Chelsea vs Dynamo Kyiv 08/03/19

8 March 2019

Chelsea and Dynamo Kyiv prepare to face-off against each other at Stamford Bridge for the first leg of their Europa League last-16 tie.

The hosts go into this meeting off the back of two successive PL victories in which they’ve scored four goals while conceding just one. However, the Blues are still trying to find a way out of a nasty-looking crisis that has seen them lose four of their previous nine clashes across all competitions (W5, D4). The Pensioners seem to have a tendency of winning and losing to nil, considering five of their last seven home triumphs have seen the beating their rivals without allowing them to score while they’ve failed to find the back of the net in all three of their home defeats this season. But, Maurizio Sarri’s men have been ruthless in London in the Europa League so far, securing all four victories with a +10 goal difference (S11, C1).

After dumping Olympiacos out of the competition, the visitors hope to reach the Europa League quarter-finals for the first time since the 2014-15 campaign. The Ukrainian heavyweights are unbeaten in all four of their competitive meetings in 2019 (W3, D1), having scored 2+ match goals on three occasions while keeping a clean sheet twice in the process. Another promising fact for Alyaksandr Khatskevich is that his players won three of their last four road trips across all competitions (W3, D1), with three of those clashes producing over 2.5 goals. Dynamo’s main problem could be that they’ve failed to keep a clean sheet in six of last eight away contests, allowing over 1.5 goals per match three times along the way.