Elche CF are hosting Valencia CF at the Martinez Valero stadium later today in a clash between the midtable combatants and have a chance to jump several positions if they manage to beat Valencia CF. Valencia CF on the other hand sit at 37 points and even a win wouldn't budge them off of the 9th position at the table. Even reaching 8th place would a challenge and everyone from 7th and higher is too many points ahead of us at this point.
So we know where Valencia CF is going to place this season, its going to be between 8th or 14th place, I'm hoping a victory today would push us towards the upper half of the table, but unfortunately this is our reality as of right now. We have great individual players like Soler, Gaya, Guedes, Paulista who I'm sure will thrive in any other team, but they just aren't leading this team to better results and the rest are all looking to make an individual name for themselves as well to hopefully play at a bigger club.
I know I've been quite negative on the team this season, more so than the few previous ones, but in the past I just blamed Peter Lim and the management, now I also put a decent amount of the blame on the team as well. I think the coach, the players are also to blame for our results. Bad management is ultimately the key issue, but the team has to look past that and do their thing, play and win games.
Looking at Elche CF they are of similar quality to Valencia CF, they play various type of football depending on who their opponents are, they have a rather leaky defense, but not the worst in the league, they are only average in terms of goals scored and they have about 50% overall possession rate. So basically average stats, not good, not terrible either and its going to be interesting to see if Valencia CF is going to be able to bring the game to them or will we still defend and only attack on the counter like most of our matches?
In terms of lineup I expect to see the strongest squad selected, with Guedes and Hugo Duro in attack, Bryal Gil a bit further back behind them, a midfield of 3 with Soler, Racic and Foulquier and a 5 man defense with the wide players acting as wingers when we attack, which is likely to be rarely!
Jose Luis Gaya, Lato, Thierry Correia and Jasper Cillessen are still out, though the last two should be available next week if everything goes well.