Rome: Roma already erased a three-goal deficit once in this season’s Champions League.
The Giallorossi believe they can do it again against Liverpool on Wednesday.
“We’ve already shown we’re capable of coming back and we should have the belief that we can do it again,” Roma coach Eusebio Di Francesco said.
Liverpool won the first leg 5-2, so Roma need a repeat of their 3-0 second-leg victory over Barcelona in the quarter-finals to reach next month’s final in Kiev.
A 4-1 win — Roma’s result against Chievo Verona on Saturday — would also suffice.
“I believe. That’s my slogan and that’s what I want to transmit to my players,” Di Francesco added.
However, Roma will have to find a way to stop their former striker, Mohammad Salah, who scored the opening two goals of the first leg.
Security will also be a concern following clashes at the first leg that left a Liverpool fan in critical condition.
Italian state police said “special attention” will be paid to the arrival and movements of 5,000 Liverpool supporters in the capital.
Wednesday’s game is a rematch of the 1984 European Cup final that Liverpool won in a penalty shoot-out in Roma’s stadium.
Liverpool should have its devastating front three intact for the second leg, with coach Juergen Klopp saying Sadio Mane will be fit after a minor thigh injury.
Mane, who missed the 0-0 draw with Stoke in the Premier League on Saturday, will link up again with Salah and Roberto Firmino — reuniting the players who scored all of Liverpool’s goals in the first leg. They have scored 28 goals between them in this season’s Champions League, more than any other team in the competition.
Klopp does have issues in midfield, though, with Alex Oxlade-Chamberlain out for the rest of the season after sustaining a serious knee problem in the first leg to join fellow midfielders Adam Lallana and Emre Can on the injury list. Jordan Henderson, James Milner and Georginio Wijnaldum are Klopp’s only fit senior midfielders.
Liverpool, five-time European champions, have proved to be the master of the counterattack domestically and in the Champions League this season, so is the last team that Roma will want to be gung-ho against. The Reds did, though, squander a three-goal cushion against Sevilla in the group stage to draw 3-3.
