Roma captain Daniele De Rossi says they can be proud of their performance after failing to reach the Champions League final.

Roma defeated Liverpool 4-2 on Wednesday night, but lost 7-6 on aggregate.

“I saw the handball clearly, looked around and thought maybe I was seeing things. I asked Edin Dzeko on the corner, he didn't see, so I stayed quiet. I was right there, I saw it immediately, but if it was just me in a stadium of 60,000, it can't have been that easy for the referee to see it either," De Rossi told Mediaset Premium.

“It makes no difference what I think, anyway. I thought at the time Dzeko was clearly offside on the other penalty, yet we saw later that he wasn't.

“Everything weighs on the result over 180 minutes. It's not that we didn't believe, it's that we had a blackout in the first leg. A side like ours that keeps conceding goals and coming back, we don't give up.

“The penalty problem was around the hour mark and there was a long time to go. It might've changed the inertia of the game, perhaps Liverpool would've gone through anyway, but at least we'd have had the chance.

“I thanked my teammates, as I am so proud of them. I told them that to make this Champions League journey even more memorable, we need to be back in it next season.

“We've seen we're not so far behind the others, so we must start thinking that Roma should have a Champions League semi-final once every three years, not once every 30. The club will work to make the team even stronger, the fans have followed us so passionately and something has been recreated with the fans that I haven't seen since I was a child.

“Now we are all as one, we are united with the fans, and we can achieve great things together."