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Melbourne Victory will host their first ever Round of 16 Asian Champions League match tonight, as they do battle with Group E winners Jeonbuk Hyundai Motors FC in the first leg of the series. Join The Roar from 7:45pm (AEST) for all the live highlights and action.
Kevin Muscat’s Melbourne side have never dived this far into the ACL before, being one of five teams in this year’s tournament to make their second round debuts.
The Victory were able to sneak past the Suwon Bluewings in the Group G standings, taking second spot with a superior head to head record despite sharing the same points and even a lesser goal difference than the South Korean side.
Melbourne’s journey isn’t about to get any easier though, tackling a Jeonbuk outfit that boasts current double defending K-League Champions status (winning four of the last seven titles), as well as being a former Asian Champions League winner in 2006.
Despite a fairly inconsistent ACL campaign so far (as inconsistent as topping your pool can be), Jeonbuk have had a ripper start to their 2016 domestic K-League season, sitting pretty in second place as the only undefeated team in the competition.
Contrastingly, the Victory only just scraped through to the A-League finals this year in sixth place, but were dumped out in the first round of elimination finals.
Just to add to the pain, they were then beaten fairly convincingly, 3-1, just two days later in the Champions League to nearly derail their whole campaign.
Although Melbourne will be up against a side favoured to win the whole thing (since Guangzhou Evergrande were bundled out), they can take comfort in their home ground, AAMI Park.
The Melbourne Rectangular Stadium, as it’s known throughout the Champions League, has accounted for seven of the Victory’s nine points through the group stages, scooping up two wins and a draw in front of the home faithful.
“We’ve put in some very good football, especially here at home we’ve had a very good attacking intent and scored some goals here at home so we look forward to tomorrow night against a good team,” said coach Muscat.
Prediction
Neither side has really been a standout, with Jeonbuk in particular not as dominant as expected coming into the tournament, but if they were to fire up, now would be a good time.
Jeonbuk will be a very tough ask for the Victory and they should pick up the important away win, but the home ground advantage could be cause for an upset if Muscat can really get his men firing.
Jeonbuk to win 2-0, or by 2 goals one way or another.
Can Melbourne extend their debut run in the Champions League finals? Or will Jeonbuk run riot over the home side on their way towards a possible second title? Catch all the live ACL action on The Roar from 7:45pm (AEST).
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