In the past year, Moscow has to accept only one Champions League match. On Tuesday, Lokomotiv will host German Bayer at the Russian Railways Arena as part of the fifth round of the group stage. At the same time, the railwaymen will try to prevent the meeting from becoming the last for them in the current Champions League season. The Russian team still has chances for this, but the conditions will be rather harsh.
To begin with, Yury Syomin’s wards need to win two victories in the remaining matches - if they manage to beat Bayer, then there will be no time to rest on their laurels - there will still be an away game with Atletico ahead. True, the fight for a ticket to the 1/8 finals will really take place only if the team Diego Simeone on Tuesday will not be able to beat Juventus.
If one of the conditions is not met, then Lokomotiv will only have to fight for the Europa League. The victory over the Leverkusenians will provide the railwaymen with an European Cup spring, albeit in a tournament of a lower rank, and a loss will almost certainly send Semin’s team to fourth place in Group D.
For the decisive match in the Champions League, Lokomotiv finally knew the forgotten taste of victory. While the red-green tried unsuccessfully to beat Juventus, they did not go for a long time in their own championship. A win-win series of three RPL matches was interrupted only in Saransk, where Muscovites barely beat Tambov 3–2 last weekend.
Lokomotiv played that meeting with the only striker in the squad - Antonio Eder. Now the team will not have to suffer so much - Rifat Zhemaletdinov is in the ranks and will be able to keep the Portuguese company together with the rest of the group of football players in the person of Grzegorz Krihovyak and Alexei Miranchuk responsible for organizing the attack and bringing it to mind.
The meeting with Bayer will be another test for the validity of rumors about the transfer of the Russian midfielder to Juventus. Media, including foreign ones, vyingly say that the Italian grand is ready to sign Miranchuk, who allegedly gave his consent to the transition. The player himself at a press conference before the match preferred not to raise this topic, only noting that he was completely ready for the game, and a busy schedule of games was not a problem for him.
The railroad workers do not do without problems with the composition. The most recent loss was Vedran Chorluka, who asked for a substitute during the break of the match of the national championship. The Croatian defender was injured, but how serious his injury is, remains unknown. Semin did not expand on this topic in more detail before the match with Bayer, only noting that he would decide on the composition at the last training session, and before that he was not very interested in talking about the health of his charges.
If Chorluka still has a chance to enter the field, and then the composition of Lokomotiv can be considered combat-ready, then Bayer has irreparable losses. In the Bundesliga’s last match with Freiburg, the Leverkusnets lost Mitchell-Elia Weiser’s main right-back - a gap in the ankle ligament left him football until the end of the year.
Also, against the “Locomotive” for the second time midfielders Kai Haverts and Nadim Amiri will not play - one is in the infirmary, and the other is serving a suspension. There are still questions about the state of Julian Baumgartlinger - an experienced opornik had been experiencing muscle pain recently, but flew to Moscow with the team.
For Bayer head coach Peter Bosch, a match with Lokomotiv will not only be an opportunity to save the champions campaign, but it will also have a personal meaning. He still has not been able to beat the Russian teams, although there were many opportunities for this.
Together with Ajax, he lost in the Champions League qualification to Rostov, having once been defeated with a score of 1: 4, and with the Leverkusenians he already unsuccessfully tried to pass Krasnodar in the Europa League. With Lokomotiv, the unsuccessful series of the Dutch specialist continued - in the first match in his field, Bayer lost by a score of 1: 2, failing to score (the ball went into the goal of Marinato Guillerme from the foot of Benedict Hövedes).
Achieving the first victory over the Russian club Bosch and his wards will be difficult, at least due to severe weather. All Tuesday, the temperature in Moscow will not rise above zero, and will continue to fall in the evening. However, defender Jonathan Taa does not see a problem in this.
“We know what the weather will be like. We usually don’t play in such conditions, but we won’t be able to do anything. We will play in the weather that is. We’ll move more, so we’ll definitely not freeze, ”he said at a press conference.