Villarreal at Osasuna: La Liga Preview

Shockingly enough, we’ve lost the last two times we’ve played Osasuna. The infuriating part about that is that those points would have us 6th instead of 7th both at the end of last season and also currently. Matches like this are crucial and we just cannot afford to go another match against them without points.

Our Opponents

Osasuna are currently on 32 points and in 11th and while I don’t mean to be disrespectful, they just aren’t all that good. If you’ll recall, we gave up a late winner to Chimy Avila, but this is a team that’s only scored 25 goals all season and two of those were against us. Kike leads their team in goals with 5, and their next highest scorer is David Garcia with 4 goals as a defender. They have not scored in their last two matches, both were losses.

Bizarrely, our prediction model has us losing this contest and you can see the explanation for that following this link.

Villarreal

With about a week and a half to wait before we play Juventus again, there should be no reason to rotate in this match. I expect all our healthy starters to feature, and frankly it’s high time we got Boulaye Dia back in the lineup. Yeremy Pino is coming off a ridiculous 4 goal performance, and it’s worth pointing out that he outperformed his xG by 1.8 goals in that match so don’t be expecting any repeats in this one. We discuss whether he should or shouldn’t be starting our our podcast that you can find here.

Prediction

It may be that I can’t see us losing just one merely because the very thought of doing so is infuriating, but 3-1 win for Villarreal is my prediction.