Barcelona v RealMadrid tonight in the ChampionsLeague - we are quoting Barcelona/Real Suprem. at - 0.8 - 1. http://bit.ly/SpxSport4
May 03, 2011
April 20, 2011
April 19, 2011
April 18, 2011
January 07, 2010
Premier League and NFL long-terms - 07/01/10
As the Premier League and the NFL both move on to the business end of the season, I thought I'd take a look at how this season’s long-term positions have been getting on and, more importantly, what to do with them from now:
1) ASTON VILLA POINTS – BOUGHT AT 56.5, CURRENTLY 63.5-65
Except perhaps for their cross-city rivals Birmingham, Aston Villa are probably the success story of the season. They top the Racing Post’s table of the most profitable teams for punters to back this year and buyers of their points are, I can assure you, pretty pleased with them too. The current total stands on 35 after 20 games: they actually reached this two games ago, but have since suffered defeats to Arsenal (deserved) and Liverpool (totally undeserved). To close out now is in effect selling at 28.5 for their final 18 games, which sounds reasonable enough to me. The smallness of Villa’s squad is well-documented, and fixture congestion could become a real issue, with a postponed two-legged Carling Cup semi-final still to come, and a decent FA Cup run looking very possible. So I'll take the 7 point profit and a pat on the back!
2) MAN CITY POINTS – SOLD AT 65.5, CURRENTLY 68.75-70.25
Looking back, this was an example of having the right idea but failing to execute it correctly. Man City this season have been everything I anticipated: inconsistent and unpredictable, yet occasionally inspired. Hughes was found to be as out of his depth as I always thought he was and ended up losing his job. Yet a points total of 35 from 19 games (the same points as Villa, incidentally) is a decent enough return and, in hindsight, maybe 65.5 was too low a price to be selling at. City’s squad is still scarily talented and despite the question marks over Mancini’s pedigree in England – and a potentially damaging January while the African Nations Cup takes place – I still think they’ll reach another 35 points from their next 19 games. I’m leaning towards closing out of this too for a 4.75 point loss.
3) BURNLEY POINTS – BOUGHT AT 32, CURRENTLY 33-34.5
The departure of Owen Coyle is a huge blow to Burnley, there is no point denying it and anyone who’s backed them to stay up might be starting to panic a little. Luckily I only bought their points, which are on 20 after 20 games. I suppose I could take the one point profit here and now, but is there really any point in paying a 1.5 point spread for it? Burnley’s points will surely make up somewhere between 30 and 40. I’ll let it ride and hope for the best.
And over to the NFL:
4) NEW ORLEANS SUPER BOWL INDEX – SOLD AT 50, CURRENTLY 54-57
Despite being offside, this is in many ways the bet I’m most happy with. I recommended selling the Saints after Week 6 when they stood undefeated at 6-0. Since then, they have won 7 more games and were in all probability a narrow defeat to the Dallas Cowboys away from going through the season unbeaten. They’ve claimed the #1 seed in the NFC and are almost certainly the strongest team in their conference, if not in the whole NFL. And yet despite all of this, they are still only trading 4 points higher than what I sold at. This feels like a result in itself, but I see no reason to get cold feet now. The Saints appear to be imploding, their once-potent offence is struggling and their overperforming defence is now riddled with injuries. Unfortunately the sell can’t make up any lower than 33 any more, but frankly I can’t see the Saints in the Super Bowl at the moment, so it shouldn’t make up any higher than 50.
5) BALTIMORE RAVENS SUPER BOWL INDEX – BOUGHT AT 18, CURRENTLY 28-31
And from the slightly offside to the very onside. The Ravens snuck into the playoffs ahead of Pittsburgh, meaning that even if they lose their wildcard game versus the Patriot, they will still make up 20 at worst. However, as number 5 seeds, they are almost guaranteed to play every game on the road, starting off with an intimidating trip to New England on Sunday. And if they win that, it’s a trip to either the Colts or the Chargers. Not great news for a team who, despite their late winning streak, haven’t come together this season fully as I was hoping and, frankly, look a little average. I will be looking at a close at 28 and the banking of another 8 points.
