Football
Glenn Price, Liverpool correspondent 6y

Roma must focus on attacking Liverpool, not Mohamed Salah - Di Francesco

ROME -- Eusebio Di Francesco has stressed that it would not be practical for Roma to triple-mark Mohamed Salah on Wednesday night as he vowed that his side will be on the attack from minute one.

Salah scored twice in the first leg of the Champions League semifinal to help put Liverpool on their way to a 5-2 victory over Di Francesco's team at Anfield last week.

The record-breaking Egypt international, who will make his first return to the Stadio Olimpico since his summer move to Liverpool, has scored 43 times for the Reds this season and collect yet another accolade on Tuesday after he was named Player of the Year by the Football Writers' Association.

"Salah made the difference in the first leg," Di Francesco told a news conference. "But we can't change our whole team. We need to have better mechanisms.

"What is important is that Salah is a little player on the counter and touching the vertical spaces, but we can't have three players on him. That wouldn't be reasonable.

"We need to focus on the rivals, but, first of all, on ourselves if we want to score three goals."

Di Francesco acknowledges that Roma's need to overturn a three-goal deficit on Wednesday means that Liverpool, who boast a frontline that has scored 88 goals this term, may have opportunities to exploit the hosts on the counter-attack.

The Italian added: "Inevitably, if you want to try and play football and score goals, you need to expose yourself and try to be as cautious as possible in preventing counter-attacks. We need to improve tremendously compared to the first leg.

"Some mistakes are inevitable when two aggressive teams are playing each other. We need to be more effective to make the most of the mistakes and to try and make as few mistakes as possible.

"We can't afford to sit back and to drop deep, so we need to stay true to our philosophy and limit our mistakes much as possible.

"We need to stay as focused as possible if we are to complete this comeback. I would like to make something clear, we are about to play a Champions League semifinal in front of 70,000 people, do you expect us to sit back? No.

"You have to expect a fighting team, you want to see a team battling on the pitch regardless of the score. What I expect is enthusiasm, passion and desire to go past this hurdle tomorrow."

In reaching the semifinals of the Champions League, Roma overturned a 4-1 result from the first leg of the quarterfinal meeting with Barcelona to eventually win the tie on away goals.

Radja Nainggolan believes he and his teammates can drawn inspiration from that night in April, but warned that Liverpool present different challenges to those of the La Liga champions.

"We all know it will be difficult, but it was even difficult against Barcelona and we did it," he said. "We need to believe in what we can do.

"I think it will be more difficult than against Barcelona because this is a physically better team, I think. For us, the only thing we need to try is trying to score three goals and not concede.

"Liverpool were just more consistent because there were some spells of the game where we did well. Unfortunately, we couldn't make it for the whole 90 minutes.

"At Barcelona we did it for larger spells of the game, but felt the result was unfair. Against Liverpool we managed to score two late goals and it gives us a glimpse of hope. We are still alive and we can't afford to repeat that mistake. We are all aware what we need to."

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