Favourites France resume their quest for a third World Cup crown this weekend as they lock horns with Paraguay in the last 16 in the US.
Paraguay enter this game on cloud nine. Despite starting the competition in awful fashion, losing 4-1 to the USA in a horribly one-sided game, the South Americans regrouped and adapted, improving as the tournament progressed to finish third in their group after a 1-0 win over Turkey and a 0-0 draw with Australia.
After that, they produced arguably the biggest shock of the knockout rounds so far as they beat Germany on penalties after a 1-1 draw.
Despite conceding 75% of the possession and 21 shots, Paraguay held firm to take the game to a dramatic penalty shootout, where they won the game in sudden death.
Form-wise, Paraguay are still pretty hit and miss with four wins, one draw and five defeats from their last five games.
Worryingly for them, they don't score a great deal of goals, netting 12 times in their last ten games. If we excluded the 4-0 win over Nicaragua in a friendly, they've scored just eight goals in nine games and have scored more than one goal only twice in their last ten outings.
Their chances of keeping France to a low scoring tally appear extremely unlikely and given how little they score themselves, it's hard to imagine this game going particularly well for them.
France come into this game with a perfect record of four wins from four games at the World Cup thus far, following a resounding 3-0 win over Sweden in the round of 32 earlier in the week.
Didier Deschamps' side toyed with Sweden at times and were head and shoulders above their fellow Europeans, and they'll feel as though they could've won the game by five or six.
Kylian Mbappe added another two goals to his World Cup tally, making him the joint-top scorer with Lionel Messi at the time of writing - with six goals to his name.
Michael Olise also reminded everyone why he's one of the most-feared players on the planet, putting on a creative masterclass to terrorise the Swedish defence.
The win means France have now lost only one of their last fifteen games, winning thirteen of those.
The French are also, as you'd expect, utterly lethal in front of goal and have scored at least three goals in all of their last five games (and in eight of their last ten).
They should, then, win this game fairly comfortably and book their place in the last eight, and that's exactly what we're backing them to do.
Paraguay 0-3 France
