Birmingham’s corner tally may struggle to match recent highs

Birmingham have taken a lot of corners this season. At St Andrew’s they won the corners count by nine against Swansea, eight against Ipswich, four against Sheffield Wednesday and three against QPR and West Brom.

If they gain and concede corners on Saturday against Hull in anything like the same way as they did in previous home games they will win the corner count easily. But they might not.

Considering the number of goals they have scored and conceded, the numbers of corners they have taken and defended is unusual. Normally those things are related.

Back Hull +2.5 Asian handicap corners with bet365 at decimal odds of 1.95 – equivalent to fractional odds of 19-20. If Birmingham win the corners count by three or more the bet will lose. If anything else happens the bet will pay out.

Birmingham’s results improved at the end of last season when Garry Monk became manager and they have been even better this season. Birmingham are tenth in the Championship table with 23 points from 16 games. They have not finished that high since season 2015-16.

Like Monk at Birmingham, Nigel Adkins helped Hull to stay in the Championship last season. This season results have not fallen so well and Hull are now second from bottom with 15 points, the same number as two other teams with better goal differences.

On Saturday, Birmingham will benefit from home advantage and there are grounds for thinking they are probably at least a slightly better team anyway.

Result-related markets imply roughly a 50 per cent chance of a Birmingham win, a 28 per cent chance of a draw and a 22 per cent chance of a Hull win, and there is no obvious reason to think those numbers are much wrong.

Over the past two decades in Football League games with similar goals expectations the away team beat a corners handicap of +2.5 about 58 per cent of the time. Decimal odds of 1.95 imply a 51 per cent chance of a bet being successful.

The chance of Hull beating a corners handicap of +2.5 at Birmingham today is not as high as 58 per cent, but it might not be as low as 51 per cent.

Birmingham’s unusual but superb performance in corners handicap markets could continue. Eventually it will come to an end, but there is no way of being sure when the process of change will begin and there is a fair chance it will not be today.

Even so, the chance of Hull covering the handicap may still be better than bet365 anticipate.

Recommendation
Hull +2.5 Asian handicap corners
1pt 1.95 bet365

Bet on this match at Soccerbase.com

Thoughts for the day

When Ruud Gullit managed Chelsea he said Mark Hughes would be an even better striker if he ran about less. I have never heard any other manager say anything like this. Or pundit, or fan.

In England, in particular, players are always exhorted to work harder. Yet there is no evidence that working harder, by itself, helps. The latest evidence to the contrary comes from the Fifa 2018 World Cup technical report.

The more distance teams covered, the less likely they were to do well. That may have been partly because bad teams tend to spend more time without the ball, and players have to run further to get the ball back than they do when they have it. Even so, the stats on distances covered were pretty damning.

And so were some of the others.

Some people say jogging may not help but sprinting does. There was no evidence for that either. There were negative relationships between results and distances covered at speeds of more than 20 kilometres per hour, and also between results and distances covered at speeds of more than 25 kilometres per hour.

Barcelona wore pink on Tuesday in their Champions League game at Inter. To be precise, pink with dashes of red.

Their kit as well as their football was pleasing on the eye. They looked like flamingos.

There are many more colours and combinations that could be used in football kits than are commonly used.

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