Canaries on song at 33/1

We take a look at the betting numbers behind THAT Norwich win and our other best picks from the weekends action, across the football league.

Many will tell you that you could never have seen Man Citys defeat at Carrow Road coming. However, we think they were a great value bet based on our research. Here are a few interesting points about the pricing ahead of and during the game.

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Norwich were generally 20/1 for their match on Saturday against Man City (and 33/1 in places), the biggest price for a home win we can recall and certainly the biggest winner.

Man City were 1.1 to win, this is short by any measure – they would typically be around 1.2 for this fixture and the short price may have been due to Norwich having many injuries, they named 2 keepers on the bench.

Was the Norwich price value? Well maybe… pretty much all the Man City players were on international duty last week (not so many for Norwich), they also have Champions League this week, there was no De Bruyne or Laporte and City have also lost to Newcastle and Crystal Palace in the last year.

All things being equal and with the same factors applied if the match were played 21 times would you expect Norwich to win once? If so then they were good value and 20s and great value at 33s.

The in-play markets were also interesting – Man City were still 1.7 at 1-0 down (we laid a few quid on that on Betfair) meaning that they were still expected to score two (which they did) and not to concede (which they didn’t). Perhaps a case of the markets not really know what to do when the really unexpected happens.

Our best bet of the weekend was Preston to beat Brentford at home at 2.7. We watched the Forest – Preston match at the City Ground before the break and Preston looked sharp against a Forest side going well (Forest have played all the sides above them in the ECL and only lost once so far), in that match the draw was a fair result with each team winning a half.

Both teams should be around the play-offs at the business end of the season. So basing our assumption on what we know and have seen, rather than what the bookies presume, Preston looked great value to beat an indifferent Brentford side (Forest also had an excellent result at Swansea which reinforces the point).

We also thought Leeds looked short at Barnsley at 1.5. Odds-on for away teams in the league are always interesting, more so as it was a Yorkshire derby. Barnsley had their chances and did well to hold out for 80 mins and the comfortable 0-2 scoreline perhaps doesn’t tell the whole story – you can’t win them all and we will continue to look for this type of opportunity.