Roma blanks Torino behind braces from Malen and Pisilli

Torino came up empty again at the Olimpico Grande Torino. Roma took all three points with a 0-2 result decided right at the end of each half: Donyell Malen opened the scoring in the 39th minute and Niccolo Pisilli sealed it in the 92nd, as the match was winding down. With the win, Roma moves to 12 points in Serie A without a loss or a draw through four matches, while Torino stays put on just 3 points.

The first half featured more back and forth than the scoreline suggests. Torino saw plenty of the ball, in fact they finished with more overall possession than their rivals, and created chances through Eray Comert, Nikola Vlasic and Rolando Mandragora, all of whom tested the goal from distance without success. But Roma was more clinical: Bryan Cristante and Matias Soule went close with shots that drifted just wide, and Donyell Malen first missed a header, then had a left-footed shot blocked, before making no mistake on the second of two chances he had in the same minute. In the 39th minute, he finished with his right foot from close range into the middle of the goal to make it 0-1 at the break.

In the second half, Torino tried to respond with substitutions: Alessio Cacciamani and Daniel Braganca came on to start the half, and Emirhan Ilkhan, Ricardo Rodriguez and Duvan Zapata followed later. There were flashes, like Giovanni Simeone's shot that whizzed just past the far post, or Gianluca Mancini's header that was saved, but Roma held the lead without any real scares until stoppage time. There, in the 92nd minute, with four minutes of added time signaled by referee Fabio Maresca, Niccolo Pisilli finished with his right foot from inside the box, low and just inside the left post, to make it 0-2, the final score.

The numbers behind the road dominance

Even though Torino had a bit more of the ball, Roma was clearly superior in both boxes: they nearly doubled the shot count and dominated set pieces from the flanks for most of the night.

The foul count tells its own story: Roma committed 20 to Torino's 7, a sign of how much chasing they had to do at times despite controlling the result. As for the expected goals calculated after the fact from the shots taken, Roma generated 2.254 to Torino's 1.343, a gap that backs up the scoreline even though the match was closer than the final result suggests.

Our preview had given Roma a 58% chance of winning, against 17% for Torino and 25% for a draw, with expected goals of 1.88 for Roma and 0.94 for Torino. The result ended up matching that read: Roma won and even topped the average number of goals we projected, while Torino failed to score.

What the table shows

In the Serie A standings, Roma leads with 12 points from 4 matches played, all wins. Torino, at the other end, sits on 3 points after one win and three losses, 9 points behind their opponent from this round. With only four rounds in the books, the table still says little about the real level of several teams, but Roma's perfect start and Torino's struggles are already starting to create some distance.