This was quite a tricky game to think about from a stats point of view, as there's simply not much information available on teams as low down in the football ladder as Havant & Waterlooville. However, another way to look at it is that presumably betting companies don't have much of an idea either, so there might be some good bets to be found.
The markets I was most interested in for this game were those related to corners. The only source from which I could get an idea of what Havant are like in terms of corners was their impressive cup run last season that so romantically involved them taking the lead twice at Anfield. In those games, on corners they lost 3-6 to York, 6-11 to Notts County, 3-8 and 4-6 to Swansea and 5-14 to Liverpool. The limited conclusions we can take from this are that against league teams Havant tend to concede a lot of corners and not gain particularly many themselves.
As for League Two side Brentford, away from home they average about a 5-5 draw, which at 10 is quite a low total corners average. The corner supremacy is also quite impressive from their point of view as one would obviously expect the home teams to get more corners. Based on the fact that the better side generally has more of an influence on what happens in terms of corners, I thought that Brentford would have quite a high corner supremacy and the total corners quote for the game would be quite low.
This wasn't the case, as one firm came out 11.5-12 on corners and 0.5-1.5 on corner supremacy. One way to take advantage of this would be to sell total corners and buy Brentford corner supremacy, but a more efficient way to do it was through the cross-corners market, which is made up by home team corners multiplied by away team corners.
Clearly if the total corners is too high then the cross-corners quote will also be too high. Also, the higher the difference between the two teams' corners I expect there to be, the lower the cross-corners quote, for instance 8 x 2 = 16 but 5 x 5 = 25. These two factors together meant that I could justify a SELL OF CROSS-CORNERS AT 32.5.
DURING THE GAME
It started badly with a flurry of corners for both sides, the cross-corners count was on Havant 2 x Brentford 4 after twenty minutes, so this trade wasn't going well. After this though things began to look more rosy - Brentford got a couple more corners but Havant were struggling to get near the opposition penalty area, and with the score at Havant 0 Brentford 2 it looked like the game might be dying a bit.
Unfortunately in the last ten minutes Havant pulled a goal back to make it 1-2, which resulted in them having a real go in the closing stages. This yielded four more corners, so the final result was 6 x 6 = 36, a 3.5 point loss, not disastrous but disappointing considering how positive it looked near the end of the game.
AR
If one believes that a buy team A's corner supremacy and a sell of total corners are both good bets, then the logical trade to me would appear to be a sell of team B's corners or, possibly, multi-corners.
Posted by: Spinoza's Ethic | November 17, 2008 at 05:13 PM