The sports spread betting blog

West Bromwich Albion v Chelsea, Premier League - 15/11/08

I liked West Bromwich Albion a lot at the start of this season, I may even have been heard to use the phrase 'goalscoring football machine'. Despite their struggling start in the top division I still think they're a good team, but I didn't fancy them against Chelsea, who'd won their last away games in the league 2-0, 3-0, 5-0 and 2-0.

I thought a supremacy quote of 1.4-1.6 sounded too low. Another question about this game was who would start up front for Chelsea, given that they had both Didier Drogba and Nicolas Anelka available. Drogba was in all sorts of trouble after his coin-throwing and hand-gesturing to the hardly blameless Burnley fans in mid-week, and Anelka was on fire, with eight goals in his last five games. I spoke to a mate who's a big Chelsea fan and he agreed with me that we were sure that only one of them would start, and that Anelka would get the nod.

Anelka's number 39 and Drogba's number 11, so this would have a large effect on the quote for Chelsea's shirt numbers. One spread firm didn't seem to be sure that Anelka would start though, as they came out with a quote of 42-44 for Chelsea team shirts, which was certainly too low if one assumed Anelka would start.

I BOUGHT CHELSEA TEAM SHIRTS AT 44, but unfortunately two high-numbered players, Alex 33 and Belletti 35, were then ruled out through injury in the next day or so. Even though they're defenders who aren't likely to score many goals, if the news had come out before I placed the trade it would probably have been enough of a reason for me to not buy Chelsea's shirts.

DURING THE MATCH

The first half couldn't have gone better, with Bosingwa 17 opening the scoring, and then Anelka scoring with two smart finishes to take Chelsea shirts to 95 by half time. It was a slight disappointment that they didn't add to it in the second half, but I was still very happy with a fifty-one point winner.

There's an interesting comparison to be made between this game and the Celtic game from the 29th October also mentioned on this blog, where I took a position against the big away favourite's shirt numbers and it ended up being a forty-two point loser. Given that for both of these bets, the away team with high shirt numbers ended up making up very high, it would be tempting to be inclined in future to buy favourites with big shirt numbers and refuse to sell them.

However it's important to realise that this is only two games, not enough to make a long-term judgement. If a sell of Chelsea or Celtic shirt supremacy looks like a good bet in any future games, I'll still do it.

AR

Havant & Waterlooville v Brentford, FA Cup first round - 8/11/08

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

Fiorentina v Bayern Munich, Champions League Group F - 5/11/08

Milan reject Alberto Gilardino had been Fiorentina's main source of goals this season, but the man I had my eye on in betting terms for this game was their controversial Romanian star Adrian Mutu. He'd struggled with injuries a bit this season, but his two goals recently against Palermo showed that he was back in form, and he is also probably the Viola's first choice penalty taker.

Because of his fitness he'd been substituted early a lot recently, as evidenced by his 67th withdrawal against Siena in his last game, so I didn't fancy buying his player goal minutes as he'd be missing out on those high-numbered minutes at the end of the game if he was taken off early again.

Another way to get with a player on the spreads is on the "fixed odds" first goalscorer market, which simply makes up 100 if the player scores first and 0 if he doesn't. His quote was 7-13. By buying at 13, I was effectively having a fixed odds bet with decimal odds of 7.69 (100 divided by 13), or 6.69/1 fractional.

I thought the true price should have been somewhere between 5/1 and 11/2, equating to 15.4 and 16.6 on the 0-100 first goalscorer index, so a BUY OF MUTU FIRST GOALSCORER AT 13 was in order.

DURING THE MATCH

Mutu stayed on the field until the end, which suggests that a player goal minute buy may have been a sensible option, but happily he scored just the first goal of the game in the 10th minute, so buying him on the first goalscorer market was far more profitable, an 87 point winner.

AR