How to turn over a 1.60 shot
I knew Southampton would lose yesterday, or at least not win. How? Well there were two key overriding factors in yesterdays match.
First, I had bothered to make the trek to the south coast to watch the match. Because of the unsocial hours of the sports markets I don’t get the chance to watch much sport so when there is a team nearby that plays when I can watch, I’ll often nip along. Unfortunately for Southampton every time I watch them, they lose! My mere presence appears to send them to defeat. As it was a case of the form team playing the team short on form on this occasion. I expected this mere fact to overturn my Southampton hoodoo. They lost 3-1.
For the more logical answer of their 3-1 loss yesterday we should look at what happened between when I decided to go to the match and the events that led up to the match itself. Brighton have been on a slippery slope this season and endured some heavy defeats as they slid inexorably towards the bottom of league one. As a result their manager, Russell Slade, was sacked on the 1st November.
Things looked pretty hopefully for Southampton, this was probably the match they needed to finally lift themselves out of the bottom four of the league. That was until Gus Poyet arrived at Brighton to take over the vacant managers position. I’ve documented it before but it’s amazing how often teams that have just had a manager appointed suddenly outperform. For that reason, I felt that at a price of 1.60 Southampton didn’t represent good value. In fact they even contracted in price near the off to 1.52 according to my data.
Unfortunately because of my history with Southampton, I didn’t have a bet, such is life. I was more concerned with trying to squeak some money out of the last day of the Cheltenham open. What I can predict is though is that, because of this ‘exceptional’ loss, most rating systems will incorrectly mark down Southampton and probably incorrectly price their next match. It will take another match to work out Southampton’s true form but I’ll be looking for some value when they next play. Let’s hope its not another team that has just changed manager!
Category: Using Bet Angel
