How to pick the right first goal time to go with your Super 6 score selections

John Sullivan, writer of Only Fools and Horses, was asked how he came up with such good payoff lines. He said that when he was composing dialogue he wanted a character to say what in real life a person would only think of saying after they had walked away. Ah, what I should have said was…

You never really expected to be in that situation and afterwards you wished you had done something else. A bit like getting all six scores right on Super 6 and wishing you had spent longer than a nanosecond on the tiebreak question of the time of the first goal. Only then you could feel goodness knows how many times worse.

On any given Saturday the odds against the most likely scores coming in will be about 250,000-1. The odds against many entries will be millions to one. If you do get six scores right you will probably be the only one who does.

But what if you are not? If another person, or more than one other person, predicted the same scores the £250,000 prize will not be shared. All of it will go to whoever gave the best prediction for the time of the first goal.

You may never be in that position, but if you are…

Well, how can you predict the time of the first goal in six games? You have an advantage over somebody else who might ask the same question in a different context. You know how many goals will be scored in total. Your prediction for the time of the first goal only matters if you get all the scores right. So the question really is this: how can you predict the time of the first goal out of a known total?

I tried two ways, theoretical and practical.

First I interrogated my computer model. What, on average, should be the time of the first goal in a group of six games when the total number of goals scored is one, two, three, and so on?

A map is not the territory, though, as any good mapmaker will tell you. (I say it as well). So next I split Premier and Football League games from the last 22 seasons – 1997-98 to 2018-19 – into sets of six. There were nearly 7,500. What was the average time of the first goal in sets with one goal, two goals, three goals, and so on?

Reassuringly, the answers were the same. I have put them in a table. In groups of six games where only one goal is scored it will arrive on average in the 51st minute. As the number of goals rises to two, three, four and higher, the average time of the first goal will come down. The commonest total will be 16, and when it occurs the first goal will arrive on average in the eighth minute.

In any group of six games where there are any goals the scoring could start in any minute from the first to the last. The figures I have given you are averages.

Game theory could come into play here as well. What is likely to happen and what might others think is likely to happen? Economist John Maynard Keynes touched on this in The General Theory of Employment, Interest and Money. In Chapter 12 he talked about buying and selling shares – unusually for an economist, he was good at buying and selling shares. The same principle applies.

“Professional investment,” Keynes wrote, “may be likened to those newspaper competitions in which the competitors have to pick out the six prettiest faces from a hundred photographs, the prize being awarded to the competitor whose choice most nearly corresponds to the average preferences of the competitors as a whole.”

And how should this be done? “It is not a case of choosing those which, to the best of one’s judgement, are really the prettiest, nor even those which average opinion genuinely thinks prettiest. We have reached the third degree where we devote our intelligences to anticipating what average opinion expects the average opinion to be. And there are some, I believe, who practise the fourth, fifth and higher degrees.”

There may be a smart punchline to those words, but if there is it could be added straight away only by someone like Del Boy.

Results have gone badly for Manchester City but could get better

Pep Guardiola has said: “Football is nice because what works today doesn’t work tomorrow. When you see the signals, you have the feelings, you have to do something different.”

Things have not worked well this season for the team he manages, Manchester City. After 12 games – almost a third of the schedule – they are fourth in the Premier League. At the end of the previous two seasons they were champions.

Then they averaged 2.6 goals per game for and 0.7 goals per game against. This season they have averaged 2.9 for (up a bit) and 1.1 against (up proportionately by a lot more). They are in a worse position because they have conceded more regularly, and they have conceded more regularly for a reason that is easily discernible – they have allowed opponents more shots and more of those shots have been on target.

As champions City allowed opponents six shots per game. This season they have allowed seven. Previously City’s opponents managed two shots per game on target. This season they have managed four.

In each of the last two seasons the number of goals City conceded was effectively what expected goals stats said they should have conceded. This season too. They got what they deserved. Only this season they have deserved to concede more frequently. So far. “I think humanity goes forward,” Guardiola said, “because people don’t accept what the reality is and try to discover new things”.

Today's top sports betting stories

Follow us on Twitter @racingpostsport

Like us on Facebook RacingPostSport