Firstly, Bilbao are a good team in good form, which showed in their cup win over Real Madrid last week. It was 4th they met with Real within two months, Bilbao were the better team in 3 out of those 4 so the win was long over due, and a very deserved one. They are actually not a great team as their finishing constantly lets them down, but in any other departement they are doing fine and they did outplay Real all over the pitch, again!

Also the San Mames offers probably the best home advantage in the country, and the only negatives that can be found are actually their cup success, as they will play the first leg of cup semi final already on Thursday, at home vs Valencia. The coach Marcelino has once more built his team the also be the most sporting and phusical, so they should be able to field once more the pretty much same lineup they always do, apart from the few doubts in the attack and in the midfield.

The poor finishing shows in the underlying statistics, with better success ratio they would be closer to top-4.

Espanyol have played a decent season, but they have won only 1 out of their 11 away matches, and more importantly they miss their best striker and scorer Raul De Tomas due suspension tonight. He has scored 12 goals which is about what he has deserved, but it is tougher for the rest of the team as 2nd best scorer is Javi Puado with 3 goals to his name. And it is even more difficult to find Espanyol players whose expected goals are even more than 1 goal, at this point of the season!

Bilbao were so hugely impressive in the Real game, they had more of everything and even when they occasionally lost the ball they were quick to recover it, and unless they think too much about the cup match they will dominate this one from the start, and I will probably hit some first half bets in too personally.

3-0