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AS Roma captain Lorenzo Pellegrini said that Bodo/Glimt coach Kjetil Knutsen attacked a member of his club’s staff after the Italian side’s 2-1 Europa Conference League defeat in Norway on Thursday.
After the quarterfinal first-leg defeat, on the ground where Roma suffered an humiliating 6-1 loss in the group stages back in October, the teams clashed on the touchline following the final whistle.
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“We came here with the utmost respect, respecting fair play,” Pellegrini told Sky Sport Italia. “They behaved badly with us.
“Even their coach attacked our goalkeeper coach Nuno Santos. I think this is an insult to the competition. I think it is an insult also to Rome and to the Romans.
“I am honestly still shaken by what I just saw, it’s absolutely shameful. Now we want to send Bodo home, also because of what happened off the field.”
Local police operations leader Kai Eriksen told Norwegian newspaper VG that “there were allegations of first a verbal, then a physical incident between the two coaching teams in the player tunnel.”
He added that none of the parties wanted to press charges. Bodo declined to comment when approached by Reuters, while the European football governing body UEFA said that it will wait on reports from the game and then the disciplinary body will assess if any action is to be taken.
Roma coach Jose Mourinho was also unhappy with the artificial pitch in Norway, blaming the synthetic surface for defender Gianluca Mancini‘s injury that forced him to be withdrawn on Thursday.
“It’s a pity that we had an important injury, which I call the injuries of the plastic pitches,” Mourinho told BT Sport.
“It’s out of our control. People decided that European competitions can be played on plastic pitches, so we have to play.”
The teams meet again next week in the second leg in the Italian capital.