First published in Racing & Football Outlook September 13-19, 2011 With seven games or so under our belts in the Football League and a pattern starting to emerge across the English and Scottish league tables, it’s time to start re-checking some of my pre-season suppositions and, if necessary, to adjust where my money is. The way I go about my tipping is to offer advice on the basis of a price being wrong as much, in a more traditional mode, as the form of any particular team. It’s a beautiful thing when value and a decent team collide, but it’s absolutely vital to be honest when things change or don’t quite turn out the way you thought they would. Now, I’m not going to come over all philosophical about this. Well not just yet anyway, but the big shift in behaviour that I’ve tried to bring into my betting over the past season is to downgrade, in certain situations, the obsessive idea of value being the sole arbiter of whether I hedge or not and the primacy of positive price expectation – the market offering a better price than what I consider the price to be. You may or may not have noticed that this season, when printing forecasted
GUNNERS NOW LOOK A SOLID LAY
First published in Racing & Football Outlook September 6-12, 2011 It’s an obvious topic, but having had a week for the dust to settle, it’s a good time to revisit the Outlook Index’s view of Arsenal in light of their poor start to the season and, in particular, the humiliation at Old Trafford two Sundays ago. It’s always a big story when a top-flight match provides a playground score but, given Arsenal’s stature, it was a huge story, and the narrative inevitably became as much about the future of Arsene Wenger as the prospects of the club itself. At the start of July I wrote that the Gunners weren’t going to be a significant part of my thinking for the title this season, and while it’s early days, that’s one lay that has all but paid out already. My contention in that article – which you can read at http://goo.gl/bw05k – was that their problem hasn’t been the club going backwards over the last couple of seasons. Instead, the clubs around them have improved beyond the strength of Wenger’s side and that has made Arsenal look like title also-rans even if they are still capable of an occasional deceptive burst of title-strength form. But Wenger’s continued presence at the club is odd, whatever his historic
ULTRA-COMPETITIVE LEAGUE 1 IS A TEST FOR PUNTERS
First published in Racing & Football Outlook August 23-29, 2011 It’s so far so good and with everything broadly running to plan, at least from a tipping perspective, I’m now looking for the next set of opportunities to present themselves. Among the potential new positions over the next few weeks must be my first stab at the Championship outright market. Already we’re starting to see something like a distinction at the top with three or so games in the database for the Outlook Index and forecasted odds algorithms to make sense of. But that will have to wait for my chief concern to settle down, with Birmingham constituting the great unknown of this season. In the meantime I want to return to League 1 and what is, at least from the perspective of the league points forecasts, an odd situation. Over the past few seasons League 1 has had more than its fair share of stale teams not good enough to get out via the play-offs but not so dismal as to drop down into League 2 and I guess historically that it’s always had a little bit of that going on. However, the current points forecast doesn’t necessarily reflect that. Instead it
FOXES LOOK A TOP TEN SIDE BUT SHORT OF TITLE QUALITY
First published in Racing & Football Outlook August 16-22, 2011 It’s obviously way too early in the season to start making snap judgements other than to say that from what I’ve seen after two weekends of the Football League and one of the Premier League, it largely seems to be business as usual. Pretty much across the board so far we’ve seen scores that fit the distribution of results that we would have expected. Nothing of significance has yet to emerge from any of the player or managerial changes that would see my having to wait a couple of matches for the Outlook Index ratings to ‘catch up’. Obviously, this is a good thing. Firstly, because it means that there is none of the lag the ratings are subject to when things change too much at the start of season. Secondly, and just as importantly, it’s good news because it sits ill at ease with the optimism of punters and supporters starting the season with unrealistic hopes for their teams or bets over the next nine months. As long as those chunks of misplaced optimism persist, so the prices will remain out of whack with reality. A few weeks back in our
ANOTHER YEAR OF UNITED ON TOP
First published in Racing & Football Outlook August 9-15, 2011 IN RECENT seasons I’ve adopted a safety-first policy in the Premier League outright market by coming down heavily in favour of the status quo by making a combined bet on both Man United and Chelsea to win the title. However, the trick in maintaining the success of that conservative approach is to know at what point change, as it always does, will come. Going back 12 months I felt I was sticking my neck out a little bit on account of going against the tide of enthusiasm for Man City and Arsenal, but also in selling the number of points that would see the champions claim the title. A year later, is this now the point that it’s all change at the top? I must admit that towards the end of last season I was preparing myself to make that shift. Man City, in particular, were starting to look as though they’d broken through that glass ceiling at the top of the Premier League. Yet, with the season about to kick off I find myself, after an intense study of the Outlook Index ratings and points forecasts, back in a
BLUES ON THE HANDICAP BUT CRAWLEY ARE THE BET OF THE YEAR
