UEFA Champions League: AS Monaco vs Juventus preview

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April 21st, 2015
Back UEFA Champions League: AS Monaco vs Juventus preview

Italian champions Juventus travel to AS Monaco on Wednesday with a decent advantage in the bag from the first leg of their Champions League quarter-final tie. Last week the Serie A leaders defeated the French side 1-0 thanks to a penalty kick goal from Arturo Vidal. The two sides have already met over two legs in the semi-finals of the competition in 1998, Juventus prevailed that time despite losing 3-2 in France.

Monaco are the surprise of this season's Champions League, they haven't been in the competition in nine years and they were not expected to reach the last eight. They have pulled off an even bigger surprise in 2004 when they have reached the final. However, it wasn't a dominant campaign from Monaco. They have been rather fortunate to end up in a group with Benfica as top seeds but they did produce a strong performance in the first leg to knock out Arsenal in the previous round. Monaco will be without their two best central midfielders, Geoffrey Kondogbia and Jeremy Toulalan.

Juventus have not reached the Champions League semi-finals since 2003, that time they reached the final but were defeated by AC Milan. They don't have to worry about the domestic league title at this point as they hold a comfortable lead over their rivals with seven games left in the season. They have won eight of their last nine matches in all competitions, the only setback was a shocking defeat at bottom-of-the-table side Parma. Juve will be without some important players though, Paul Pogba, Kwadwo Asamoah, Romulo and Martin Caceres are all out of contention.

Probable line-ups:

Monaco: Subasic - Toure, Abdennour, Wallace, Kurzawa - Fabinho, Moutinho, Silva - Ferreira Carrasco, Matheus Carvalho - Berbatov

Juventus: Buffon - Lichtsteiner, Bonucci, Chiellini, Evra - Pereya, Pirlo, Marchisio - Vidal - Tevez, Morata

My prediction: Juventus to win 2-1.

Here are the odds for the match at Bet365:

Monaco win - 3.40 Draw - 3.25 Juventus win - 2.38

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