Kevin Pullein: Saturday's best Asian handicap corners bet & thought for the week

Best bet

Rochdale +3.5 Asian handicap corners
1pt Evs bet365
Back this tip with bet365

Back Rochdale +3.5 Asian handicap corners at decimal odds of 2.0 – equivalent to the fractional price of evens – in their Sky Bet League One game at Oxford. They could lose the corners count by four or more, but the chance that they will not might just be better than bet365 envisage.

First things first. What sort of game does it seem reasonable to expect at the Kassam Stadium?

Oxford finished six points above Rochdale after 46 games last season and are three points ahead of them after 14 games this season. Oxford seem to be at least slightly better and they have the advantage of playing on their own ground.

The result-related market appears to be in roughly the right place – it implies a 63 per cent chance of an Oxford win, a 22 per cent chance of a draw and a 15 per cent chance of a Rochdale win.

Goals and corners are generally related. The more a team get of one the more they are likely to get of the other, and vice versa.

Over the last two decades or so in EFL games with similar goals expectations fair decimal odds about the away team +3.5 Asian handicap corners would typically have been about 1.6.

For this game the right odds for Rochdale +3.5 Asian handicap corners would be a lot bigger – but perhaps not quite as big as 2.0. There are two reasons why to some degree the odds should be bigger.

First, Karl Robinson is a manager whose teams tend to gain an even larger sharer of corners in their games than is usual for the number of goals they score and concede. This was so at Milton Keynes Dons, then at Charlton and now at Oxford.

This is Robinson’s tenth season as a manager so it seems prudent to accept that his teams have this characteristic. Unless or until they start to post different stats anyway.

Second, Rochdale have exhibited the opposite characteristic, though only since Brian Barry-Murphy became manager in March. Their results have been okay. Managers coach their players to try to score from corners, but how many corners they take matters greatly only to those who bet on them.

Even allowing for those team-specific characteristics, however, there still seem to be grounds for thinking that there is a greater than even-money chance that Rochdale will not lose the corners count by four or more.

Thought for the week

The new handball law may be good or bad, but VAR applied it correctly last Sunday in disallowing what would have been an equalising goal by Sadio Mane for Liverpool at Manchester United.

It is now an offence to score a goal with your hand or arm even if you do so accidentally. It is also an offence to touch the ball with your hand or arm, even accidentally, and then touch the ball again with your foot, leg, trunk or head and either score a goal or set-up a goalscoring opportunity for a teammate.

The second offence requires at least two touches – one with the hand or arm, then another with a different part of the body.

Mane touched the ball with his arm – accidentally as far as I could make out – and afterwards kicked the ball into the net. According to the 2019-20 Laws of the Game that goal should have been disallowed, and it was.

Earlier in the season Premier League VAR wrongly disallowed goals when an attacker other than the scorer accidentally touched the ball with their arm but did not afterwards apply a deliberate touch with foot, leg, trunk or head.

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