JW
December 08, 2009
Davis Cup Final - 6/12/09
This weekend represented the most important date in the sports calendar, the pinnacle of the professional where champions are crowned and the unworthy vanquished.
It was the Davis Cup Final, my favourite tennis weekend of the year, and something which 99.9% of the country could not care less about. But then, as the old adage goes, wouldn’t it be a boring world if everyone liked the same thing? We all have our favourites, our eccentricities and obsessions and it just so happens that mine is an oft-overlooked team tennis competition.
Despite my loyalty to the Dwight Davis creation, I can understand why it leaves others cold. For a start, Great Britain are hopeless, having lost to minnows Poland and Ukraine in the last year alone. Many argue that tennis, this most individual of sports, just isn’t suited to a team format like the Davis Cup. The competition itself has been pretty roughly treated by the schedulers in recent years, with the quarter and semi-finals due to take place immediately after Wimbledon and the US Open, when the world’s best are at their most fatigued.
This might explain the presence of this year’s two finalists. The hosts were Spain, defending champions and undoubtedly the strongest squad in the competition. The four players selected for the final were Rafael Nadal, Fernando Verdasco, David Ferrer and Feliciano Lopez, but with an astonishing 12 Spaniards in the ATP Top 100, captain Albert Costa really was spoilt for choice.
The contrast with their opponents, the Czech Republic, was stark. The Czech team relied heavily on their pair of talismen, Radek Stepanek and Tomas Berdych. Both are ranked within the world’s Top 20 but, perhaps crucially, neither had made much of an impression in this year’s Grand Slams. Instead, playing together in the Davis Cup, they had created the sensation of the year. Star-studded nations including France, Argentina and Croatia fell to the unstoppable Berd-Step duo. There had been some memorable matches on the way, not least Stepanek’s six-hour, 16-14-in-the-fifth epic against Ivo Karlovic.in the semi-final away in Croatia, while the pair also excelled as a doubles team, unbeaten in eight rubbers.
From a betting perspective, I had been all over the Czech Republic since the quarter-final stage and was sitting pretty with an 16/1 each-way shot that had already placed. Unfortunately, I had also being laying the bejesus out of Spain, mainly banking on Rafael Nadal’s creaking knees ruling him out of the final (they didn’t). Needless to say, I had been laying them at much larger prices than the five-to-one-on (1.2) available just before the final! So a Spain win was very bad, a Czech win very good and seeing as I still made the Czechs a decent bet at market price, I couldn’t even talk myself into laying off some of my not-inconsiderable liability on Spain.
The final itself will surely be remembered for the extraordinary performance of Nadal, whose recent underwhelming form had been the main talking point in men’s tennis. He started the opening singles rubber versus Berdych with a 25:0 index of 19.5- 21 – extraordinary when you consider that the man had been practically unbeatable in best-of-five-sets clay court tennis up until his defeat to Robin Soderling at Roland Garros this year. But then people – myself included – were questioning whether Nadal would ever obtain that level of dominance again - and even giving serious thought to the idea that a lifelong underachiever like Tomas Berdych could defeat the man, away in Barcelona of all places.
The pipedream last until 5-5 in the first set, when at 0-30 down, Nadal produced an astonishing backhand down-the-line that seemed to spark him into life. Gone was tentative Rafa with his weak ground-strokes dropping short, replaced by clay-court warrior that dazzled us all on his way to four successive French Open crowns. He peeled off an astonishing 13 successive games to wipe the floor with Berdych, eventually triumphing 7-5 6-2 6-0 and handing the Spanish the early initiative.
