Sunday Funday EPL Style
Written by James Kempton (follow him on twitter @ukbettingpro)
This Sunday will see one of the biggest bet games of the season as Tottenham make the trip to Merseyside to take on Liverpool. The game will be beamed around the world and bookmakers will be frantically looking to balance their books ahead of kick off for what will be a massively bet fixture. However, just like the prettiest girls at the school disco don’t always make the best wives, the biggest and best games do not make the best bets!
Instead, this Sunday we take our betting bank 122 miles North East from Liverpool to St James Park, Newcastle for the match between Newcastle United and Stoke City. Newcastle appear back on track now after a poor start to the season which saw them languishing very low in the EPL table. Coach Pardew has stabilised things in recent weeks and enters this game with two consecutive home wins. A 3-2 win over Chelsea was followed up by a great come from behind win over Southampton. The home side are 15th in the table but know a win here would almost, barring a miracle, guarantee their EPL survival for next season. Stoke have been their usual strong self at home but their poor away form, which has plagued them throughout their EPL residence has continued. They appear safe from relegation, currently sitting eleventh, but they have a style of play that when on a bad run could send them back towards the drop zone.
Looking at the market prices here the number on the home win is very tempting. Stoke has won just one of fourteen away from home and have lost four straight on their travels. With their two recent home wins and seven wins in fourteen home games this season, the 1.8 looks good value for a Newcastle win.
Turning to the goals market and this is the bet warranting a trip to the window. The modern trend has been towards goals and goals aplenty this season. Stoke has typically been viewed as one of the exceptions to this as their style of play is very solid and unexciting. So much so that the goal line for this game has been set at over 2 and 2.5 which is rare for an EPL game. At first glance you may say fair enough, Stoke are poor on the road and do not score many goals. Drilling down into the statistics paints a slightly different picture. These teams have met seven times in EPL history. In five of those games, both teams have managed to find the net and six of those games have seen an over 2.5 goal ticket cash with the other game landing 2.
There are further supporting statistics for this bet this season with Newcastle participating in the Europa League and playing many games on Sundays. All nine games so far on a Sunday this season have seen goals and despite there not always being a lot of goals the downside risk to a 2 and 2.5 looks minimised by that trend.
As a pick I am slightly torn between the home win inspired by brute of a striker Moussa Sissokoand and the over If your book offers a Home win/Overs double then you may wish to take this bet. For those searching for just a single, I would go with the heavy trend of goals in this fixture and take the overs on the goal line.
