The sports spread betting blog

Gamba Osaka v Manchester United, FIFA Club World Cup semi-final - 18/12/08

This match was always going to be a big showcase for Cristiano Ronaldo. He's FIFA's golden boy after deservedly winning their Ballon d'Or recently, and before this game in Japan he was getting even more attention than usual.

This was a day on which rumours of a possible move to Real Madrid intensified, and it might just have been my imagination, but I thought he looked a bit disinterested for parts of this match. Nevertheless, the absence of Wayne Rooney and Dimitar Berbatov meant that he would be taking on more responsibility than usual in terms of getting into forward positions, and on this basis I had a small BUY OF HIS GOAL MINUTES AT 29.

He did score, a header from a corner just before half time, but the interesting period in this game from a spread betting point of view was the last fifteen minutes. In the 74th minute, United were 2-0 up and the game looked like it was dying a bit. In fact, I was thinking of backing Under 2.5 goals on the fixed odds spreads, but how wrong I was.

Gamba scored in the 74th, 84th and 90th minutes, while United scored in the 75th, 78th and 79th minutes. This meant that the total goal minutes quote went up 480 points in that period of time, which would have been an unprecedented jackpot for any buyers of Total Goal Minutes, and equally ghastly for sellers - a good example of the sudden ups and downs one can experience in spread betting.

AR

Almeria v Racing Santander, Primera Liga - 13/12/08

All of my posts so far have been about betting on live football, so I thought I'd write something about my attempts to win on non-live matches. The weekend in Spanish football was dominated by El Gran Clásico between Barcelona and Real Madrid on Saturday night, but I had my eye on one of the less glamorous fixtures, involving two clubs between which one can draw a lot of parallels.

Almeria and Racing Santander both had excellent seasons last year, exceeding expectations by finishing 8th and 6th respectively. It was always unlikely to last for this season though as they each lost their talented young coaches - Unai Emery went to Valencia and Marcelino went to Zaragoza. They both replaced them with managers who'd won promotion to La Liga the previous season, with Gonzalo Arconada going from Numancia to Almeria and Juan Muniz, pictured above, leaving Malaga for Racing.

Each side lost an important player in the summer, with Melo leaving Almeria for Fiorentina and Aldo Duscher, the breaker of Beckham's metatarsal before the 2002 World Cup, going to Seville from Racing. The two teams had similar starts to this season, although there were signs that it was starting to go wrong for Almeria, after successive defeats to Osasuna, La Coruna and Numancia.

Racing's away record isn't fantastic but they're capable of the odd good result, such as the 4-2 win at Valencia recently. The most significant team news was that Almeria's new South American defender Pellerano would miss the game. From this evidence, I would think it'd be fair to say that Almeria are a worse team than Racing at the moment.

When you take home advantage into account, that meant that the supremacy quote of 0.3-0.5 looked too high to me, so my non-live bet this week was a SELL OF ALMERIA SUPREMACY AT 0.3.

There's not much need for a 'During the Match' section here, because there was no opportunity to trade in and out or watch the game. Suffice to say that the game finished 1-1, ending Almeria's losing run and providing us with a small winner.

AR

Everton v Aston Villa, Premier League - 7/12/08

The main thing that struck me ahead of this game was that the corners quotes available looked quite low. The whole outlook of the game changed, though, when Villa's Steve Sidwell banged one in from outside the box after about 30 seconds.

How a goal affects corners, bookings and team's goals for the rest of the game is a very subjective matter. But a goal as early as this makes these questions very simple - there's 90 minutes left, so how many more or less corners will there be given that Aston Villa are a goal ahead?

Everton are a good team with strong mental fortitude. I suspected they'd react well to the setback mentally - they wouldn't give up, they'd keep their cool and start to exert pressure on Villa. Goodison Park is also a fantastic crowd, the fans would not get on the team's back in this situation, and if Everton were putting pressure on, the atmosphere for the rest of the game would encourage a fast tempo which would hopefully yield lots of corners.

Perhaps things will be different when Everton move to yet another identikit new stadium out of town, with the fans nowhere near the pitch and no atmosphere. So, my main opinion after the goal was that corners would be higher. I noticed that all the spread betting firms moved up on corners after the goal went in, but one of them didn't move up quite enough in my eyes, and this coupled with the fact that I thought corners should have been a bit higher initially meant that a BUY OF CORNERS AT 16 was the bet.

