Kevin Pullein predictions: free football betting tips from the Soccer Boffin

When to bet

Watford v Preston
3pm Saturday

Best bet

Preston 0 Asian handicap cards
1pt 1.7 bet365

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Kevin Pullein's best bet

Back Preston to receive most cards in their Championship game at Watford. Bet365 quote decimal odds of 1.7, equivalent to the fractional price of 7-10, about Preston 0 Asian handicap cards.

Each yellow will count as one card and each red as two. If Preston’s total is highest the bet will win, if both totals are the same stakes will be returned, and if Watford’s total is highest the bet will lose.

Most cards are shown for an attempt to stop an opposition attack that goes wrong. So how many cards a team receive is related to how much defending they have to do. A proxy for that is how many goals they concede compared to how many they score. The less likely a team are to score most goals in a match the more likely they are to receive most cards, and vice versa.

Playing away in the Championship most teams are underdogs in result-related markets, as Preston are for today’s visit to Watford. After 34 games Watford have 50 points and Preston 46. So Watford are a bit higher in the table and have home advantage. Odds imply a 52 per cent chance of a Watford win, a 27 per cent chance of a draw and a 21 per cent chance of a Preston win. To me, those percentages seem right.

In Championship games with similar result expectations fair decimal odds about the away team 0 Asian handicap cards should normally be shorter than 1.7. And it is possible that they should be today at Vicarage Road. There does not seem to be anything particularly unusual about the cards records this season of Watford or Preston, either venue-specific or in total.

In any market in any match any outcome is possible, but the chance of Preston receiving most cards at Watford may be better than bet365’s odds anticipate.

Thought for the week

This is how I would have written a match report of Fulham beating Leeds in the FA Cup on Tuesday. Two of Fulham’s shots went in and none of Leeds’s shots went in. That is why Fulham won and Leeds lost.

You can understand why no one has ever paid me to write a match report. But for this match, and many others, I think that sort of explanation cannot be bettered.

I have enjoyed watching Fulham this season. I thought they played well on Tuesday. But I thought Leeds played well too. Fulham scored two goals that were beautiful to watch, curling shots from distance. Leeds had shots from similar and better positions but none of them stretched the net.

Somebody else might say Fulham were clinical and Leeds wasteful. But what would those words mean? Will Joao Palhinha and Manor Solomon always score from those positions? Of course not. Nobody does. Only a tiny proportion of such shots go in.

When they do we shout and marvel at the skill of the shooter. When the ball flies high into a stand we say the player should have passed.

Leeds had twice as many shots as Fulham and twice as many on target. I am not an expected-goals compiler - my impression was that if Leeds played many games and in each had the same number of shots from the same positions, for and against, they would score about twice as many goals as they conceded.

This is one of the reasons why the result of a match can be deceiving. The score might not reflect the play. Actually, it is not uncommon for a team to go through a sequence of games in which unaccountably they get fewer or more than they deserved.

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