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