Stats preview card component - using HTML & CSS

I have few question would really appreciate answers:

1. Regarding the Image and Overlay/background color - I was trying to do it by using background color to img_component & img itself but it was not working, finally i did it by using an empty div inside the component after img.(Is this a correct way?)
2. As I have used div for background i cannot seem to be able to get rid of the spacing at the very end of image and the background color as you can see in the page. I tried using display:block and vertical-align:center but they are not working.