First published in Racing & Football Outlook August 2-8, 2011 LAST season’s Premier League relegation battle was so competitive that in many seasons the points totals of each of the teams dropping down to the Championship would have been enough to stay in the top flight. That shows the potential strength of the relegated teams and where it gets even more interesting is that their new division, as we saw last year, is not at its strongest in relation to the Premier League. That means there is a logical train of thought that at least two of the three teams coming down will be head and shoulders above the strongest teams already in the competition. However, the fact that Birmingham City’s owner has been arrested and charged with money laundering in Hong Kong means that I don’t have a massive amount of enthusiasm for them for this season’s Championship title. Neither does the market. Having been matched at a low of 8.8 on Betfair, they are currently trading at 18.5 to win the title. Despite their relegation and the inevitable uncertainty that brings, I was oringinally prepared to stick my neck out a little about their chances this season. When taken in the context
BACK HUDDERSFIELD TO FIND A PLAY-OFF HANGOVER CURE
First published in Racing & Football Outlook July 26-August 1, 2011 There’s only a week to go before the first of our English pre-season pullouts and what will, as ever, be the definitive betting guide to the coming season. With so much to cover and some absolutely massive ante-post betting opportunities to tell you about next week – including one maximum stakes, put your house on it tip – I figured that, rather than just squeeze in my League 1 tips, I’d bring up the old Third Division a week early to give it the attention it deserves. Last season followers of the Outlook Index had a great payday from going in big on Brighton and going against the crowd in dismissing the chances of a Southampton side who were not on top of their game for the first half of the season. This time round, the picture isn’t as clear-cut in terms of a standout team. That is reflected in part by the prices in the outright market where there are five clubs under the 10-1 bar. Yet, when viewing the outcome suggested by my final points forecasts, it appears that Huddersfield and Sheffield United are substantially ahead of the rest. A 3-0
RANGERS LOOK LIKE THE SPL VALUE
First published in Racing & Football Outlook July 19-25, 2011 And so the summer draws to a close, with the first sign of winter the Scottish season kicking off. As I mentioned at the end of last season, I’ve spent the first half of the summer rebuilding the Outlook Index software and can start unveiling new features and improvements to existing ones. The first of those improvements – and the first of many between now and Euro 2012 next summer – is the extension of our unique league points forecasts into Scottish football for the first time. Of course, no amount of computing power or mathematical wizardry can find an alternative to the Old Firm this season and, after taking the title by a point last time, I can see little evidence from the ratings that we’re going to see much change at the top. The forecasts suggest that we’re in for another close season with Rangers coming out on top again. With less than two points separating them at the top, we’re well within the margin of error that one would expect with 38 games to go. However, the SPL market has formed in such a way as to provide us
WILL THIS SEASON SEE US BIDDING WENGER ADIEU?
First published in Racing & Football Outlook July 12-18, 2011 I’ve only seen prices from Victor Chandler so far, but I’m very tempted to back Arsene Wenger not to be Arsenal manager on the last day of the season at 11-2. It’s hard to escape the feeling that, perhaps sooner rather than later, we may reach the point where Wenger’s almost 15-year reign at the club draws to a close. There’s little point rehashing the calls for Wenger’s head, which started to increase in volume towards the end of last season, with varying rationales. Instead, it’s more interesting to look at Arsenal’s forthcoming season from a more objective perspective, using my league forecasts. With the confusion of the summer transfers still to kick in I think there’s time to make an early play, particularly as the Gunners look like being one of the clubs who will start at a disadvantage compared to where they left off at the end of last season. It looks as if Cesc Fabregas will be leaving at some point with Samir Nasri only marginally more likely to remain at a club who, based on last season’s Outlook Index ratings, have their work cut out for them. One
McCLAREN LIKELY TO IMPROVE FOREST – BUT FOR HOW LONG?
First published in Racing & Football Outlook June 28-July 4, 2011 Summer is an irrelevance to the modern football punter. Yes, there’s a hiatus from match betting – at least in the major leagues – but with player and managerial changes occurring daily, this matchless period is at least as important as the season itself. The managerial changes are the ones that should concern us most given the influence a good, bad or merely indifferent manager can have on a team. Some of the summer appointments are perhaps more difficult to take a view on than others. For example, while there was a fair amount of meaningful information one could offer about Alex McLeish’s move to Aston Villa, the managerial career of Andre Villas-Boas offers less in the way of clues to the punter. I’ll leave trying to decode the effect of Villas-Boas’ move to Chelsea for a while and instead slip down a division and turn instead to the City Ground and the return to these shores of Steve McClaren. It’s a measure of how far the former England manager’s stock has fallen that, even though he has become one of the tiny group of English managers to succeed on the continent, he returns not to the Premier League but to Nottingham Forest,
