Real Madrid and Lyon are already used to facing each other in Europe’s top competition, having met no less than six times in last few Champions League campaigns, with the Spanish team winning the last 16 phase tie last season.

Los Merengues have experienced some unexpected problems at the start of the season, with slip ups against Levante and Racing Santander seen as major setbacks, but the team quickly returned to the right track.

Apart from the two games, Real have won all other seven this season, scoring at least four goals in five of those.

Entering the game on the back of a four-match winning run, los Blancos have got to be considered favourites in this clash, with 188BET paying 1.25 (1/4) on home win.

Gonzalo Higuain is set to start up front after bagging three hat-tricks in the space of just two weeks and the Argentine is 21.00 (20/1) with William Hill to score what would be his fourth hat-trick in five games.

This means that Karim Benzema will probably start on bench even though he has fully recovered from a hamstring problem, whereas Sami Khedira is expected to replace Lassana Diarra in the starting line-up.

Nuri Sahin, Ricardo Carvalho and Raul Albiol remain sidelined and they will not be in contention for the game against Lyon.

Probable starting line-up (4-2-3-1): Casillas – Arbeloa, Ramos, Pepe, Marcelo – Khedira, Alonso – Di Maria, Ozil, Ronaldo – Higuain.

Olympique Lyon started this season in impressive fashion, taking ten points from first four league games, as well as bringing one point from their first group game in Amsterdam.

Remi Garde’s side have since beaten Bordeaux, Dinamo Zagreb and Nancy at home, but what is really worrying is that les Gones lost both away games, to Caen and PSG.

The team played most of the games this season without two key players, Lisandro Lopez and Yoann Gourcuff, which didn’t prove to be such a big problem, mostly because players like Bastos, Gomis and Gonalons managed to step up the plate.

Lyon obviously have a problem when playing on the travels, but seeing they traditionally do well against Real, the odds of 4.33 (10/3) offered by Stan James on Lyon not to lose do look tempting.

The good news is that Yoann Gourcuff returned into action following the lengthy spell on the sidelines, meaning that he will be on contention for a starting place, but Lisandro Lopez, Jeremy Pied, Yannis Tafer and Clement Grenier remain sidelined.

Probable starting line-up (4-2-3-1): Lloris – Reveillere, Kone, Cris, Cissokho – Gonalons, Kallstrom – Briand, Gourcuff, Bastos – Gomis.