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Reuters: The goals continued to flow for Manchester United’s Zlatan Ibrahimovic and AS Roma’s Edin Dzeko as they bagged hat-tricks to help their teams take commanding leads in the first legs of their Europa League last 32 ties on Thursday.
United swept aside St Etienne 3-0 at Old Trafford and Roma made light work of last season’s semi-finalists Villarreal with a 4-0 win in Spain, leaving their sides with little work to do in next week’s return encounters.
St Etienne will be totally sick of the sight of Ibrahimovic as the Swede took his tally against the Ligue 1 side to 17 goals in 14 games, having terrorised Les Verts during his four years at Paris St Germain.
“Every time I’ve played against St Etienne, with hard work there has been a couple of goals. I’ve scored a couple of goals tonight and hopefully I can do the same next week,” Ibrahimovic told BT Sport.
He opened the scoring with a deflected free kick in the first half and added two more – a tap-in and a late penalty – after the break as United quelled the visitors’ early enthusiasm.
The match was billed as a battle of the Pogba brothers with younger sibling Paul facing St Etienne’s Florentin for the first time in a competitive encounter. It was the 35-year-old Ibrahimovic who stole the show, however, grabbing his first United hat-trick and taking his tally in a remarkable maiden season at Old Trafford to 23.
Dzeko is in a similarly rich vein of form at Roma, who swatted aside a Villarreal team who are in freefall having now won just one of their last 10 games in all competitions.
Emerson Palmieri gave Roma the lead after 32 minutes and then Dzeko took over after the break, netting for the seventh straight game to double the lead in the 65th minute before adding two more goals to take his tally for the campaign to 28.
Reuters: Mauricio Pochettino is eager to bring a swift end to Tottenham Hotspur’s “bad period” when they travel to second-tier side Fulham in the FA Cup on Sunday as the Argentine rejected the notion his side are in the midst of a crisis.
Tottenham followed up a poor performance in Saturday’s Premier League defeat at Liverpool with a blunt display in Thursday’s 1-0 Europa League round-of-32 first-leg loss at Belgian side Gent.
“That is the reality. It sometimes happens. Good and bad things happen. We’ve started now a bad period. I hope, on Sunday, we break that negative run,” Pochettino told British media.
“It’s not about confidence... We were wrong with our judgment if we think, because of Liverpool, it’s only about confidence.”
Tottenham’s woes were further compounded on Thursday when attacking spearhead Harry Kane sustained a knock to his knee that will likely force him to miss the match at Craven Cottage. Pochettino suggested he would rotate his squad for the fifth-round tie against Fulham.
“I think we need to assess some players. Harry Kane got a knock on his knee, different players too. We need to refresh the team and we’ll do that,” the Argentine manager added.
“We’ll see, but we’ll put out a team with aims to win and be ready again to compete.”
