Bologna grinds out 1-2 win at Parma despite playing almost the entire match against ten men

Parma finished the match with ten men from the 8th minute, played nearly the entire second half a man down, and still left the Ennio Tardini feeling like they had competed to the very end. Bologna won 1-2, but it cost them far more than their dominance suggested it would.

The red card shaped the game before it really got going. In the 6th minute, VAR reviewed a possible red for Abdoulaye Ndiaye and overturned it, but just two minutes later, in the 8th, the defender ended up seeing a red card anyway. With Parma down to ten so early, Bologna took total control: they finished with 68.6% possession and 33 shots to the home side's 11.

Despite that gap, the score stayed level through the entire first half. Bologna created clear chances, Nicolò Casale's header that grazed the crossbar in the 18th minute, attempts from Federico Bernardeschi and Jens Odgaard, but Parma held firm and went into the break at 0-0, which, given the visitors' dominance, already felt like a small moral victory.

Bologna breaks the deadlock and the game opens up

The resistance lasted seven minutes into the second half. In the 52nd minute, Arthur Theate headed home from close range to make it 0-1, off a cross from Nicolò Cambiaghi on a counterattack. A minute later, VAR reviewed a possible penalty for Bologna and waved it off, but the visitors already had the lead their play deserved.

The second goal came from the penalty spot. In the 67th minute, El Bilal Touré fouled Cambiaghi inside the box. The referee hadn't called it in real time, but VAR stepped in and awarded Bologna a penalty. Riccardo Orsolini made no mistake in the 71st minute to make it 0-2.

The match, which seemed all but decided, took an unexpected turn. Just four minutes after the visitors' second goal, in the 76th minute, VAR came into play once more, this time awarding Parma a penalty for a foul by Martin Vitík on Giovanni Fabbian inside the area. Vincent Sierro converted it in the 80th minute to make it 1-2, the final score, and Parma stayed alive until the end despite playing a man down since the first half hour.

The numbers behind the dominance

The gap also shows up in our own expected goals estimate calculated from the match's shots: Bologna generated 3.88 xG compared to Parma's 1.48 xG, a fairly accurate reflection of what was a one-sided match for almost the entire ninety minutes, aside from the brief window around the home side's penalty.

Our preview published ahead of the match had Bologna as the favorite, with a 44% chance of winning compared to Parma's 23% and a 33% chance of a draw, with expected goals of 1.25 for the visitors and 0.82 for the home side. The final result ended up matching that forecast, even though the path to get there included an early red card and two penalties that were not part of anyone's script.

In the standings, Bologna sits in eighth place with 17 points from 11 matches played, while Parma remains in the relegation zone, in 16th place with 8 points from the same 11 rounds, nine points behind tonight's opponent. For Parma, the result leaves the sense that, even playing a man down for more than eighty minutes, there's still room to compete. For Bologna, the win comes with a warning: creating so much and finishing so little also carries a cost.