Roma President James Pallotta saw a lot of “interesting non-calls” in last night’s win over Liverpool.
The Giallorossi won 4-2 on the night, but they went out of the Champions League having lost the first leg at Anfield 5-2.
“Incredibly proud of this team all the way through,” Pallotta said on Sirius XM FC.
“If you just look at the Champions League, everyone said we were in the ‘Group of Death’ and we ended up winning it, so right off the bat I think we surprised people.
Roma President James Pallotta saw a lot of “interesting non-calls” in last night’s win over Liverpool.
The Giallorossi won 4-2 on the night, but they went out of the Champions League having lost the first leg at Anfield 5-2.
“Incredibly proud of this team all the way through,” Pallotta said on Sirius XM FC.
“If you just look at the Champions League, everyone said we were in the ‘Group of Death’ and we ended up winning it, so right off the bat I think we surprised people.
“Then to get through and get through Barcelona and then Liverpool… the guys always fought through and fought back no matter what happened.
“Am I anguished? I’ll get over it, but that’s an understatement given I watched the second half of the game in the Coach’s room and so in a real basis and on a replay basis I watched a lot of… let’s just say interesting non-calls.
“I think they were… look they were missed and that’s why I was so upset, something has to be done.
“I know refs are going to make mistakes and I know these guys realise they made some major mistakes and are probably pretty bummed about it, but at the same time you can solve some of those issues with VAR.
“I just think in games like this it just has to be used. It’s different in a basketball game, you have 120 points scored, there’s some different things going on here and there.
“But when a goal is so important and at the end of the day we lose on a 7-6 aggregate and there’s a couple of obvious chances and a red card, that’s just difficult to take, you know?
“But it is what it is, Liverpool is a spectacular team with great players, great coaches, great organisation.
“I just tip my hat to them and wish them well and we’ve got three more games in our league and we want to get back into the Champions League as we’ve been consistently doing for the last five years so… yeah I’m pretty happy with the guys.
“Let’s be realistic here, Real Madrid probably have three or four times the revenue that we do, Bayern Munich have at least double if not three times, Liverpool have more than double the revenue.
“So we’re fighting a football battle against those other three semi-finalists with a budget that is substantially different than theirs, so I think we deserve a lot of credit.
“I think any one of those teams we could have played against and played well against, in fact honestly in some ways the team I was probably not wanting to play was Bayern.
“I felt good about the other ones, I think we made some mistakes in the first game with how we played against Liverpool, clearly.
“There were a couple of calls but, you know, calls happen.
“I think in the second game if you look at the statistics of the entire game, other than one mistake that Radja [Nainggolan] made and a mistake where [Edin] Dzeko got pushed almost outside the box on their second goal, we actually played a really, really good game yesterday and had the chance to put in five or six goals if some of the things went our way.”