Kevin Pullein: free football betting tips & analysis from the Soccer Boffin

Football tips, stats and philosophy from Kevin Pullein.

Best bet

Eibar -0.5 Asian handicap cards
1pt 2.075 bet365

Back Eibar to receive most cards in their La Liga game at Real Madrid. It is possible bet365 have underestimated the chance of that happening by offering Eibar -0.5 Asian handicap cards at decimal odds of 2.075 – equivalent to fractional odds of 43-40.

Each yellow will count as one card and each red as two cards. If Eibar’s total is higher than Madrid’s the bet will win, otherwise it will lose.

Madrid have important games coming up. They play Liverpool in a Champions League quarter-final first leg on Tuesday, Barcelona in La Liga next Saturday, then the second leg against Liverpool the following Wednesday.

If they take their eye off the ball against Eibar the game could go against them, and then they could pick up cards trying to turn it round. Players are more likely to receive cards when things are not going their way.

But that is only one of the possibilities. Real are six points behind rivals Atletico with ten games to play – a big gap but they will not have given up hope of closing it and retaining their La Liga title. They could be business-like and disciplined.

Eibar are in the relegation zone, two points below the cut-off line – and 37 points below Madrid. More often than not Madrid will beat Eibar. As they should. Madrid’s payroll in recent seasons was around 15 times the size of Eibar’s.

Result-related markets for the match imply a 72 per cent chance of a Madrid win, an 18 per cent chance of a draw and a ten per cent chance of an Eibar win. Those numbers seem reasonable.

In La Liga games with similar result expectations fair odds about the outsiders receiving most cards would normally be shorter than 2.075. Perhaps they would not be as short as usual for this match.

Real have received more cards than we should have anticipated at home and Eibar fewer away. Those trends will turn, but the movement might not start yet. Even so, odds for Eibar to receive most cards perhaps should not be quite as big as 2.075.

Thought for the week

Browsing through an article on an Opta website the other day I found they were saying something I have been saying for years. Not enough years, I confess. I had been watching football for decades before I realised something that now seems to me blindingly obvious.

Each team in a match will have the same, or almost the same, number of opportunities to score. This is because each team in a match will gain possession of the ball the same, or almost the same, number of times. Football is a game of alternating possession. One team have the ball, then the other, and so on.

The Opta article said: “The total number of possessions belonging to each team in a given match can only differ by one. If a possession for one team ends, the other team has gained control of the ball and hence started their own possession.”

Who has the ball when the referee whistles for the end of each half determines whether both teams will have the same number of possessions or whether there will be a difference of one.

The Opta article went on: “On the other hand, the length of these possessions are not necessarily equal”. If one team have more possession time than the other it will mean that their possessions lasted longer on average, which in practice will mean that they contained more passes on average.

If teams with lots of possession time generally score more often than teams with little possession time – which they do – it suggests that longer passing sequences generally are more likely to lead to a goal than shorter ones.

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