A Game Of Two Halves

I did have the second part of my Asian betting post all ready to go (including another large-breasted Asian beauty for you all), but I think I must have accidentally deleted the entry 'cos I can't find it for the life of me. Oh well, I'll knock it up again I suppose (the post, not the beauty) - but in the meantime, I thought I'd change track and chat about how first-half action can affect the second half in a match of association football. Nothing like a bit of axiomatic fat-chewing, is there?

I've been looking at the English Premier League and the Championship over the last three full seasons worth of data to see how many goals are scored by both teams after a particular scoreline. Hopefully it will be helpful to some of you out there.

Okay, so the tables on the left here show the average number of goals scored by the home and away teams when the given scoreline was achieved in the first-half of the match. So, for the EPL, we can see that if the first half finished 0-0, then on average the home side will score 0.85 goals and the away side will manage 0.63.

Maybe there's nothing too amazing with all that, but there are a few points to note. For example, a first-half score of 1-2 is quite a dangerous score for any away Premier League side as it appears to trigger something of a fightback from the home side (1.02 goals). This is also reflected in the Championship, although is not quite as pronounced. In both leagues, the 1-0 and 2-0 scorelines will probably also see the home side go on to stretch their lead in the second-half.

As far as the home side is concerned, 0-1 is a bad first-half result in the Premier League, causing the away side to improve even further - while 2-1 is rather precarious in the Championship, as that causes the away side to redouble their efforts even further in the second-half.

If you're looking for the maximum number of goals in the second-half, then 0-1 is top in the Premier League (with an overall total of 1.67 goals), and 2-0 triggers most goals in the second-half of Championship matches, seeing on average 1.65 goals.

Right, another pair of tables, and this pair is unfortunately perhaps even less interesting than the dull tables above (sorry about that). These two show the number of goals scored when the first goal is scored in a particular 10 minute section. For example, in the EPL table, if the first goal is scored in the first ten minutes of a game, then on average there will be 3.69 goals in the match. Unsurprisingly, the number of goals steadily dwindles with the passage of time. Shocker, huh?

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Note, I do realise that I have a number of comments that require answering. I'll try and get round to those in my next post.