Next Monday, 9th of March 2015, a super motivated Fiorentina will travel to the Eternal City to measure forces with an extremely consistent Lazio for round 26 of the Italian Serie A. This will certainly be the most important match of the round, becoming the stage for the confrontation between two of the best teams at Italian football this season.

Fiorentina are currently experiencing an excellent moment after winning the first leg match of the Coppa Italia semi-finals against Juventus in the middle of last week. The Viola, inspired by the flamboyant Egyptian winger Mohamed Salah, left Turin with a precious advantage for the second leg match and placed the current Serie A champions on a particularly delicate situation. Although they have allowed Juve to have more ball possession, Fiorentina had plenty of goal chances and forced Juventus’ goalkeeper, Marco Storari, to plenty of hard work.

To sum things up, Fiorentina are definitely going through the best period of the season with just one defeat on the fourteen matches they have played since the new year has started. The Viola’s only defeat was surprisingly against Parma, the weakest link of Serie A this season, but from that match onwards, Vincenzo Montella has rallied his troops for battle and won six of the last eight matches they took part in.

For the important and predictably difficult match against Lazio next Monday, the former Italian sharpshooter will not be able to rely on the services of Mario Gomez, Tomovic, Tatarusanu, Rossi, Lupatelli and Babacar, all currently sidelined due to injury.

As for Lazio, the boys from Stefano Pioli are also having so far a season to remember and their recent form is also pretty impressive. After their painful home defeat against Genoa, on a match they completely dominated, Lazio managed to bounce back and embarked on a fairly positive period with three wins on the four match they took part in.

Pioli has been doing a remarkable job with the capital city team and not even the home draw against Napoli for the first leg of the Coppa Italia semi-finals is enough to change that.

Lazio’s recent home record against Fiorentina is not particularly impressive and the visitors will certainly try to explore such fact on next Monday’s match. There aren’t any firm favourites for the upcoming fixture, but, since they are playing home, Lazio have an excellent opportunity to defeat the super motivated Fiorentina.

Lazio

Stats: W-3 L-1 D-1

Recent Form - DWWWL

Fiorentina

Stats: W-3 L-0 D-2

Recent Form - WWWDD

Possible Line-ups

Lazio (4-3-3) - Marchetti - Basta - Mauricio - De Vrij - Radu - Cataldi - Biglia - Parolo - Anderson - Candreva - Klose

Fiorentina (4-3-3) - Neto - Richards - Rodriguez - Basanta - Alonso - Kurtic - Badelj - Fernandez - Salah - Joaquim - Ilicic

Prediction

Lazio 1 Fiorentina 1