Stepanek was fancied to put up a greater fight against the inconsistent David Ferrer, but contrived to waste a two-sets-to-love lead, falling 8-6 in the fifth. This was one of the great Davis Cup rubbers, with a fervent home crowd propelling their man to victory in spite of some inspired play from his valiant opponent. As much as I would have enjoyed to sit back as a neutral and admire Ferrer’s magnificent comeback, my wallet failed to share this enthusiasm.
Stepanek’s defeat left the Czech Republic with a mountain to climb. Instead, Berd-Step rather meekly surrended to a straight-sets defeat in the doubles and that was all she wrote for this year’s Davis Cup, and indeed the tennis season as a whole. Spain successfully defended their title, but trouble lies ahead, with a first-round tie next year against Roger Federer’s Switzerland. For us Davis Cup nuts, the fun never ends.
JW
November 24, 2009
In pursuit of perfection - Grand Slam of Darts 2009
Have no fear of perfection - you'll never reach it. ~Salvador Dali
As someone who struggles with the most basic of physical tasks, the prospect of truly mastering a sport could barely seem further away. But where I’d happily settle for being vaguely competitive in anything, there exist a few professional sportsmen for whom just being above-average is unacceptable, for perfection is their goal. Think of the greatest moments in the careers of the greatest athletes in recent times: the Barbarians’ famous try vs. the All Blacks in 1973, Maradona’s second goal against England in 1986, or Nadal’s 6-1 6-3 6-0 demolition of Federer in last year’s French Open – and it is hard to dispel the notion that the protagonists have, at least for the briefest of moments, achieved sporting perfection.
Yet the very fact that we consider these individual moments to be career-defining illustrates the transient nature of sport. The Barbarians are, by their very nature, a transient, evolving outfit. Maradona’s public fall from grace in the 1990s left him long, long way from perfection, while Nadal has recently returned from a serious injury barely resembling a top 10 player. So in pursuit of true, as opposed to momentary greatness, we need to look for those who have reached perfection and sustained it. Sustained perfection might include, say, unprecedented dominance in one’s sport for 15 years. Or being a 12-time World Champion. Or not just destroying your competitors on a regular basis, but constantly improving while doing so. Thus I present to you the only sportsman to ever really sustain perfection, Phil ‘the Power’ Taylor.
(If we could just leave aside the inevitable grumbling that fat, sweating men throwing pointy things at a cork board isn’t a real sport and carry on with the eulogy…)
Even by Taylor’s standards, his performance at this year’s Grand Slam of Darts was extraordinary. The tournament is in many ways a more gruelling test than the World Championships. It consists of the best players from both professional codes (the PDC and BDO) and, after a challenging short-format round-robin stage where anyone can, and does, beat anyone else, the tournament evolves into best of 31 legs match-play, with the semis and final held within hours of each other on the Sunday night. In short, the winner truly merits the victory.
This year’s winner, for the third straight year since the tournament’s inauguration, was of course Phil Taylor. This much raised little surprise: Taylor now holds all the TV majors (not including the Premier League) for the first time in darts history. It was the manner of the victory that was most arresting. Taylor won his four knockout stage matches 10-4, 16-7, 16-6 and 16-2. The third of those was against Raymond van Barneveld, the only player to ever suggest that he can remotely live with Taylor’s unbelievable high standards; the fourth to Scott Waites, the strongest candidate offered by the BDO. And yet Taylor just gets better and better. His three-dart average comfortably exceeded 100 in all of the matches. For any other players, hitting three figures in a long-format match would be a phenomenal achievement; with Taylor, it is merely par for the course.
The match against van Barneveld was in turn both awe-inspiring and thoroughly dispiriting. Awe-inspiring in the way that Taylor has comprehensively pulled away from a man who was once his greatest rival, but is now merely a bit-part player in Taylor’s rewriting of the history books. Taylor-Barney clashes used to be something to savour, but the Dutchman evidently understands as well as the rest of us that no mere mortal can live with Phil Taylor. You can see it in van Barneveld’s demeanour now the moment Taylor takes a leg. Whatever kryptonite Barney once possessed is powerless; however well he plays himself, Taylor will always find a way to get the better of him.
