Leo Román's Four Saves Earn Deportivo a Point as Casadó Returns at Espanyol

A goalless draw needs a reason to be remembered, and RCDE Stadium produced two of them on Saturday night. The first stood in Deportivo's goal: Leo Román made four saves to deliver his side's first clean sheet of the entire season, a 0–0 earned the hard way against an Espanyol team that held 63.8 percent of the ball and kept coming. The second arrived in the 72nd minute, when Marc Casadó — on loan from Barcelona, sidelined by a fractured collarbone — came off the bench to a reception that told you the home crowd knew exactly whose comeback they were watching.

Start with the siege that never landed. Espanyol took 11 shots to Deportivo's five, put four on target to Deportivo's one, and won the corner count nine to five in front of 31,030. Roberto Fernández carried the fight up front, captain Leandro Cabrera battled through a shirt-pulling war in the middle of it, and the home side's pressure ran in waves across both halves. What it never produced was the finish. Every Espanyol attack that reached the decisive moment found the same answer: Román, positioned, composed, and equal to all four shots that asked a real question of him.

A first clean sheet in November is a strange statistic for a top-flight defence — it means every previous match this season ended with Deportivo picking the ball out of their own net — and it explains the way the visitors defended this one: compact, patient, content to let Espanyol have the harmless thirds of the pitch and fight for the dangerous one. Eight yellow cards, four per side and no reds, mark how contested the middle of the field became; Deportivo's one save asked of the home goalkeeper is the measure of how rarely the visitors truly threatened at the other end.

And then there was the moment the match will actually be filed under. Casadó's loan from Barcelona was supposed to be a season of minutes and development; instead it became a season of rehabilitation, a fractured collarbone costing him the autumn. His introduction on 72 minutes — into a goalless game, away from home, at the ground of his parent club's city rivals — was brave squad management and better theatre. He played the closing stretch, Deportivo saw out the point, and when the final whistle went it was Casadó who stayed out applauding the supporters, a Barcelona loanee being cheered at RCDE Stadium for a Deportivo clean sheet. Football writes those scenes itself sometimes.

The corners deserve their own sentence in the inquest. Nine corners is a mountain of set-piece opportunity for a home side chasing a game, and Espanyol converted none of them — the deliveries came, the bodies went up, and Deportivo's defence won the moments that mattered in its own box. Add the four shots on target that Román handled and the pattern completes itself: Espanyol did almost everything a dominant home performance requires, in every zone of the pitch except the one where goals live.

So the points split along the night's two storylines. Espanyol will file this under frustration — the possession, the corners, the territorial dominance, and nothing to show for it. Deportivo will file it under foundations: a first clean sheet, a point away from home, and their returning midfielder fit again. Some 0–0s are empty. This one sent both teams home with something true to say about themselves. Follow every kick in the Game Center.