Of all the Champions League quarter-final ties, Real Madrid vs Chelsea is the one with the clearest favourite for the bookies as the reigning champions are expected to reach the semi-finals. To reach the final four, Los Blancos will have to do something they didn’t need to do last season, which is to overcome an away second leg.

Carlo Ancelotti is very much aware of that fact and that this will be a different kind of tie because the Bernabéu leg is first up. He is expected to name an attack-minded line-up on Wednesday night as Real Madrid look to build up a multiple-goal lead to take to London, since they won’t be able to rely on late Bernabéu heroics in this tie.

Given Chelsea’s struggles, Real Madrid are more than capable of achieving this. They are very much a big game team, as evidenced by their 4-0 Clásico win at the Camp Nou last midweek and the fact they won both legs of the Liverpool tie for a 6-2 aggregate score.

Chelsea, meanwhile, haven’t won any of their seven games against other ‘top six’ Premier League sides this season, while they only edged past Borussia Dortmund 2-1 in the previous round.

Perhaps the Stamford Bridge crowd can make Chelsea competitive in the second leg, but for this first leg Real Madrid are the big favourites and are more than capable of securing a multiple-goal advantage to take to England.

Leading the front line for Real Madrid will be Karim Benzema, the French forward who has five goals in four previous meetings against Chelsea, only failing to score on one of those four occasions. It was his hat-trick in the first leg of this round last season that put Real Madrid on track to progress, and he comes into this rematch with two hat-tricks in his last three outings.

Despite a quiet evening against Villarreal on Saturday, Benzema had scored three against Real Valladolid and then repeated another treble against Barcelona in midweek with an intense training regime during the international break seeming to pay off with immediate results. “He’s recovered his optimal condition and when he’s good physically he can make the difference,” Ancelotti said after the first of his hat-tricks.

His season average for shots on target is 1.99 per 90, but that has risen of late and sits at 2.5 per 90 over the last six matches. Taking into account the fact that this run of fixtures includes two ties against LaLiga leaders Barcelona, Liverpool and European-chasing Villarreal and Real Betis, he certainly hasn’t had an easy run of it. With Real Madrid leading the competition for shots so far this season, Chelsea may feel vulnerable, particularly to an old enemy like Benzema.

This is also a tie that pits two teams with very different disciplinary records against each other. While Real Madrid are the only club in this year’s Champions League to average less than one booking per game, with 0.8 yellows per 90 minutes, Chelsea have been collecting the fourth-most yellow cards per game of the 32 teams, with 2.4.

That difference is underscored by the fact that not one Real Madrid player has been booked more than once in this year’s tournament, whereas Chelsea have seven players just one yellow away from missing the second leg of this quarter-final tie.

If Chelsea are to fall behind on the night and grow frustrated, there could be a few desperate challenges and the Bernabéu crowd will call on the young referee François Letexier to show a yellow card for every single one of them.