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

Football tips, stats and philosophy from Kevin Pullein.

Best bet

Dundee -0.5 Asian handicap cards
1pt 1.8 bet365

Take Dundee to receive most cards in their Scottish Premiership game at Celtic on Sunday.

Back Dundee -0.5 Asian handicap cards with bet365 at decimal odds of 1.8, equivalent to the fractional price of 4-5. Each yellow will count as one card and each red as two cards. If Dundee’s total is highest the bet will win, otherwise it will lose.

Mark McGhee, appointed Dundee manager on Thursday, will not be in the dugout for this game against a team he once played for. He is starting a six-match touchline ban imposed in 2017 after he left his last Premiership job with Motherwell.

Dundee are not a dirty team – far from it – but they may be more likely than the odds acknowledge to receive most cards at Celtic Park.

Nearly all cards are shown for well-intentioned but mistimed attempts to regain the ball. The more defending a team have to do, the more cards they are likely to collect. And on Sunday Dundee may have to do a lot of defending.

Celtic have averaged 69 per cent possession in the Premiership. They are top of the table with 63 points from 26 games. Dundee are one off the bottom with 21 points from 25 games. They could be bottom after Saturday's games. Those positions are not surprising given the budgets of the two clubs.

Decimal odds of 1.8 imply a 56 per cent chance of a payout. The current format for the top division in Scotland was introduced for season 2000-01. Since then when Celtic have played at home to opponents other than Rangers the away team have received most cards in more than 56 per cent of games.

The result-related odds for Sunday, which seem reasonable, imply an 85 per cent chance of a home win, a 11 per cent chance of a draw and a 4 per cent chance of an away win. In any Premiership game with those result expectations – realistically the only other ones would be hosted by Rangers – it is arguable that decimal odds for the away team to receive most cards should be shorter than 1.8. And it is possible that on Sunday they should be as well.

Thought for the week

Here is something I do when I am looking at a team’s results and trying to make sense of them. It is particularly appropriate, I feel, when a team have been on a really good or bad run.

Ask yourself these questions. If they carried on accumulating points at the same rate, how many would they get over a whole season? And is such a total feasible for them – or indeed anyone?

Only five times in the history of what we now call the EFL Championship have a team reached triple figures for points. None has gained more than 106 points.

Researching an article on the Championship that was published on Friday I was reminded that Bournemouth started this season with an unbeaten run of 15 games, from which they gained 37 points. If they had carried on at the same pace they would have finished with 113 points.

Records can be broken. Cliché lovers would say that records are made to be broken. And at times in that opening third of the season Bournemouth played extraordinarily well. They could have gone on to become by some distance the most successful Championship team ever. Realistically, though, it must have been more likely than not that at some stage results would slow. And they did.

When results will start to change, by how much and for how long, there is no way of telling. But after a team have posted a string of extreme results – good or bad – I think it makes sense to allow for the possibility that there will be some change at some time.

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