Daniele De Rossi Channels Idols Gerrard and Keane in Quest to Oust Liverpool

When Roma needed a captain's performance from Daniele De Rossi, he knew exactly what was required.

De Rossi venerates Roy Keane and Steven Gerrard—he has described both players as his "idols"—and his performance in Roma's sensational 3-0 second-leg Champions League quarter-final comeback against Barcelona carried strong echoes of Keane and Gerrard's signature displays in the competition.

The battle-hardened De Rossi, who wears the No. 16 shirt partly in tribute to Keane, has built his reputation upon blood-and-thunder performances in the midfield engine room, but just like Keane against Juventus in 1999 and Gerrard against AC Milan in 2005, in Roma's hour of need, he led from the front.

It was his lofted pass from the centre circle that released Edin Dzeko to steam into the box and spark the second-leg fightback against Barcelona. It was he who rattled home the penalty, after Dzeko had been felled by Gerard Pique, that left Roma needing one goal to qualify. And when Kostas Manolas scored the header that sent the Stadio Olimpico into raptures, De Rossi was there again—following in, leading the charge, poised to snap up the rebound should Marc-Andre ter Stegen have had the nerve to keep the ball out.

Roma's 3-0 win, which enabled them to qualify on away goals having lost the first leg 4-1 at the Camp Nou, kept alive De Rossi's hopes of emulating Gerrard by captaining his hometown club to victory in a Champions League final. To do that, of course, he must first extinguish the hopes of the club that Gerrard carried to glory. Roma play Liverpool at Anfield on Tuesday in the first leg of their semi-final.

It would be unusual for a locally born one-club man with close to 600 appearances in his team's colours not to be an undisputed figurehead, but for the first 16 seasons of his Roma career, De Rossi had to share the limelight with the immortal Francesco Totti. Long known as Roma's "capitan futuro" (future captain), De Rossi finally became the capitan proper when Totti retired at the end of last season.

Though Totti's departure left a huge emotional void in the Roma squad, on the captaincy front the transition has been painless. De Rossi was already captain in all but name and had stood in for Totti with increasing regularity as the great man's powers waned. As Antonio Rudiger, the former Roma defender, said in an interview with l'Ultimo Uomo (link in Italian) last year, if you have an issue at the club, you go to De Rossi. "If you ask him anything, he is the person who knows more than anyone," Rudiger said.

But if becoming club captain has been straightforward, De Rossi's first season with the armband has been anything but. The 34-year-old may now stand just a few steps from the European summit, but the journey that has taken him to this point has been scarred by sporting heartbreak and personal tragedy.

Three days after Totti's retirement in May 2017, De Rossi signed a new two-year contract that is reported to have made him the best-paid player in Serie A, according to BBC Sport.

"I thought, after Francesco, I could not leave the club as well," he explained. "It would have been too big a blow."

Despite having reaffirmed his commitment to Roma, for whom he made his first-team debut in October 2001, De Rossi was strongly linked with a move to Inter Milan last summer, and once the season was under way, he confessed that he had given serious thought to leaving the club. "For a while, it was my plan to leave," he told Corriere dello Sport in September (via MailOnline).

De Rossi has made no secret of his desire to play football in the United States one day and said that if "a big European or American club" had come in for him, he would have left. His affection for Roma won out in the end, but his desire to experience a different football culture remains unsated.

"I do feel the strong desire to have an experience elsewhere," he said. "Frankly, 16 years at Roma is like 32 elsewhere, because they really weigh on you. I am physically having the best seasons of my career, but the pressure is often excessive."

November brought with it the bitter disappointment of Italy's failure to qualify for the World Cup, a sporting calamity in which De Rossi inadvertently played a starring role.

He got the fatal touch on the goal that took Sweden to the World Cup at Italy's expense, attempting to block a 61st-minute shot by Jakob Johansson in the first leg of the qualifying play-off in Solna and succeeding only in deflecting the ball past a wrong-footed Gianluigi Buffon.

He did not make it off the bench in the second leg, a 0-0 draw at the San Siro that sealed Italy's fate, but his angry reaction when asked to warm up by a member of Gian Piero Ventura's coaching staff—and his insistence that Lorenzo Insigne should be warming up instead—became a symbol of the Azzurri's downfall.

De Rossi, Buffon and Andrea Barzagli retired from international football immediately afterwards (along with Giorgio Chiellini), thereby cutting the last threads that tied the present-day Italy team to the side that triumphed at the 2006 World Cup.

Two weeks later De Rossi conceded a penalty for blatantly slapping Gianluca Lapadula in the face during a 1-1 draw at Genoa and was sent off. Lapadula scored the penalty, which was awarded following a consultation between the referee and the video assistant referee, and De Rossi received a two-game ban.

The death of Davide Astori, the Fiorentina centre-back, last month hit De Rossi particularly hard. The pair became close friends during Astori's season on loan at Roma in 2014-15 and also played together at international level.

De Rossi was doubtful for Roma's first game after Astori's death, a Friday night league fixture against Torino at the Stadio Olimpico, due to an ankle injury, but he told coach Eusebio Di Francesco that he wanted to play. There were tears in his eyes during the moment of reflection that preceded the match. He volleyed in the second goal in Roma's 3-0 win, but his celebration was subdued. It was his first goal in 10 months.

The quarter-final meeting with Barcelona in the Champions League appeared destined to carry more sporting disappointment for De Rossi, whose freak own goal in the first leg—hammered past goalkeeper Alisson as he sought to prevent Lionel Messi latching on to a pass from Andres Iniesta—set Roma en route to a 4-1 defeat.

His exemplary display in the return leg was a form of atonement, both for the first-leg own goal and for his dismissal during Roma's loss to Porto in last season's Champions League play-off round. De Rossi was shown a straight red card for raking his studs down Maxi Pereira's right shin in the first half of the second leg, and with Emerson Palmieri also sent off early in the second half, Roma collapsed to a 4-0 aggregate loss.

De Rossi has always been prone to spasms of brutality—witness his appalling elbow on Brian McBride at the 2006 World Cup—and his slap on Lapadula showed that he is still to eradicate it from his game, but his second-leg performance against Barcelona demonstrated what an inspirational figure he can be.

He will relish his first match at Anfield, and not only because it was Gerrard's old stomping ground. He has previously spoken of his admiration for England's "beautiful stadiums" in an interview with Undici (h/t FourFourTwo). De Rossi is also an avowed Anglophile, citing Oasis, Coldplay and Mumford and Sons among his favourite bands, and listed Glasgow as one of his three favourite cities in a 2016 interview with the official Roma website.

The grandeur of the setting will not be lost on him. If he can rise to the occasion as he did against Barcelona, they will have to start preparing a place alongside Keane and Gerrard in the pantheon of the Champions League's greatest captains.