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 rends in Football/Rugby |
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| Barry Glendenning
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| Tuesday 9 June 2009
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World Cup 2010 betting guide: How to
lose your shirt on Jesus
Whether it's the common-or-garden staples
of outright winners and top goalscorer or quirkier markets offering odds on the
nationality of the first player to reveal a Jesus T-shirt, odds layers are
providing punters with an eclectic array of opportunities to lose as much money
as is humanly possible during South Africa 2010. That's bookies for you,
they're good like that.
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Rather than sensationally predict the
blindingly obvious, our intention here is to ferret around in search of more
bang for your betting buck, so if you're hoping for prescient assurances that,
yes, Brazil probably are worth backing to edge past North Korea in the group
stages, then this probably isn't the gambling guide for you. If, on the other
hand, you're after a handful of decent-priced punts that could help fund the
professional counselling required once those value-free jingoistic wagers on
England have gone south, read on.
At the risk of sounding Boering, no
host nation has ever failed to qualify from the group stages and it would be
astonishing if the Dutch stumbled at the first hurdle in South Africa. Their
unfairly maligned back four are nowhere near as inept as some would have you
believe, while in Wesley Sneijder and Robin van Persie, they have a potential
player and top scorer of the tournament.
The Internazionale midfielder
arrives at the World Cup high on the hog after a treble–winning season
conducting Mourinho's Philharmonic, while the Arsenal striker is fit and raring
to go after a season largely spent crocked on the sidelines at the Emirates.
Whether the pair can put their seething mutual contempt for each other to one
side remains to be seen, but thenthe Oranje has long been a byword for
rancorous bickering of the kind that helps Dutch players pass those
interminable hours between training sessions.
Despite finishing only
one point behind Brazil in South American qualifying, Chile are priced at a
preposterously generous 90-1 to win the tournament and could well be the dark
horse in the 32-strong field worth swinging your leg over. Managed by the
innovative eccentric Marcelo Bielsa, they habitually line up with rampaging
wing-backs supporting a playmaker and three strikers you've never heard of and
look set fair to be the most swashbuckling team of the tournament. A reasonably
cushy draw in Group H suggests a potentially lucrative white-knuckle ride
through the knockout stages is very much on the cards.
Like Van Persie,
Brazil's Luís Fabiano also seems a stand-out price at 12-1 for top
scorer, but it is in Group A where the real value in this market lies. There
lurks two-time European golden boot winner Diego Forlán. With a
potential boot-filler against South Africa in the group stages, the
Atlético Madrid striker's greatest concern could be the prospect of
being eclipsed by his team-mate Luis Suárez. No mean goal-getter
himself, the lantern-jawed frontman cleaned up with Ajax last season with 49
goals in 48 games.
Elsewhere, egg-headed stat buffs should be advised
that eight out of England's past 10 games have produced more than 2.5 goals, as
have nine out of 10 played by the USA. The two sides meet on Saturday and a
successful bet on that game serving up three or more goals will double your
money; a good return on an outcome that, statistically at least, looks a
shoo-in.
And so to the bookie benefit that is World Cup novelty
betting. In the aforementioned Jesus T-shirt market, South Africa (16-1) could
be a sound investment, but while church-going midfielder Steven Pienaar has
form in the field of unveiling religiously themed undergarments, the T-shirt he
revealed after scoring a winner for Everton in 2008 specifically proclaimed
God, rather than his son, to be "great". While you'd expect any bookie who has
a passing familiarity with the central dogma of Christian theology to pay out
on the grounds that both are one and the same, the potential for becoming
embroiled in an unwinnable ecclesiastical debate is just too great. With that
in mind, a few quid on the hot-headed Argentinian ref-botherer Javier
Mascherano getting sent off at some point during the tournament might be a
shrewder investment. In terms of fun betting, it isn't so much a laugh as the
proverbial lock.
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