Roma led Real Madrid 3-1 at the Stadio Olimpico with about ten minutes left. They lost 4-3. Every goal that beat them came from a corner, and all three landed inside seven minutes. That's how a team throws away a Champions League night it had controlled for an hour.
Marten de Roon put Roma ahead, Donyell Malen scored twice, and by the 83rd minute this looked like a deserved win. Then Carlos Espí made it 3-2 from a corner. Endrick headed in an almost identical goal at the near post to make it 3-3. Antonio Rüdiger, a former Roma defender, headed the 90th-minute winner, also from a corner. Between the 82nd and 90th minute, Madrid won four corners and scored from three of them. You can get beaten once by a great delivery and a sharp run. You can't get beaten by the same delivery three times in seven minutes unless somebody on that pitch decides, actively, not to fix it.
Arda Güler swung them in, and he was superb: two assists in the closing minutes, both placed exactly where a defender's zone meets a forward's run. Madrid didn't fold at 3-1 down on the road, and whoever kept calling for that same corner deserves credit for sticking with what worked.
Roma still defended like they'd never seen a corner before. Good delivery should make you concentrate harder. It doesn't excuse what happened next. The near-post run that beat them for Endrick's goal was the same run that had just beaten them for Espí's. Nobody adjusted the marking. Nobody closed the space. For eight minutes Roma watched the same play unfold and kept getting surprised by the ending. That's a coaching failure and a leadership failure on the grass, and Gian Piero Gasperini knows it: he admitted the defending on those corners was shocking even as he insisted his side had outclassed Madrid over the match. Only one of those shows up on the scoreboard.
Madrid had José Mourinho on the opposite bench that night, back at the club he once led to a European trophy, and he got the win by reaching for the oldest tool in the box. His substitutions reshaped the attack, Güler came on and bent the game around a corner flag, and Madrid stayed perfect through two matchdays of the league phase.
A 3-1 lead with ten minutes to go should be the safest thing in football. Roma made it the most dangerous. Four corners, three goals, and not one defender treated the second one like a warning.
