Robert Sykes
Dailysports's expert
On January 2, Stade de la Route de Lorient (Rennes) will host the match of the 17th round of French Ligue 1, in which Rennes will compete with Nice. The battle will start at 21:00 CET.
Rennes
The club in recent years, under the rule of different coaches, manages to stay among the so-called “2nd wave” in France. It means that it doesn’t even aim for the championship title, but goes in “the peloton”. Moreover, it took the cup in 2019. A year later, there was the maximum result in Ligue 1 – bronze medals. The team is not able to repeat those results, but thanks to the 4th place in the season 2021/2022, “the Red and Blacks” played at the group stage of the Europa League in the autumn. By the way, they beat Dynamo Kyiv and the further play-offs will start with matches against Shakhtar. Despite this workload, Bruno Genesio's wards won 9 out of 15 matches in the inner arena and ended the autumn part of the season in the top three. Perhaps they relaxed too much, because after the break they quickly conceded a couple of goals from Reims, and lost the game with a 1-3 score.
Nice
The team obviously wants to be as successful as its following opponent. Everything is OK with ambitions on the Côte d'Azur, and it seems that those ambitions are also confirmed by the finance. It was noteworthy that Galtier, having made Lille the champion of the tournament, had appeared right in this club. But he quickly disappointed, taking only the 5th place with “the Eaglets”. As a result, Christophe was given an opportunity to work in Paris and was replaced by Favre, who had already won the bronze medals with the team. So far, Lucien's second trial is mediocre. The French club was able to win the group in the Conference League under his rule. But this hardly compensates for the fact that there had been equal wins and losses, with a negative goal difference in the championship by November. The situation did not change after the previous December round: the team played a goalless draw, slowing down the sensation of the season, Lens.
The statistics of head-to-head matches
Rennes took only 1 victory in over 15 previous matches. Last season, Nice was stronger and scored 4 points out of 6 possible.
Predictions
Bookmakers do not believe in Rennes’ second misfire in a row. It must take into account all the wrong steps and will be able to win in a home match (odd: 1.86).
