoza only became an official Roma player on February 2. Yet given Roma’s current injury list, he’s been reportedly pushed straight into the starting lineup, instead of being afforded a more gradual on-ramp to minutes. The good news is that Zaragoza fits perfectly into the gaps that Roma’s injuries have created in the starting eleven.
Zaragoza’s zone is where Roma have been missing a live wire the whole season. Outside of Matías Soulé, it’s been tough for Gasperini to trust any player to receive the ball on the half-turn, force a defender to choose, and turn a safe possession into a destabilizing one. That’s Zaragoza’s bread and butter, which is fortunate considering the notable absence of Paulo Dybala from the lineup. If the Spaniard can impress from day one, it creates a tactical knock-on effect with long-term implications. In theory, if Zaragoza holds the pocket and keeps the ball under pressure, Roma can push Wesley higher up the pitch without making Romanisti feel like it’s a gamble every time they lose the ball. In the best situation for Roma, Zaragoza slides right in, creates chances, and lets Roma play confidently in Cagliari’s half for longer stretches without the whole thing feeling too fragile.
Conversely, if Zaragoza stays wide, Roma risk becoming too predictable to win, even against Cagliari. So tomorrow, look to see if the Spaniard is playing aggressively and forcing Cagliari’s midfield line to step out. If he is, it might open a lane for Soulé to drift into; it might give Donyell Malen a partner to bounce off; it might help Roma win. This may not be the easiest welcome to Rome that a winter signing has ever had, but the opportunity is certainly there for Zaragoza to quickly show why he should be a permanent signing.
Super-Svilar Needed
With Roma down to bare bones in attack, the margin for error shifts for every other part of this side. When you’re missing Paulo Dybala, Artem Dovbyk, Stephan El Shaarawy, and Evan Ferguson, you have to implicitly agree to play a different kind of match than the typical free-flowing football many Romanisti wish we were seeing more frequently from this side. A manager in this situation has to accept that your side may not score early, that you may not score twice, and that the game might hinge on whether you can survive the one stretch where your possession gets sloppy, and Cagliari remembers they’re allowed to run forward.
That’s why, as always, the most important man to watch tomorrow is Mile Svilar. If you zoom out a bit away from the disappointing recent results for Roma, Svilar’s statistical profile matches what your eyes have been telling you: the Giallorossi are where they are right now in large part because the Serbian shot-stopper has been stopping a lot of what’s been put in front of him. FootyStats has him saving 70 of 84 shots faced so far this season, giving him an 83.33% save rate. That’s exactly the kind of number that turns “we’re not creating enough” from fatal into merely stressful, even when the attack is down to bare bones.
It’s not original to say that Svilar is incredibly important for Roma’s hopes this season. He’s been Roma’s best player arguably for years. But I would argue that the pressure on Svilar tomorrow is evolving past “make saves.”
Part of the reason for that is that there’s a growing sense that, with Roma stripped down to the studs in attack, Svilar is being asked to hold the whole thing upright while everyone else tries to scrape together a goal. That’s been a pretty consistent theme in his time in Rome, in part because Roma’s attack has dealt with injuries and poor form for quite some time.
The problem there isn’t that Svilar isn’t up to the task; he clearly is. The problem there is that when a goalkeeper is doing that week after week, the consequences don’t stay contained to the ninety minutes. The league notices. Other clubs notice. And the player notices. Over the last few weeks alone, he’s been linked with interest from Bayern Munich via Il Messaggero, and there’s been specific Premier League gossip tying him to clubs like Tottenham, plus broader reporting that Chelsea and Manchester United are monitoring him. Roma can insist they’re building, that he’s central, that he’s valued. Still, the market has its own language, and it starts speaking louder when a player looks like the only reliable adult in the starting eleven.
That’s why this stretch matters in a slightly different way for Roma. While wins are important and Champions League qualification is crucial, the Giallorossi also need to ensure that Svilar feels like the project isn’t “you, and then everyone else.” That’s how you lose someone in July, even if you think you’re fine with them on paper—or even grateful for just how significant a load they have carried on behalf of your club. Given that, Roma and Gasperini need to make the pitch to Svilar for the long-term more credible. To sell him on the idea of a Roma long-term project, they can’t just say he’s important. They need to promise him that he won’t be spending each spring playing goalkeeper and crisis manager at the same time moving forward. That may be a hard one to sell without results, but at the very least, a more comfortable win tomorrow for the Giallorossi might make the bright lights of the Premier League seem just a touch less tempting.