And this is where, for fans of darts, the situation becomes depressing. It’s not like the other players aren’t improving themselves: by every discernible measure (3-dart average, number of 180s etc.) the opposition are getting considerably better year on year. The likes of van Barneveld, James Wade, Terry Jenkins and Gary Anderson are very, very good players. But as long as Taylor is around and motivated, they don’t stand a chance. And this is bad news for the sport: competition is essential to maintain interest and at the moment, to draw a parallel with the tediously predictable SPL, Taylor is like Rangers and Celtic rolled into one.
Darts continues to draw huge crowds and is probably the surprise sporting success story of the last 10 years. But, frankly, it’s getting to the stage where Taylor is becoming more of a hindrance than a help. People’s admiration can only lend itself so far; there are only so many times that you can watch the same result over and over again. Instead, Taylor is a top-priced 8/15 to win the PDC title for a 13th time this January. The expression ‘fill your boots’ springs to mind.
In the last leg of Sunday’s final against Waites, Taylor – who had taken out the maximum 170 checkout earlier in the match - hit two consecutive 180s, followed by a treble-20 and a treble-19. He was one throw away from winning the tournament with the ultimate nine-dart finish. As he took aim at double-12, I realised that this man had nowhere left to go. He had already reached darting perfection and by now was just rubbing the rest of our noses in it.
Taylor missed the double 12 by the width of the wire.
Perfection? Not quite.
November 06, 2009
Champions League update - 06/11/09
Given that it is indisputably the most popular club competition in the world, the Champions League comes in for an awful amount of criticism. The chief target is the pre-Christmas group stage, which is dismissed as a predictable, money-spinning procession for Europe’s big-boys with little-to-no interest from a sporting or betting perspective.
If this has been a valid view in previous years, then the 2009 Champions League is doing its best to change perceptions, with several of Europe’s giants in serious danger of missing the knockout stages. Heading into Matchday 4, as UEFA rather gratingly term it, Bayern Munich, Inter Milan and even Barcelona were performing well below some lofty expectations.
Chief underachievers of course were Rafael Benitez’s spluttering Liverpool side, whose travails have been plastered across the back-pages for the last month or so. Normally I’d be reluctant to buy into the media hype surrounding one of the Big Four, be it positive or negative, but a quick glimpse at Group E showed that they were in serious trouble.
A defeat away to Lyon on Wednesday night would almost certainly doom them to a pauper’s existence in the wilderness that is the Europa League. A draw wouldn’t be much better, either. With a late defeat at Anfield to the French side still fresh in the memory, the prospect of a trip to Stade de Gerland without Steven Gerrard and half-fit Fernando Torres didn’t inspire confidence. The pre-match supremacy of Lyon / Liverpool 0.2-0.4 reflected as much.
I couldn’t shake the thought, however, that as poor as Liverpool’s side on the night looked – Benitez was again starting Andriy Voronin for goodness sake – they have the admirable trait of managing to get the job done. I remembered a match in similar circumstances against Marseille in 2007 when, needing a last-ditch win to extricate themselves from another precarious position in the group stages, Benitez’s side cruised to a 4-0 win in the Stade Vélodrome.
Seven players involved that night were set to play in Lyon and I was confident enough that Liverpool’s big-match experience would carry them through. Thus I SOLD LYON SUPREMACY AT 0.2.
Well, if Liverpool were in trouble beforehand then they’re knee-deep in the mire now. Despite an 83rd minute strike from Ryan Babel that looked to have given them the win that their composed performance had deserved, some awful late defending allowed Lisandro Lopez to net a 90th minute equaliser for Lyon.
My supremacy bet ended as a (very) small winner but in the bigger picture, assured the French side’s qualification. Liverpool, meanwhile, are marooned in third place, and the current quote of 5-6 on their Group Index (makes up 25 to winner, 10 to second, 5 to third) reflects their unlikelihood to finish anywhere else.
