The Belgian national league reaches its second round and at this point in the competition, KV mechelen and St. Liege meet to try to get closer to the first place.
The Belgian championship has 16 teams. The top 6 advance to the title match, the teams that place between 7th and 12th place qualify for the conference league group, and the last 4 placed qualify for the relegation group.
KV Mechelen’s objective is certainly to escape the relegation group and today, they appear in 11th place with 19 points, having only 2 ahead of Westerlo, who opens the relegation group.
That’s why each round at this point in the competition is important, and the phase the team is going through is very bad.
In 18 games they only won 5 times, with 4 draws and 9 defeats, with 16 goals scored and 22 conceded.
They come in a sequence of 3 matches without positive results, losing at home to St. Truiden 2-0, and away to Royale Union SG, 1-0.
Not even the local factor has been a great weapon in its favor. Under these conditions, the team only has the 12th campaign in the league, with 3 wins, 4 defeats and 2 draws.
St. Liege seems a little higher up on the leaderboard, but they haven’t been able to have a regular campaign either.
It occupies ninth place with 22 points and has 8 less than sixth place. Therefore, advancing to the title group is very difficult.
Their campaign has 5 wins, 7 draws and 6 defeats, with 18 goals scored and 25 conceded.
Like his opponent this Wednesday, they also appear in a negative moment, with 3 rounds without victories.
They lost to Club Brugge away from home 2-0, and then drew 2 matches. In the first, playing away from home against Anderlecht, they finished 2-2 and in the last match at home, they drew 0-0 with Charleroi.
Now they return to play as a visitor and in these conditions they also have a very weak campaign.
They haven’t won 4 games away from home, having lost 3 in this period. They won only 2 times in 9 games, in addition to 2 draws and 5 defeats.
This season the teams have already faced each other on one occasion, which was precisely the clash in the first round of the competition.
The match ended in a 1-1 draw, in a game where St Liege at home had a slight superiority in ball possession, but was surpassed in offensive actions.
Conclusion:
Both teams have been having some difficulty and although they scored goals in the direct confrontation, I believe that the tendency is once again to be a game with an economical score.
Anticipating this balance, bookmakers place very high odds for both teams and my bet will be on the line of fewer goals, which already happened in the first round of the competition.