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

Football tips, stats and philosophy from Kevin Pullein.

Where to watch

BT Sport 1, 7.45pm Saturday

Best bet

Under 5.5 Asian total cards Fiorentina v Torino
1pt Evs bet365

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Bet on a low number of cards in the Serie A game between Fiorentina and Torino.

Bet365 quote decimal odds of 2.0, equivalent to the fractional price of evens, for under 5.5 Asian total cards. Each yellow will count as one card and each red as two cards.

This season in Serie A has been like most other recent seasons as far as cards as concerned. There have been five cards on average. Sixty-two per cent of games have featured fewer than 5.5 cards.

And today’s meeting of Fiorentina and Torino seems like a fairly standard Serie A contest. Odds in the result-related markets, which I think are about right, imply a 45 per cent chance of a home win, a 29 per cent chance of a draw and a 26 per cent chance of an away win.

Both teams have 23 points after 18 games. There does not seem to be much difference in ability between them. The match odds are mostly a reflection of the anticipated impact of ground advantage.

Referee Federico Dionisi is relatively inexperienced at the highest level. This will be only his 17th game spread across five seasons. But on 11 of his previous appointments he showed fewer than 5.5 cards. In other words, over an admittedly small sample of games, he has not shown a high number of cards worryingly often.

So far, so good.

Now things get a bit more concerning, but only a bit. Fiorentina’s games have yielded a high number of cards quite frequently. But Torino’s have not. And if we look at venue-specific data we still find that there have been under 5.5 cards in six of Fiorentina’s nine home games and seven of Torino’s nine away games.

A fair number of Serie A games finish with more than 5.5 cards. Fiorentina against Torino today could be another. But the chance that it will not may be better than the odds suggest.

Thought for the week

The more time that passes the more remarkable Sir Alex Ferguson and Arsene Wenger seem to me.

Ferguson won the Premier League 13 times as manager of Manchester United, and for those achievements he is rightly celebrated. What I think is also extraordinary is that those successes were spread across 21 seasons and in none of them did United finish lower than third.

Wenger won the Premier League three times as manager of Arsenal. He went 20 seasons without finishing lower than fourth.

I find such consistency remarkable and praiseworthy in its own right because things can so easily go wrong.

Ask Jurgen Klopp, manager of Liverpool. His teams have produced some of the best and most effective football ever seen in England. Last season they won 92 points, three seasons ago 99 points and four seasons ago 97 points. With the highest total they were champions and with the ones just below they were runners-up.

In the other season in that period Liverpool finished third but they were way off the pace with 69 points. This season they are ninth with 28 points after 18 games. If they carry on at the same rate they will finish with 59 points.

I expect them to improve and get more because I think they are still capable of playing a lot better than they have so far this season. But the disappointing displays so far show that even for a top manager at a big club things can go pear-shaped.

What I find remarkable about Ferguson and Wenger is that for them nothing went disastrously wrong for so long.

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