Roma vs Udinese

Stadio Olimpico is the venue as Roma and Udinese go head-to-head in a potentially low-scoring Serie A affair. Each of their last seven league H2Hs has seen one side fail to score, with 71.43% of those clashes featuring under 2.5 total goals.

Roma blew a 1-0 half-time lead at the soaked Bentegodi to lose 3-2 to Hellas Verona last time out as Jose Mourinho’s three-game winning Serie A start in the dugout came to a halt. Seeking a way back to winning ways here, the ‘Giallorossi’ can fall back on an impressive home form, having won their last five Serie A fixtures at the Olimpico in a row. They could now post six straight league wins at home for the first time since 2017, and Udinese’s visit to the capital seems like a prime opportunity to achieve that feat. Roma have outplayed the Udine visitors in their previous two top-flight H2Hs on home turf by an aggregate score of 4-0, last keeping three straight clean sheets in such match-ups in 1986.

Meanwhile, despite falling to a dreadful 4-0 home defeat to Napoli last time out, the visitors have already shown signs of improvement this term following a disastrous 2020/21 campaign. That loss brought Udinese’s three-game unbeaten start to the 2021/22 Serie A season to an end (W2, D1), marking the first top-flight match in which they failed to find the net this term. Since a 1-1 draw with Genoa in late March, none of Udinese’s subsequent six Serie A travels have ended level (W3, L3), with five of those games seeing over 2.5 goals and both teams on the scoresheet, excluding the last one (1-0 win at Spezia). Topically, the last time Udinese drew a Serie A meeting with Roma was in March 2009, with two triumphs and ten defeats for them since.