It is no secret that Chelsea are struggling to score goals, but the main positive for Chelsea has been how strong they have been defensively. Under 2.5 goals would have been a winner for all of Chelsea’s last 8 matches and 11 of their 13 matches since the World Cup break. Dortmund are higher scores however, as they showed against Manchester City they can sit back and play defensive football away from home against possession hungry teams. As they are defending a lead here I expect the same style of play here.

Dortmund will sit back, make themselves hard to break down and then see if they can nick a goal on the counter. Chelsea have struggled to break teams down and against a team that managed to stop Manchester City scoring in one of their matches, Chelsea will likely struggle again here. The match is set up to be low scoring again and while under 2.5 goals can be a nervy selection, it looks to be a good value selection here.

Chelsea’s fluid system under Graham Potter makes life difficult for opposition midfielders, players drop into pockets of space to pick the ball up meaning they often have room to run at players and are therefore brought down a lot. Dortmund will play on the back foot, looking to defend their aggregate lead and maybe hit Chelsea on the counter. This means that we can expect a game with a lot of Chelsea possession and Dortmund players defending for their lives.

In the last match between the two, Emre Can committed 4 fouls as he struggled to cope with Chelsea’s fluid system. Can has averaged 1.44 fouls per 90 so far this season and usually commits a lot of fouls against high quality opposition. He has committed at least 2 fouls this season in matches against Leverkusen, Freiburg, Monchengladbach, Manchester City and Bayern Munich. He looks good value to commit 2 or more fouls in this match and with Dortmund defending a lead I expect him to commit at least 2 here.

Chelsea have seen a huge number of corners under Potter this season, across the whole season they have averaged 5.52 corners per match. Recently these numbers are higher, they have had at least 5 corners in 8 of their last 9 matches, only failing to do so away against Tottenham.

It has been 5 matches since they failed to have 5 corners at home and that was against Manchester City and in the first leg they had 10 corners away at Dortmund. Chelsea need to push forward and get at least 1 goal here if they are to have any hopes of getting through to the next round of the Champions League so I see them winning even more corners than normal and they could easily surpass 4.5 corners here.