on Tuesday he faces the “best of Brazil” and on Sunday he has the Superclásico

River travel to Rio de Janeiro with head focused on Libertadores Cupbut with a sideways look on the Super classic. It is that after facing Fluminense, the duel against Boca will come for the Professional League. AND Martin Demichelis he wants to be in all the details.

After the tie against Atlético Tucumán, which allowed River to maintain the advantage over San Lorenzo, since Ciclón also tied with Vélez, The Millionaire coaching staff aims all the cannons at the week of greatest combat since the Demichelis era began. It’s that Núñez’s team will face the toughest team in their group in the Libertadores and five days later they receive their eternal rival, in what will be the first Superclásico as coach for Micho.

For the confrontation against Fluminense, River will once again have its starting base after Demichelis took advantage of the trip to Tucumán not only to rest the gala team but also to observe the performance of some players who had not been having minutes continuously, as Robert Rojas, Elías Gómez, Santiago Simón, Pablo Solari, Miguel Borja and Salomón Rondón.

So without being able to have Paulo Díaz (recovering from a left hamstring strain) and Enzo Díaz (he was sent off against Sporting Cristal), regular starters, Demichelis will rebuild the team with most of the players who usually come out to play from the start. While Emanuel Mammana would play for the Chilean and Andrés Herrera would join the former Talleres, so Milton Casco will play as left back.

This way, the possible team to play against Fluminense would be with: Franco Armani; Herrera, Leandro Gonzalez Perez, Mammana, Helmet; Enzo Perez, Alexander; Nacho Fernandez, Esequiel Ship, Nicholas De La Cruz; Lucas Beltran. Hence he will come out on base too to face Boca on Sunday.

“He is the best rival in the group and, I dare say, also in Brazil at present”, Demichelis said about Fluminense. And the River coach does not lack reasons: the Flu is the leader of Group D in the Cup and until Saturday (the day it lost 4-2 with Fortaleza with a team full of substitutes) it had a streak of seven victories in a row between all competitions.

The carioca team has a great coach like Fernando Diniz (He already faced River in the Libertadores 2020 with San Pablo) that proclaims the beautiful game and –without straying from modern methodologies- a regression to primitive Brazilian soccer. With him, Flu has already won two titles (the Taça Guanabara and the Carioca). And on his campus he has figures like, Felipe Melo, Gans, Marcelo (drags an injury) and Argentine striker Germán Canowho has been playing there since the beginning of 2022 and has scored 64 goals in 89 games (average 0.72 per game).

In addition, Flamengo’s eternal rival has two incentives. One is his goal power, since he currently has an average of 2.3 goals per game. And the other is to play in the mythical Maracaná, a stadium that River visited six times (this will be the seventh), of which it lost three, won two and drew once. Precisely, that equality (1 to 1) was against Fluminense, in the 2021 Libertadores. The other matches had been against Flamengo.

River trained the last two days at its Ezeiza property, where it did mostly ball and tactical work. The squad travels this Monday afternoon (at 4:15 p.m. departs from the Ezeiza airport) to Rio de Janeiro, where it plans to arrive after 7:00 p.m.

And the delegation will stay at the Sheraton Grand Río in Leblon. It will even have a fan among its members who will share the experience of living the trip with the squad, after winning a raffle made by Codere, River’s main sponsor.

But that is already behind. Now, the story is different. And in his coaching role, he will seek to find his first victory as a visitor in the Libertadores as River coach in Rio.