United we stand, divided we fall

I've just regained my appetite for football, just in time I suppose. Come April or May it's only the Champions League Final, relegation 6 pointers or title deciders that I find watchable. 2nd week in August though everything is gripping, Swansea to Swindon, Chelsea to Crawley. Bookings indexes, goal averages, new signings, managers under pressure, handicaps and corners all get my full attention. You want to join dozens of fantasy football leagues, have tens of yankees on the outcome of the various divisions and want to secure a credit union loan for that price on the match bet that is simply wrong. Then reality strikes.
 
I understand punters haven't unlimited disposable income to invest thousands across multiple markets and can't take a weeks holidays simply to study every statistic available to man for the forthcoming season. I will therefore suggest a couple of bets which will neither break the bank nor take up too much of your time, yet may hold great interest right upto next May.

It is twenty years since a team won the premier league without having finished in the top three the season before. I've robbed this wisdom from the genius that is Kevin Pullien of the Racing Post. Therefore without too much extraordinary transfer happenings outside the top 3 (Man Utd, Chelsea & Man City), it looks a certainity that one of the '3' will win again. In fact in my opinion these three have strenghtened and the likes of Arsenal have weakened resulting in the gulf in class widening. The big three pays 1/5 dutched or combined, that in my view is more than fair.

Man Utd (7/4) have that winning mentality that Ferguson has obviously always instilled. I have been against them for years now, last year especially thinking their side was particularly mediocre, how wrong I was. This summer however I like the cleanout (O'Shea etc) they have performed, the youth and exuberance they have signed, and think if they sign Sneijder they will become unbeatable in England. Cue their downfall! 7/4 is fair. Ten out of eleven football traders for different major bookies in the RP Premiership pullout selected United for their 20th title, ominous.

Chelsea (11/4) haven't signed too many but I like Villa Boas and they might be a happy and formidable unit this season. Man City (4/1) have huge talent, however too much in my opinion, 'Too many chefs' and all that...

Liverpool (10/1) may put the wind up 1/5 backers though. They too look a settled side, two quality strikers, and a manager the players look up to. Carragher still set to start does not inspire me however. They should have bought a quality centre half to replace Carragher and complement some decent signings that have already been made.

The departure of Fabregas and Nasri from Arsenal (9/1) was inevitable, but the fact that this saga is finally coming to an end brings home the fact that the Gunners have no chance this season. I am a huge Wenger fan and I'm sure the Arsenal board are too considering how profitable and entertaining the club are he contributes to, but another trophyless prospect is too much to comprehend for fans. I can see Arsenal starting so poorly that Arsene might walk before Christmas, making him the first manager to leave at 25/1 attractive. Players like Nasri and Fabregas not wholeheartedly supporting his policy of youth promotion, patience and not buying success has surely dented Wengers pride and with the board not giving him much too spend, or alternatively his unwillingness to spend it, I feel Wenger might think he has brought Arsenal as far as he can.
 
The race for the Golden Boot is always a good betting heat at 9 or 10/1 the field. I think players from clubs like Man Utd, Man City, Chelsea are no value. There are no definites on the team sheet each week because of a feast of options, team rotation, European football ect. So Hernandez (17/2), Aguero (16/1), Torres(10/1) and co are not for me. Van Persie (10/1)would be enticing if he wasn't so injury prone. First men on the various team sheets this year with plenty of potential to score 20+ include Bent 12/1(Villa), Carroll 22/1 & Suarez 14/1 (Liverpool), Van der Vaart 40/1 (Spurs), Odemwingie 50/1(West Brom) and Cabaye (Newcastle).  With each way 1/4 1,2,3,4 places I believe small stakes on each will show a profit for the season. 

Liverpool to beat Arsenal at Even money is a fair bet for the season in my opinion. It maybe an unfashionable bet however due to it's length and short price.

It is worth noting the African Nations Cup is on next January and Febuary in Gabon and Guinea. This will most affect Chelsea, Arsenal and Blackburn.

I think Blackburn (3/1)are value for the drop this season. They are a poor side and with no real additions they are big price to be relegated. Their manager Kean is favourite for the first manager to go market at 9/4, that is about right. They have two fair centre halfs in Samba and Nelsen but injury or poor discipline is a worry to their only strength.

