We continue to fly through the Chinese Super League campaign as teams across the top tier attempt to push towards their ultimate goal - whether it be the title, survival or somewhere in between. Today, we’ll be taking a look at an important clash between Dalian Aerbin and Shanghai Shenhua.
Dalian Form GuideThey’ve only won one game all season and they are stuck at the bottom of the table, and yet, there’s still hope that they could survive - probably as a result of their recent form, combined with the ‘quality’ of the teams around them. Dalian have struggled to find the kind of consistent quality within their squad that they sorely need, but at the very least, there’s more optimism than there was a few months back.
Dalian’s nice run of being draw specialists continued into July as they picked up a point against Qingdao, Shanghai, Nantong and Changchun. Unfortunately, it came crumbling down in a 4-1 defeat to Chengdu, before another loss to Meizhou a week later.
Shenhua Form GuideAs arguably one of the most notable names in Chinese football, Shanghai Shenhua often has a target on its back. It doesn’t help that they had a poor campaign last time out but this time around, they’re in the running for a shot at the title. They made a strong start to the season and with just four league losses to their name, there’s still a lot of optimism flying around the city, and there likely will be for months to come.
Inconsistency has been defining Shenhua for a while and based on July, it’s not hard to see why. They lost to Tianjin, before a 1-0 win over Hangzhou. They lost 3-0 to Shandong before beating Meizhou, earned a point away at Changchun, and then got battered 5-0 by Shanghai.
Match PredictionShenhua are the clear favourites to win this game and, to be blunt, that’s exactly what we expect them to do. With that being said, we can’t picture them blowing Dalian out of the water by any stretch of the imagination. Because of that, we’re going to favour under 2.5 goals scored.