After the bet it was actually Villa that got a few corners, and they were ahead on corners when Lescott equalised for Everton on 30 minutes. This goal was probably bad for my bet, but I still felt fairly positive as both sides were attacking plenty, there was a good tempo and the corners kept coming. A mistake by Phil Jagielka gave Villa the lead again on 54 minutes.

After this Everton stepped up the pressure to another gear, and in the last 10 minutes there was a flurry of corners to bring the total up to sixteen. They got the equaliser right at the end through Joleon Lescott, a player who I originally thought was just a solid centre back, but who seems to be able to play the role of overlapping full-back and instinctive goal-poacher amazingly well at times.

There was yet more drama to come as Ashley Young put Villa ahead for the third with the last kick of the game, and I was left happy with my five point winner on corners.

AR

Portsmouth v AC Milan, UEFA Cup Group E - 27/11/08

There's a growing trend in Italy for players to use their year of birth as a shirt number if they can't get the number they want most. This has little consequence for anyone apart from those involved in spread betting, for whom it's going to make trading on shirt numbers that bit more interesting for the next twenty years or so.

I've written a few times about shirt supremacy involving teams with high numbers, but Milan are the ultimate example, with 80 Ronaldinho, 76 Shevchenko, 84 Flamini and 77 Antonini in the squad. I fancied Milan against Portsmouth from the start, and was surprised when I saw the market prices.

Tony Adams just doesn't come across as a particularly intelligent man from what I've heard him say over the years, and surely you need to be intelligent to run a football team successfully. Some of his comments before the Milan match were way off the mark. "I'd expect the Italians to come and play for a 0-0 draw", for instance, just sounds like something a man on the street who doesn't know what he's talking about would say. It's also wrong as Milan have had one 0-0 draw since February and are quite a high-scoring team these days.

He was also talking the day before the game about Paolo Maldini experiencing Fratton Park for the first time, despite the fact that it was public knowledge that Maldini was out of the match and hadn't even travelled from Italy. When you consider that Adams had presumably spent the week formulating a game plan to beat Milan, the lack of knowledge displayed from these comments was inauspicious to say the least.

It looked like Milan would play a strong team, with Kaka, Inzaghi, Shevchenko, Gattuso and other stars likely to start. This coupled with the fact that Portsmouth had Defoe, Diarra, Campbell and Kranjcar out, all key players, meant that the goal supremacy quote of 0.2-0.4 looked low. It was quite difficult to predict the exact starting line-up for Milan, but from what I could tell, Shevchenko and Flamini would start, with Ronaldinho in with a chance of starting, and definitely coming off the bench if he didn't make the eleven.

I thought the shirt supremacy quote was too low, so BOUGHT MILAN SHIRT SUPREMACY AT 27.

DURING THE GAME

Shevchenko, Kaka and Inzaghi started off up front for Milan, with 76 Shevchenko obviously the man I had my eye on. It was Inzaghi who had the chances in the first half though, hitting the woodwork twice as Milan looked comfortably the better side. Portsmouth got into it in the second half though, and took the lead through Younes Kaboul, who thankfully was wearing the number 3 shirt.

The worst case scenario came in after that as 27 Kanu scored for Portsmouth, to put us on minus 30, having bought at 27, with time running out. At this stage I was sure that Ronaldinho was about to come on, but this wasn't reflected in the spread firm's total shirt numbers quote, so I BOUGHT TOTAL SHIRT NUMBERS AT 44.

Ronaldinho came on with sixteen minutes left, and with Milan pressing forward to try and get back into the game there was always hope. They got a free kick in the 83rd minute in perfect Ronaldinho territory, thirty yards out, slightly to the left, and he curled it magnificently into the top corner to send buyers of shirts into raptures.

Finally, in the last minute number 9 Inzaghi got the equaliser for Milan, breaking the hearts of Portsmouth fans but providing the cherry on the cake for people long of Milan shirts at low level shirts. This game summed up the ups and downs of spread betting perfectly - going from a fifty-seven point loser to a thirty-two point winner in the space of seven minutes.

AR