The team which take most of my attention pre season though is Aston Villa. At first glance; Mad to take on Alex McCleish, stupendous to let go Downing and Young and showing a lack of ambition. Further study reveals an able and hungry manager, great signings in N'Zogbia and Given, a settled side and one which will 'beat the rest' in my opinion. They mightn't beat Chelsea, United or City, they'll give Arsenal, Spurs and Liverpool a good go and I think they are better than Everton and the rest. They are 8/11 to be a Top 10 side, value. They get 28pts on the season handicap, value, and they are 9/2 without the 'big 6' (Man Utd,Chelsea, Man City, Arsenal, Liverpool & Spurs), each way 1/5 1,2,3 (or 7th, 8th, 9th most likely). It is very hard to see them not being placed in that market and it's easy to see them heading 'the rest'.   
I've briefly touched on some on my musings towards this season. Many will differ on opinion on what sides may do what. The casual punter should look at the Handicap market though for the season, it's an intriuging and fun market, and one which doesn't require a large outlay. The golden boot is an attractive market and Betting without the top six holds great interest throughout the season.

Happy campers, settled sides and teams united to the cause this season will perform the best in my shoddy opinion. I wish Ferguson would retire, I think it's the only way the opposition will wrestle the Premiership trophy from United's grasp.
Best of luck for the season. Enjoy.

Post by Peter Kingston

Anyone who comments below this post may avail of the following offers before kick off this Saturday in our shop;

12/1 Arsenal - Premiership
2/1 QPR - To be relegated
10/1 - Hernadez, Rooney and Torres - Golden Boot
4/1 Spurs - Top 4 Finish
9/2 The Field to beat Man Utd, Chelsea, Man City - Premiership

End of the long hot summer

The unofficial start to the new season happened last weekend, when Manchester United beat their city rivals 3 – 2 in the charity shield.

At half time it looked like the reigning Premiership champions were heading for defeat, they were two nil down, to what looked like a superior outfit. Had City won they would have erased some of the inferiority complex the club has within Manchester.

However normal service resumed after the break and United managed to draw level, they then won the game in injury time. Based on this performance, United and their aging manager still have the hunger to win and that is why they will be the team to beat this season.

The sad thing about the highly professional game is that only a select few teams can actually win the league. Personally I would be surprised if United and Chelsea do not finish first and second again, though not necessarily in that order.

The best guide to future events is past results and that means that Arsenal will choke, Liverpool will most likely not be competitive for the title and Man City will still be a mess off the pitch.

However the race for the top four could be more exciting than ever: I suspect that Arsenal will make it, but the final place will see the incumbent, Manchester City, possibly face a sustained threat from a rejuvenated Liverpool and a Spurs team, who have only the league to focus on this season.

City may suffer the same fate as Spurs did last year. Tottenham found competing on two fronts meant that league form suffered. However Manchester City have endless cash and this could be used to bolster their squad come January, if the current crop cannot handle the added workload.

Queen’s Park Rangers are the real unknown for the year: they are another with seemingly endless resources, however according to articles I have read, they have not really splashed the cash this summer. Perhaps their owners are hoping to make the club financially viable. This season will most likely centre around avoiding relegation – next season they will know what’s what and be able to spend sensibly, with the eventual aim of European football.

However despite my concerns that the season overall may prove to be drab, I will be an eager onlooker come next Saturday. The appetite was certainly whetted by the Community Shield, but the real business is only two days away.

From this week on I will try to include a small piece about gambling every week. This being the start of the season there is always the urge to bet on the league winner and on who will be relegated – avoid at all costs. You do not want to tie up cash till the end of the season.

After that statement I imagine that this blog will be followed by: “the views expressed by individual bloggers are not consistent with the opinions held by Kingbet or any of its affiliates”

But seriously, why have a bet that takes nine months to pay off - if you are in it for the long haul, buy Irish government bonds, they offer solid rates of interest and are going to give you a real sweat.

In the Newcastle – Arsenal game, which is live on ESPN (Saturday 1730), I fancy Arsenal at evens. Newcastle are supposedly in turmoil and Arsenal certainly have the nous to take advantage. On to Super Sunday, there are two live games. In the first game Chelsea are 4 to 6 away to Stoke, once again this smacks of value. In the later game Man United are 8 to 15 away to West Brom and for this weekend at least I will stick with the favourite.

Combine the three of them for a price of 4.12 to 1.

Anyone who mentions this treble in either Kingbet outlet, Drogheda or Clogherhead will receive the enhanced price of 9 to 2.

Till next week,

M.C.

To keep it simple the staking plan will be one point on each of the three games plus on the accumulator.

