I'm Back

Hi to everyone. I'm back from my little sojourn over in South East Asia, and it's good to be back - if a little strange as everything seems so, so quiet in comparison. I can almost hear a pin drop in England despite the Jubilee celebrations that are now building up nicely.

So, Manila. What can I say? Home of the nice-coloured envelope, there are nearly 80 million people in the Philippines, 15 million in Manila, which is one of the largest and most densely populated cities in the world. The place is a huge urban sprawl, exceptionally hot, horribly polluted, filthy dirty and desperately poor. It's a city with the most stunningly bad driving I've ever seen (Rome, for example is like a gentleman's club in comparison). There is absolutely no road etiquette and every car pushes in front of the other, changes lanes without warning, beeps, flashes their lights constantly and recklessly tries to steal every last inch of space from each other.

The place absolutely stinks of shit from the poor sewage system; there are huge cockroaches the size of small rats roaming the streets in gangs; homeless, horribly deformed people sitting on the pavements begging; blast-furnace temperatures and more prostitutes than you could shake a stick at...

And you know what? I absolutely loved the place. Despite everything, it's the people that get under your skin. Most of them have little or nothing in the way of possessions but are happier and more content than we are. They can sit on a stool with a beer in their hand and not have a care in the world. I love that attitude and feel that we can learn a lot from them and their outlook on life.

Anyway, this ain't no travel diary, so I'll shut up about my trip and turn my attention to betting and trading. I only returned on Friday, but some bright spark thought it would be a good idea if they took me along to the Epsom Derby yesterday. I was horribly jet-lagged, but the day turned out to be good fun, in spite of losing a bit of money and once falling asleep on the grass surrounded by a mass of picnickers. The winner from Britain's Got Talent (a lady with her performing dog) did a turn, the Red Devil's parachute team dropped onto the (very windy) course, the queen and Prince Philip turned up and Katherine Jenkins (top totty) sang the national anthem. All good stuff.

The racing, however, surpassed all this easily. A top-class card with some outstanding horses. I don't know much about the GGs, but seeing a six foot one inch jockey (Joseph O'Brien) riding the two top favourites, St Nicholas Abbey and Camelot, to victory was a bit of a surprise. At only 19 years old, he seems to have exactly the right temperament to be a top jockey, although his height may eventually curtail his career as he fills out.

Of course since I've been away, all sorts of excitement and amazing drama has taken place in my absence: a heart-stopping last day of the season, Chelsea finally realising their dream and the odd Premier league sacking or two. Incredibly I completely missed all of this, not catching a single match or sporting event of any kind while I was away.

This, of course, means that I'm ready to rock and roll when the Euros start shortly. I'll be trading away like billy-o, although I will be away from the 15th to the 18th as I'm taking my patient and understanding wife away to Milan for a long weekend, which I'm looking forward to.

This is slightly bad planning on my part of course as I shall be missing some games, including one England match. I should, however, still have plenty of trading to do throughout the rest of the competition.

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Having a quick browse around at blogland to see what's been happening, I notice a couple of established bloggers have hung up their keyboards. This is a shame but if you have something better to be doing (and quite honestly, who doesn't?) or it's no longer fun, then why not stop blogging? It should be fun to do and not an onerous task.


I did also spot this entry HERE from Cassini about the time of the first goal for games that have a low goal expectation:

I have seen a few comments about the correlation between Under / Over prices, and the TOFG (Time of First Goal) markets, and someone (I forget who, sorry) recently left a comment suggesting that the Half-Time 0-0 market might be another opportunity. It certainly should be, and is something I'll be tracking next season. For the record, in 2011-12, of the 156 XX Draw selections, 60 were 0-0 at half-time (38.5%, IP 2.6) and the average TOFG (when there was one) was 33.66 minutes. Unfortunately, I do not know what the HT 0-0 prices were, nor what the average TOFG is, but I would hope that both offer some value.

I do collect goal times for various leagues and can provide this small snippet of information that may be helpful. The goal average times for under/over matches in the English Premier League for the 2011/12 season are:


                  Total 1st goal         2nd goal        3rd goal
Over 2.5 goal matches: 204 24.03 42.53 63.14
Under 2.5 goal matches: 176 49.18 78.55 N/A


I can provide the median also if those are wanted by anyone. Note that for the 1st, 2nd and 3rd goal averages, if that number of goals wasn't achieved then a value of 93 minutes is used to build the averages. There are arguments for and against this practice. We should also be aware of the large amount of variance within these figures, but as a general statement it would appear that for games with low goal expectations, there generally won't be a goal in the first half. We could also say that if there is no goal after the first half-an-hour, then the match will probably not be an Overs match.

We could also say that there could be value at that very point for certain teams! Which, for me, is the benefit of collecting and analysing score data for all leagues and for all teams within those leagues.