CdF: Marseille vs. Lyon

By: John | January 28th, 2009

January 28,2009
Round of 16 French Cup
Le Stade Gerland
(20:45CET, 19:45GMT)

Today, Marseille come to Le Stade Gerland to take on Lyon in the Round of 16 of Le Coupe de France,with neither team looking for anything less than a victory. Both teams will be fielding their best available squads. Let’s hope this match will be the complete opposite of what we saw in the last meeting between these two sides in regular league play on December 14th, a (0-0) draw which would’ve put an insomniac to sleep. In fact, the only thing I enjoyed about that match was the Lyon boys giving HBA a good welcome-home thrashing, physically knocking any potential effectiveness right out of him, probably causing Gerets to pull him in the second half. Let’s hope Lyon can continue their current three-game scoring streak that began with Lorient and continued this weekend(six goals vs. division five team Concarneau)- hey, I’ll take it!- in which we’ve seen scoring by players with names other than Karim; an occurence of monumental importance in my opinion.

History: In Overall cup play, Marseille have won the cup (10) times while Lyon have hoisted the trophy (4) times. In the meetings between the two teams in cup play, Marseille have won the last (5) meetings between the two teams, with the last two matches being very closely constensted with a (1-2) loss at Gerland in ‘06 and again a (2-1) loss at the Velodrome in ‘07.

Le groupe Lyonnais:
Lloris, Vercoutre – Grosso, Boumsong, Cris, Faure – Toulalan, Makoun, Källström, Fabio Santos – Pjanic, Juninho, Delgado, Keita, Mounier – Tafer, Piquionne, Benzema.

Injuries: The usuals: Clerc, Reveillere, Mensah, Bodmer, and Gouvou are out. Ederson can be added to the list now, at least for this match, as he has reaggrevated that ankle injury he sustained in the CL I believe it was, and I think he’s still getting over that flu he’s been suffering from for the past week or so.

Lineup: The best are out on the pitch. I’ll go with this.

Lloris
F.Santos-Cris-Boumsong-Grosso
Juninho-Toulalan
Keita-Delgado-Kallstrom
Benzema

I think that Gassama has been sent to the CFAs- no word on any injury- and Fabio Santos gets to start at RB. I think Makoun might be seeing more bench time, as Puel has seen that Kallstrom’s creativity has given the squad some needed offensive push. I still don’t like Delgado at the 10, he needs to be on the wings were he shinned against Grenoble(didn’t see Concarneau). So we’ll see if Puel’s starting 11 looks anything like this.