The Numbers Game

Sports fans come in many categories. There are the anoraks, those who can tell you the exact results of the 1988 FA Cup fifth round or the winning scores of the 1976 European Tour. There are the casual fans, those who will watch something if it's on, but who won't actually know the minutiae. And then there are those in between, those who will hold forth on subjects and know just enough about their subject to get by. I would hopefully count myself in that category, though others may beg to differ.

The classic wannabe question in a sport is "who is the best ever?". It sets off a debate, makes them seem more intelligent than they are, and conveys the impression that they have considerable knowledge about their field. In recent years, however, the growth of TV has moved sports in this direction. Forty years ago, almost no sport published rankings. Today, almost all of them do. The idea of "best ever" is here to stay.

The problem with this is that it is completely disingenuous, as "best ever" is almost unquantifiable. Sure, there are names that will forever be considered to be the top in their field. Think of Pele in football, Babe Ruth in baseball, or most obviously Muhammed Ali in boxing. Every talent since then gets compared to these.

It's human nature to compare things. Oasis spent most of their career being compared with The Beatles. Every dark fantasy novel is referred to as "the new Twilight". The problem is that in sport, while it seems easy enough to make a valid comparison, given that the rules of the game don't change, in practice no comparison ever is valid.

Tiger Woods has fourteen Majors to his name. Jack Nicklaus has eighteen. Ergo, Nicklaus is the best ever. However, this is flat wrong. If Woods, playing at his peak in the early part of this century, was to play against Nicklaus at his peak, there would be no contest. The Tiger would wipe the floor with the Golden Bear. The reason that Woods has yet to equal Nicklaus's record (he has plenty of time to do so) is because great though he is, he isn't as good relative to the rest of the field as Nicklaus was. Since Nicklaus's time, courses have been made longer and harder, and top golfers have moved from being semi-professional types to being full-time players who train from childhood.

The same applies to boxing. Much as people might like to dispute it, Lennox Lewis would probably have beaten Muhammad Ali if both fought at their peaks. Heavyweight boxing had simply moved to a different level. Of course, the most obvious field that this is shown in is athletics, as records continue to fall with every World Championship or Olympics. It is just over fifty years since Roger Bannister broke the four-minute mile. Now hundreds of people have done it.

However, there is a flip side to all of this. In Pele's time, football boots were poorly made lumps of metal with nails in them. Nowadays, the things are designed on computers. Similarly, when Jack Nicklaus went out with his three woods, the things were actually made of wood, unlike the titanium affairs of modern times. The switch from wooden racquets to metal ones in tennis coincided with a change in the gameplay to focus on serving rather than rallying, as metal racquets gave players increased hitting power. The fact is that the differences in ethos, training and equipment make comparisons over extended time periods worthless.

A second question arises when we move from looking at the best ever to the best of the moment. World rankings in sports are a comparatively recent invention. Golf's ranking system only started in 1986. The reason they became useful in certain sports was twofold. Firstly, the sheer profusion of events in fields like golf or tennis make it difficult to judge who the best is. Particularly in golf, very few players will win multiple tournaments in succession. When the only tournaments worth talking about were the Majors, it wasn't as important, as there were only four competitions, so anyone could follow it. Now, with the profusion of golf competitions out there, there isn't as clear a proxy, so we rely on the sporting federations to do our thinking for us. The second reason is the rise of television.

One of the things about American sports that so baffles outsiders is their obsession with statistics. American football pundits are the worst offenders. One cannot watch a ball being thrown in an American football game without a talking head informing you that it was the third longest throw this month, or something similar. I suspect that one of the reasons America still hasn't really taken to Association Football is that the sport doesn't lend itself easily to statistical analysis.

However, it's worth noticing that with the spread of television, statistics are now part of every sport. The fact that they use subjective measures means that to the anorak, they are useful only in demonstrating their obsession. After all, the world golf rankings award huge points for winning a Major, despite the fact that the courses are no more challenging than anywhere else on the tours. They are the prestige tournaments because we have decided they are. The same applies to tennis. People complain that Caroline Wozniacki is World No. 1 on the Women's tour without ever having won a Grand Slam, yet this misses the point. While she may not have won a Grand Slam, she's consistently performed at everything else, and after all, Wimbledon is no more technically challenging than any other grass court in the world.

