Champions League: Inter and Roma Both Through with Wins

By: Martha | November 27th, 2007

The guys at home. Today is Roberto Mancini’s birthday, but Fenerbahçe’s coach Zico doesn’t care. In fact, he’s got rather unpleasant intentions: “I’m hoping we poop his birthday party.” Jeez, Zico, could we do without the scatological references, please? (Zico also wants to take a certainly lumpy countryman off Mancio’s hands, but that’s a story for another time.) Apart from the pooping, Zico is also hoping to beat Inter in their own house, a result that would vault them over the Italian side and into top spot in Group G, securing them their first-ever place in the CL knockout round. If Inter win, however, it’s them who will end the day with that ticket to the next round, so they’ll be looking to get revenge for the humiliating 0-1 loss they suffered in Turkey in the group’s opening match.

Zico will have the services of most of his fleet of Brazilians, including Roberto Carlos and Alex, who scored a hat trick in the club’s last league match. In addition, Deivid (who scored the winning goal in the first meeting) and Lugano are back from suspension, while Stephen Appiah (!) has recovered from injury. Deniz Barış and Mateja Kežman, however, are still out, the latter of which is sad because Inter have Dejan Stanković back, finally, and there were hopes (from me, anyway) of a gleeful Serb reunion. Oh well. In addition to Stanković, Inter, who are still without Luis Figo and Patrick Vieira, also finally have Marco Materazzi back and, despite the continued suspension of Nico Burdisso, are absolutely lousy with defenders — the eight on Mancini’s squad list for the match are a far cry from the defensive crisis with which they started Champions League play.

Roma, meanwhile, travel to chillly Kiev, needing a win over pointless, non-scoring Dynamo Kyiv — who they beat 2-0 at home — to book a place in the next round. Both team are dealing with awful injury problems: Roma are missing pretty much everyone in the picture up there, including Francesco Totti, Philippe Mexes, Alberto Aquilani, Simone Perrotta and maybe Rodrigo Taddei, while the Ukrainian side are without first-choice keeper Olexandr Shovkovskiy (he’ll be replaced by the 20-year-old Olexandr Rybka — what do you want to bet the third choice is also named Olexandr?), as well as Kleber and Rodrigo and, depending on how his fitness test goes, midfielder Carlos Corrêa. Also, in case you were wondering, it’s going to snow. RomaChris’ big daddy (that’s the post, not him) preview post is up, as usual.