UEFA Champions League: Chelsea – Real Madrid, the big game (9pm live commentary)

Less than a year after a thrilling semi-final duel, champions Chelsea and Real Madrid found themselves in the Champions League for the C1 quarter-final poster on Wednesday (9:00pm).

Thomas Tuchel’s players are going through a complicated season due to the restrictions placed on their owner Roman Abramovich in the wake of the Russian invasion of Ukraine.

Blues activism was heavily framed by the British government in the context of sanctions against several oligarchs famous for being close to the Kremlin.

But the London club, third in its championship, can feed on the memory of 2021 when Real were eliminated by stifling their attackers in the second leg (1-1 in Madrid, Chelsea’s 2-0 victory in London).

Merengues, who are (often) capable of better and (very rarely) like losing 4-0 in El Clasico in mid-March, arrived with confidence: they fly above La Liga by 12 points over Barcelona and have knocked out PSG by Mbappe, Messi and Neymar in the previous round.

Carlo Ancelotti could also count on a captain having the best season of his career in Karim Benzema, who scored a hat-trick against Paris Saint-Germain.

In the second quarter of the program on Wednesday he will face a surprise guest, Villarreal, Bayern Munich, the third most successful club in C1 behind Real and AC Milan.

Opposition to Method and Scale:yellow submarine“The Spaniard, winner of the Europa League (2021), has only one semi-final in C1 to his credit (2006), when Bayern lifted”big ear cut‘, last time in 2020.

But if the flaw is obvious, the Germans will have to be careful, as their boss and former goalkeeper Oliver Kahn said: “No one should think that these two matches will be easy“.