Television has led to the mass-marketing of sport, and thus the growth of the casual fan. Previously, the only way to experience sport was to actually be physically at it. This meant a) sports fans tended to have a much deeper interest, and b) it would be in a much narrower field. A football fan could really only be able to attend one team's home games, which obviously gave him a much deeper understanding of this team, but a more introverted field of view for the league as a whole.

Nowadays, television has made it possible to watch much more sport than before. However, the amount of sport to follow has also shot up. In the 1970s there were twenty events on the European Tour. Now there are forty-seven. It has become increasingly difficult for a fan to follow all of this. Numbers simplify things nicely. Rather than having to keep track of every player's ongoing performances, the casual fan can simply check on a golfer's rankings to bluff his way through a conversation.

As sports continue to globalise, we can expect more of this. Sporting fans are more likely than ever to be unable to see events live. The amount of tournaments, matches and games to keep track of is going to grow, as developing countries see having a golf or tennis competition as a badge of prestige. The anorak fan, who knows the minutiae of Stoke City for the past fifty years, is dead. In his place is the fan who watches dozens of sports from across the world on satellite TV, and needs numbers to make sense of the whole thing.

Pundits, numbers, and statistics are now part of sport. We, the fans, have created the beast. Now we can but hope it won't destroy us.

Greg Bowler doesn't own an anorak, but is good with numbers.

The Secret's In The Caddy

All the talk at the start of the week was of one man, Tiger Woods. The most famous golfer on the planet was returning from a lengthy lay off having not played since the Masters in April, where he finished a creditable tied fourth. Despite having not played in four months and his somewhat patchy form at the start of the year, Augusta apart, Tiger went into the WGC Bridgestone Invitational as one of the favourites due to his phenomenal record at the course. The world number 28 had competed at the Firestone golf course eleven times and had ended the week victorious on no fewer than seven occasions, with last year being the only one in which he failed to finish in the top five. You could understand people wanting to side with the 14 time major winner when he obviously loves the course and knows how to get the job done here.

However, Woods wasn't the only seven-time winner at Firestone looking to make it number eight. Steve Williams, Tiger's ex-caddy, is now the bag man for Adam Scott and he too was hoping to claim another title at the Akron, Ohio venue. Williams was a major part of the former world number one's success, working with Woods for 13 of his 14 major victories and all seven of his Firestone triumphs. After his acrimonious split with Woods earlier this year, Williams was asked to caddy for the 31 year old Scott and he jumped at the chance. 

It was a decision that would prove to finally bear fruit come last night. At the fourth time of asking with Williams as his caddy, the Australian came good. After carding an impressive bogey free eight under par 62 in his opening round, which turned out to be the low round of the week, Scott followed that up with a level par 70. On the Saturday, he was level par for the day through 11 holes and had relinquished his lead at the top of the leaderboard before producing a late flurry, which included four birdies in five holes between the 12th and 16th holes to take the lead into Sunday with Jason Day and Ryo Ishikawa a shot behind on -11.

With Williams by his side, Scott played smart conservative golf in the early part of his final round. Having Woods' ex-caddy helping him around the golf course was crucial to the Australian's assault on the tournament as his course knowledge and confidence were evident and could be seen brushing off on the man from Adelaide. You generally don't win tournaments on the front nine of the final day and this could be seen in Scott's play. He waited patiently for his openings as others around him started to throw their chances away, most notably Keegan Bradley who finished the last seven holes +6 after playing solidly all week.

He chose the back nine to make his move and he executed a stunning final nine holes to claim victory. After achieving his first birdie of the day on the 10th, he chipped in from the first cut at the edge of the green on 12 to really put the pressure on his rivals. Another birdie followed at the 14th before Scott saved par with a 10-foot putt at the next. The word clutch came to mind. Two pars followed at 16 and 17 and he approached the final hole with a three shot lead knowing that only a huge collapse could halt his charge towards his eighth victory on the PGA Tour. Taking his caddy's advice he hit one of the best shots of the day, a 6 iron with his second shot aimed straight at the 18th pin, which allowed him to birdie and give him the victory with a final score of -17, four shots clear of world number one Luke Donald and young pretender Rickie Fowler. It's now onto the final major of the season, the USPGA Championship, where Scott looks to build on a poor record of only five top 10's out of 42 major appearances. With the Firestone victory under his belt and Williams by his side, you wouldn't rule out former world number 3 from ending his poor major's record in Atlanta this week. Look out for Rickie Fowler to build on his close showings at the Open and the Bridgestone Invitational and I also expect Dustin Johnson to make a strong showing.