AC Milan will hope to earn a second successive UEFA Champions League win at San Siro and stay at the top of Group H as they welcome winless FC BATE Borisov on matchday three.
Milan moved on to four points after their 2-0 home win against FC Viktoria Plzeň on matchday two – three points more than BATE, who suffered a 5-0 home loss to FC Barcelona on the same evening. The Belarusian side will be determined to make amends for that emphatic defeat although Milan will have other ideas as they bid to keep pace with Barcelona at the summit.
Milan were 6-0 aggregate winners when the clubs met in the 2001/02 UEFA Cup first round. Andriy Shevchenko and Javi Moreno earned the Rossoneri a 2-0 first-leg win in Belarus and they prevailed 4-0 back in Italy courtesy of Rui Costa, Moreno, Mohamed Sarr and a Filippo Inzaghi penalty.
Christian Abbiati and Gennaro Gattuso played in the first leg for Milan while Viktor Goncharenko, now BATE coach, appeared at San Siro alongside Aleksandr Fedorovich and Aleksei Baga – his assistant coaches today – and Artyom Kontsevoi.
Match background
Massimiliano Allegri's hosts will hope their defeat of Plzeň marks the start of an improved run of home form in the UEFA Champions League. In the previous two seasons they had won just one of eight fixtures at San Siro, losing four of them.
BATE are unbeaten in their four European away games this term, recording a win and three draws – including a 1-1 stalemate at Plzeň on matchday one.
BATE might also take heart from their two draws against Juventus on their UEFA Champions League group stage debut in 2008/09 – 2-2 in Minsk and 0-0 in Turin. Of the present BATE squad, Dmitri Likhtarovich, Vitali Rodionov, Aleksandr Yurevich and substitute Aleksandr Volodko all played in that first UEFA Champions League visit to Italy in December 2008.
The Borisov club's only other game on Italian soil was a UEFA Intertoto Cup third round encounter with Bologna FC in 2002. They lost 2-0 and that proved the eventual aggregate score of a tie in which Goncharenko was an unused substitute for both legs./Source:Uefa/
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