The Roma head coach, Luciano Spalletti, has no plans to “cage” Cristiano Ronaldo when the Italian club take on Real Madrid in their Champions League last-16 first leg tie on Wednesday evening.

Ronaldo is the Champions League’s all-time record scorer with 88 goals and is top-scorer in this season’s competition with 11 goals. But Spalletti is refusing to overly concern himself with the Portuguese forward before the match in Rome.

“Cristiano Ronaldo is one of the best players in the world, he can always make a difference. However, I’m not going to cage him, I’m not going to order three players to mark him,” said Spalletti.

“I don’t want to say that my players have one third of Ronaldo’s quality. If so, we’d need 33 players to deal with him. Alessandro Florenzi can counteract Ronaldo, but he is not the only one. He has speed and against a player like that, pace is a necessity.”

The Roma defender Kostas Manolas added: “If we feel we’re only one third of Ronaldo, then we’d be better off not playing at all. We’d already be beaten.”

While Real cruised through their group, winning five of their six fixtures and scoring 19 goals in the process, Roma squeezed into the knockout stages with just six points having won only one group match. Despite this, Spalletti, who replaced Rudi García as Roma head coach last month, refuses to accept his team are outsiders to progress to the quarter-finals.

“I don’t think there’s a favourite,” he insisted. “We’ve got a 50% chance of going through. I’m very optimistic, as I’ve seen my players improving all the time. I wouldn’t be amazed if it was my team who went through.”

Real Madrid’s Gareth Bale will missWednesday’s match due to a recurrence of a muscle injury. However, the left-back Marcelo looks to have recovered from a serious shoulder dislocation.

“We must pay attention to the speed of their players,” said the Real forward Karim Benzema of Roma. “They can really harm us.”

The second leg takes place at the Bernabéu on 8 March.