Benfica vs Dynamo Kiev Predictions

• Benfica won the first leg in Poland 2-0 comfortably and should go with the same line-up.
• Dynamo Kiev have lost six of their last seven Champions League away games.
• Benfica have won four of the five previous head-to-head meetings and have yet to concede a goal against Dynamo.

End of the road for Dynamo

Dynamo Kiev’s brave bid to make the Champions League group stages looks likely to come to an end in Lisbon with Benfica taking no risks with their line-up as they aim to seal their place. The Eagles were fully in control of the tie by the end of the first leg in Poland after recording a 2-0 win thanks to first-half goals from Gilberto and Goncalo Ramos.

The Portuguese giants had no fixture to negotiate between the two legs and Roger Schmidt is expected to redeploy the same starting XI at the Luz. That should be enough to ensure qualification and probably a victory too.

Benfica have won all five of their competitive games so far this term after a perfect pre-season in which they emerged victorious from all their major preparation games.

Lucescu lacks experienced options

Dynamo scraped past Sturm Graz in the previous round, losing in 90 minutes before staging a remarkable extra-time resurrection. Mircea Lucescu’s squad is very thin on experience at this level – underlined by the fact that the Romanian coach’s first substitute against Benfica last week was a 20-year-old defender straight out of the youth team with no first-team action to speak of at all.

Benfica should be backed without question here and a win to nil is a tempting way to extract a bigger payout. The Eagles did not keep clean sheets in either leg of their previous qualifying round tie against Midtjylland, but the Danes play in a very different manner to Dynamo.

Another 2-0 victory could well be on the cards for the hosts, who have scored at least twice on eight of their last ten home Champions League games – the outliers being when faced by Bayern Munich and Liverpool.