Next Tuesday, 23rd of September 2014, the current European champions, Real Madrid, will take on Elche at the mythical Santiago Bernábeu for round five of the Spanish Liga BBVA on a match where it will be interesting to see if the home side will continue what they started last weekend.

The new Real Madrid is a mixture of talent and superb performances with some inconsistency and lack cohesion. Last Saturday, Carlo Ancelotti’s boys inflicted a painful defeat to one of La Liga’s newcomers, Deportivo at Riazor. Los Merengues scored eight goals and shocked everyone who followed the match, especially if we have in mind the team’s recent performances and their two consecutive defeats against Real Sociedad and with their neighbours and rivals of Atlético Madrid. Led by an utterly inspired Cristiano Ronaldo and by a devilish James Rodríguez, Real put up a quality performance and razed Deportivo’s motivation levels, who had just defeated Eibar last weekend. Chicharito Hernández, who replaced Gareth Bale during the second-half, also had his share deal of success as he netted in Real’s seventh and eighth goals during the last ten minutes of the match.

During this past week or so, Real Madrid managed to recover from the bad moment they were living, since not only did they collect two consecutive wins, the team has also scored 13 goals in those respective matches. The current European champions’ firepower is impressive but their defence line deficiencies cannot be ignored as they have already costed them six points this season.

On the match against Elche, it is very likely that Carlo Ancelotti will give some more real football time to players such as Chicharito and Isco, in order to implement a consistent rotation system in the team due to the large number of important matches that are just around the corner.

As for Elche, the last round of the Spanish La Liga didn’t go according to plan as they were defeated at home by the newcomers Eibar. Before that match, Elche had only been defeated by Barcelona on day 1 of the tournament and since that match they had been enjoying a fairly positive moment. Elche’s performance last Friday was quite unimpressive, as they failed to react to Eibar’s goal in the early moments of the match and, at the same time, they allowed the Basque team to control almost the entire game.

When both sides met at Santiago Bernabéu last season, the home side won by a conclusive 3-0 and next Tuesday it is very likely that history might repeat itself, especially if Real Madrid carry on with their recent fairly inspired performances.

Real Madrid

Stats: W-3 L-2 D-0

Recent Form - WWLLW

Elche

Stats: W-2 L-2 D-1

Recent Form - LWDLW

Possible Line-ups

Real Madrid (4-2-3-1) - Casillas - Nacho - Varane - Sergio Ramos - Coentão - Modric - Isco  - James Rodríguez - Ronaldo - Bale - Chicharito

Elche (4-2-3-1) - Tyton - Suárez - Roco - Lombán - Albácar - Mosquera - Adrián - Coro - Fajr - Garry Rodrigues - Jonathas

Prediction

Real Madrid 3 Elche 0