Of the other underperformers, Inter Milan rallied from 1-0 down to post a late 2-1 win in Kiev which propelled them to the top of a very tight-looking Group F. Barcelona, drawn in the same group, could only manage a 0-0 with Rubin Kazan, their conquerors at the Nou Camp two weeks previously.
Barça remain favourites to progress (16-17.5), ahead of Inter (13.5-15), Rubin Kazan (5.5-7) and the surely doomed Dynamo Kiev (2-3.5). Things are nearly decided in Group A, where Bayern Munich (5-6) are almost certainly out, thanks to a 2-0 home defeat to FC Bordeaux (19.5-21) who look set to qualify alongside Juventus (13.5-15).
JW
October 29, 2009
NFL, the season so far - 29/10/09
Green 34, Omaha, Omaha, hut hut hut! Yep, the NFL season has been back up and running for several weeks now and has been as fascinating and unpredictable as ever. Betting at the start of the NFL season can seem like a lottery at time, but having had a decent amount of time to look at and evaluate the leading contenders, I’ve identified a couple of value bets – in theory at least! – on the Super Bowl Outright index.
Just to clarify, the Outright Index awards 100 to the eventual World Champions (sic), 70 to the runners-up, 50 to the Conference finalists, 33 to Divisional Play-offs losers and 20 those who only reach the Wild Card Play-off. Phew! In short, 12 of the 32 NFL will ‘cash’ but not necessarily enough for buyers to get their whole stake back.
1) SELL NEW ORLEANS AT 50
Getting against the New Orleans Saints? Sounds mad I know. And their early season form has been extraordinarily good. 6-0, including convincing wins against the Eagles, Giants and Jets. Drew Brees is looking like a shoo-in for season MVP, the defence is the best they’ve had in years, while the offence racks up 45+ points on a stunningly regular basis. What’s not to like? Well, you could point to the fact that the Saints have never reached the Super Bowl in their history and have a group of players who are yet to show they can handle the extreme pressure of the NFL play-offs. And then there’s the fact that the defence, while leading the NFL in turnovers and having generally played out of their skin so far, still rank in the bottom half of the NFL in points allowed. If the offence doesn’t fire in the play-offs for whatever reason, can they really be relied on to win the Saints the game?
But my main reason for selling is historical. Simply put, every year in the NFL there’s a team who over-perform at the start of the season only to revert back to type later on. Last year it was Tennessee, who went 9-0 only to lose in the first round of the playoffs. A few years before exactly the same happened to Kansas City. If a team are going to stay hot, it helps if they’re used to being up top. The 2007 Patriots were; the 2009 Saints are not. Selling at 50, I’m willing to take my chances that New Orleans eventually fall back down to earth with an early play-off exit.
2) BUY BALTIMORE AT 18
The Baltimore Ravens were subject to a pre-season gamble and this looked justified as they charged to a 3-0 start. With sophomore quarter-back Joe Flacco leading his offence like a wizened old pro, it seemed that for the first time in many a year, Baltimore were strong on both sides of the ball. Since then however, the Ravens have skid to three consecutive losses and currently lie third in a horribly competitive-looking AFC North. Furthermore the Baltimore defence is looking far shakier than usual. It has been suggested, or whispered rather, that the renowned unit featuring Ray Lewis, Ed Reed et al. isn’t what it used to be. The stats bear this out: they rank 16th in points allowed and 19th in total yards. So why buy them on the index at all, never mind at a still high-ish looking 18? It’s all about potential. This team, potentially, is one of the very best in the NFL. If the defence can sort out their recent issues and revert to the previous form, and the offence keeps firing as it has been, then 18 could look cheap in a few weeks time. The two teams above them in the AFC South, Pittsburgh and Cincinnati, are both two games ahead at 5-2 but neither has looked unbeatable this season, and Cincinnati, especially, could find themselves pipped by the Ravens to a wildcard spot.
