Leeds v Chelsea: Championship club can upset Blues

Chelsea will be looking to put their World Club Championship disappointment behind them with a win at Elland Road and claim a place in the semi-final of the Capital One Cup.

Understandably, the Blues are favourites and can be backed at 8/11 to win the game in normal time, while the hosts are priced up as 16/5 outsiders.

However, with Chelsea having circumnavigated the globe to participate in the aforementioned World Championship, their preparation has hardly been ideal and there’s a distinct possibility Leeds could upset the odds here.

The Yorkshiremen can take confidence from the fact that they have lost just one of the previous five games with their west London foes on their own patch and come into this game as one of the form sides in the Championship with four wins from five.

Three of these came in front of their own fans, including the toppling of two promotion frontrunners in Crystal Palace and Leicester, while the vastly improving Ipswich were sent packing last time out with minimal fuss.

Rafa Benitez has endured contrasting fortunes to his fiery counterpart, Neil Warnock, of late, winning just one of his four domestic matches at the helm and with Fernando Torres continuing to blow hot and cold it’s difficult to envisage where the Chelsea goals are going to come from.

That being said, in their two previous games in this competition they’ve ran in an incredible 11 goals and only relied on their struggling Spanish asset for one of these.

Although two of these strikes came in the extra-time victory over Manchester United, they’re not a bad price to notch over 2.5 goals themselves at 9/4.

Leeds’ Capital One Cup excursions this campaign have been goal-filled too which makes a 0-0 here unlikely. All four of their games have yielded over 2.5 goals and the 4/6 that favours another repetition of this score-line here is well worth a punt.

All odds and markets accurate as of publication’s time and date