Earlier this season, Stade Reims was surprisingly 1-0 too strong for Olympique Lyonnais but is that a second time too?
Olympique Lyonnais:
Olympique Lyonnais was still active on four fronts at the beginning of this year, but after just a week, Bruno Génésio’s team was already eliminated in the Coupe de le Ligue. The first game of the season in the 1 / 32th-finals of the Coupe de France was still winning against a fifth division, but last Tuesday was lost with 2-1 against RC Strasbourg in the quarterfinals of the Coupe de la Ligue. A missed penalty from captain Nabil Fekir in the first half with a 1-0 deficit turned out to be fatal, so the focus for the rest of the season could be on the league, Champions League and Coupe de France.
Olympique Lyonnais is the most offensive team this season in the Ligue 1 on paper with an average of no less than seventeen shots per game, six of them on goal. With thirty goals this season in the competition, the conversion rate is less than ten per cent extremely low for Génésio’s team, which scored an average score of 0.6 goals per game last season. World champion Nabil Fekir, who could not break pots at the start of this season, is back on the road again, so it is plausible that OL will start to rise in the second half of the season. Provided Fekir is still practicing penalties.
Stade Reims:
At home Stade Reims managed to kick off the year 2019 with a 2-0 victory over second division RC Lens in the 1 / 32th-finals of the Coupe de France. Already in the first half, the final score was reached, after which the team of David Guion spared in the second half to start as well on the second half of the season as on the first. One of the highlights of the first half of the season, which ended the PhD candidate in a neatly shared seventh place with 26 points and a goal difference of -3 (15-18), was a 1-0 win in his own stadium against Olympique Lyonnais, something the team will like to repeat this weekend.
The star of Stade de Reims this season is Edouard Mendy. The French goalkeeper knew this season in nine of nineteen games to keep his goal clean and only two teams this season took less of a counterweight than Stade Reims. Of all goalkeepers this season at least five games have come into play, only Walter Benitez of Olympique Nice and Alphonse Areola and Gianluigi Buffon of Paris Saint-Germain perform this season so far better in terms of adversities.
PREDICTION: Lyon to win @ 1.43