So we can add the Saints and the Ravens to the long-term portfolio which already includes Aston Villa, Man City and Burnley. It’s been a decent start in the Premier League so far, so here’s to more success in the NFL.
JW
October 09, 2009
O'Sullivan v Higgins - World Grand Prix Snooker, second round - 7/10/09
In theory, random draws are a wonderful idea. Think of the excitement that FA Cup third round day brings, or at least used to. Minnows getting rewarded for early round success with a plum tie away to a giant club, or local rivals clashing in the cup for first time in years; all this from the random union of Trevor Brooking’s #35 with Jimmy Hill’s #63.
There is, alas, a problem with such a format which is particularly accentuated in a small competition rather lacking in star names. Such as, say, the World Grand Prix snooker. The hook of this 32-man event is the random draw that follows each of the first four rounds. Unlike all other snooker ranking events, the cosseted top-16 ranked players are not protected from each other. And so it came to pass that the 2009 Grand Prix’s two recognisable stars, Ronnie O’Sullivan and John Higgins, clashed in a 2nd round contest that pitted the reigning World Number One against the current World Champion.
From a sporting, and spread betting, point of view the contest was intriguing. The market consensus had O’Sullivan as a warm favourite against Higgins the hometown hero. In my humble punting opinion, this didn’t sit right. Higgins has experienced considerable success against Ronnie over the course of their careers and is clearly one of the (few) players that the Rocket truly respects in the game. True, their only meeting this season, in the Shanghai Masters semi-finals, had resulted in an easy 6-1 win for O’Sullivan, and when pricing up any Ronnie match you always have to factor in the possibility that he will come out in such a mood that makes him simply unplayable.
Nonetheless Higgins looked in far better nick than O’Sullivan in their respective first round matches, and is simply the more reliable player from a punting perspective – far less likely to have an off-day or play half the match left-handed to make snooker more ‘fun’. And if that wasn’t enough, you only had to read O’Sullivan’s interview to see how mentally unstable he is feeling at the moment (sample quote: “The longer I can stay playing the game without feeling like I want to commit suicide, the better”).
While O’Sullivan can be prone to melodrama, this isn’t the most encouraging thing to hear before backing a player. And so I quite confidently SOLD O’SULLIVAN’S 25:0 AT 14.25 – a fixed-odds type bet with only a win or lose outcome since, as fun as supremacies markets such as the ‘10/3’ can be, they’re downright scary when you’re getting against the most talented player to ever grace the game.
The match itself was a nip and tuck affair, featuring both impressive break-building (such as the 131 from Ronnie to open up proceedings) and some surprisingly poor misses. They went into the mid-session interval at two-apiece and before Ronnie took a 4-3 lead with a typically fluent 67 break. At 50-6 up and only a couple of pots away from the match, Ronnie cued across an unbelievably simple, straight red handing Higgins a lifeline.
I later found out that O’Sullivan had traded at 1.01 for the match on the betting exchanges just before this miss, leaving some short-odds backers feeling very green indeed. Higgins, consummate professional that he is, capitalised on Ronnie’s mistake, sealing the frame 58-56 before compiling a quite magnificent 94 break in the decider to squeak the match 5-4.
I’ve had a few bets trade at 1.01 before losing in the past, so it was wonderful to have the opposite occur for once. In the grander scheme of things, the match was a fair indicator as to why O’Sullivan, as supremely skilled as he is, can never be considered the type of ‘banker’ Phil Taylor or Tiger Woods represent in their own sports. In many ways, it’s impressive that a man who has admitted suffering from demons has managed to carve out such a memorable career in this most mentally challenging of sports. But as distasteful as it may seem to link mental health with betting profit, this does mean there’s never such thing as ‘free money’ when it comes to Ronnie O’Sullivan.
JW
Spreadex Sports
Financial Spread Betting, Sports Spread Betting and Fixed Odds Betting from one account.
Recent Comments