Of course, it is far too early to tell what is going to happen this year in the English leagues, but there have been some useful indicators. The three leagues below the Premier League have started off as they promised – incredibly tight and difficult to predict. However, already we have seen a few things [...]
Everyone who is living on planet football in England will know that in the next 14 days there are four huge semi-finals in European competition, and that two games in the Premier League on Sunday are likely to decide the title.
But where else in England and Europe should the discerning football fan be looking for the drama, excitement, elation and sheer gut-wrenching fear and desolation that makes this the greatest game on planet Earth…
Easter weekend found a few casualties, and a few winners, but not as many as we usually find on the biggest weekend for domestic football of the year. Footbet’s editor – a former English Leagues editor for ESPN, takes a look at all three lower leagues and picks out the best bets for the final month of the season, including a 25/1 shot
After the scourge of a brutal winter comes the gamblers scourge of unpredictable pitches. It looked like the usual rant of a madman when Sir Alex Ferguson suggested that the turgid pitch had “killed Wayne Rooney”, but he may have a point. The problems with the Wembley pitch are well documented, but elsewhere in England – as the permafrost threatened to lift across the country – an unprecedented number of managers claimed the pitch as a factor in iffy results. There were grumblings at Peterborough in The Championship as the poor surface did nothing to help a home side that prefers to play it on the deck, but the worst pitching – inevitably – further down the leagues.
We are now creeping towards the 100-day marker for the world cup in South Africa in the summer, which is starting to have an intriguing side-effect on the Premier League. It is a very difficult thing to spot, but any team with a number of World Cup-bound players in it, is going to suffer a little as those players begin to get the injury-sweats. To pick up an injury at this stage – with only a couple of weeks before national managers make provisional decisions about their final squad – would be absolutely calamitous, and the players are more than aware of it.
The season is just moments away and the inevitable has happened – favourites Leeds are down a player. And not just any player either… whereas the fans of the League One club would have sighed and accepted the disappearance of a potentially temperamental Jermaine Beckford or the ageing Luciano Becchio with a whistful shrug, the [...]
