Russian in a hurry

Bit of a whupping for the Czechs. I'm no Arsenal fan but how come Arshavin didn't play like that for the Gooners during the last year or two? He was excellent tonight.

I've enjoyed the first night of the Euros. It's been good fun. I won't waffle on too much tonight, but I'll try and have a bit more to say tomorrow. Toodle-pip for now.


Football: £38.05 | Tote: |  Total P&L:  £38.05

 

Football Showing 1 - 2 of 2 markets

Market Start time Settled date Profit/loss (£)
Football / Russia v Czech Republic : Correct Score 08-Jun-12 19:45  08-Jun-12 21:37  128.29
Football / Russia v Czech Republic : Over/Under 2.5 goals 08-Jun-12 19:45  08-Jun-12 20:55  -90.24

Dull Opener?

Yes, the opening match in any European Championship is always dull and boring, and almost certainly a 0-0 draw. That's right, isn't it?

Nah! Two sendings-off, a saved penalty with a goalkeeper's first touch of the ball, and a disallowed goal that shouldn't have been. That's not too dull.



Decent enough start for me. I'll try and post up again after this evening's match.



Football: £145.36 | Tote: |  Total P&L:  £145.36

 

Football Showing 1 - 2 of 2 markets

Market Start time Settled date Profit/loss (£)
Football / Poland v Greece : Over/Under 2.5 goals 08-Jun-12 17:00  08-Jun-12 18:53  0.66
Football / Poland v Greece : Correct Score 08-Jun-12 17:00  08-Jun-12 18:52  144.70

Denmark Win the European Championships

First-off, an apology regarding my last post:

Anonymous
You forgot Sweden as a participant!

Well, I didn't "forget" them, I just highlighted the wrong team - Turkey in the first table instead of Sweden - and so took Turkey across to the second table. Sorry about that. Anyway, you still get the picture and I can't be bothered to redo the tables.

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Aah, so it's not Portugal who win the European Championships, as I boldly stated in my last entry. Nope, amazingly Denmark will pull-off another almighty shock just as they did back in '92.

So what do I base this new brash assumption upon? It's based on additional Elo points gained during the last year. Here's the table to prove it:

Yes, Denmark have gained more Elo ranking points this year than any other team. Not sure how relevant these particular stats are, mind you: look at Holland, undoubtedly one of the more likely teams to figure prominently in the competition yet down in last place in my table, with -56 points.

If you want to view how the Elo World Rankings would work for the first eight matches of the European Championships, you can see the details in the downloadable spreadsheet HERE.

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Don't like those stats. Okay, how about these. Let's look and see if there is any correlation between FIFA World rankings and past success in the European Championships. Let's see who's outstripped their world ranking the most and who has fared the worst.

Just like the previous posts, I will only be looking at Euro ’96 onwards due to the format change in the competition at that point. The FIFA World rankings are easily available for all the ’96, ’00, ’04 and ’08 Championships.

For each previous European Championship, I have taken the world rankings from May of each relevant year, so one month before each competition started. The non-European teams have obviously been excluded from these rankings, so I’ve therefore “scrunched” their positions up to fill any vacant slots. The rankings of course have absolute numbers, but when comparing those rankings against final position within each competition, I’ve had to make some decisions:

Winner of competition     = First (no shit)
Runner-up                 = Second 
Losing Semi-finalist      = 3.5 (average of 3rd and 4th)
Losing Quarter-finalist   = 6.5 (average of 5th to 8th)
Losing in Group Stage     = 12.5 (average of 9th to 16th)

Therefore if a team is ranked 4th in the world according to FIFA, then they would be expected to reach the 3.5 level (semi-finals) in the Euros. If they do better than that, they will attract a positive score; if, however, they only make it to the quarter-finals, then they will receive a negative score (3.5 minus 6.5).

This of course is completely unfair as, if a country is always near the top of the world rankings, then they can only meet their expectations but rarely better them, whilst weaker, lower-ranked teams can more easily exceed the ranking. This is graphically demonstrated with this table:

Hmm, Portugal out in front again. Let's ignore that for now, and try and tailor our ranking a bit better. How about if I give each team a starting value of 1 to 16 points dependent on their current world ranking? So Spain will get a 16 point head-start.

Oh damn. It's Portugal again, the one-man team that is not fancied at all this time around - especially as they are in the "group of death".

Oh well. As I said yesterday, you only have one choice. Lump on! :-)

Portugal Win the European Championship

What's this? A prediction? Well, no, not really. Tomorrow I will produce a similar headline with a different team based on different statistics, but today's stats are all about past performance in the Euros.

Here is a table showing all the historical results since Euro '96:

The teams coloured in pink(ish) are those teams who will be participating in this year's European Championships. Obviously due to things like qualification for past competitions and progression within those competitions, the teams have played a variable number of matches within the Euros. The standard three points for a win, one point for a draw is given in my table - not only for the group stages but for all matches played, right up to the final. Do please shout if you strongly disagree with that method.

So, let's look who performs well in the Euros. We have the obvious candidates such as Spain (33 pts), Holland (32 pts) and Germany (31 pts), but out in front is Portugal with a surprising 37 pts, which is made up of 12 wins and one draw. England have only managed 19 pts, but of course we don't always qualify for the tournament.

Removing all the teams who are not in this year's competition, the table below translates their wins, draws and losses into percentages:

This shows that Portugal have won 63.16% of all their matches, which is an excellent win rate considering that early rounds tend to be played less aggressively than later rounds. France and Holland also perform well (55.56%) in the Euros - which doesn't bode too well for England come Monday.

The hosts, Poland, have never won a match in the Euros, but have only qualified once. Ukraine have never qualified (since '96 that is).

So, place every penny you have in your bank account on Portugal, because the statistics speak for themselves...

Unless you wait for tomorrow.

More Euro Trash

More fanciful statistics for your delectation. Again, make up your own minds on the worth of these. I'll throw them over to you and you can do what you want with them. My advice would be to treat this information with a large dose of caution, but if you do take anything from them, then read the data in conjunction with that given in the previous post.

Below is a table showing the average goal scoring times during the last four European Championships, separated out into the Group Stages (sub-divided here to 1st eight games, 2nd batch of eight games and 3rd batch of eight games), then quarters, semis and the final. The data again becomes extremely thin indeed as less teams become involved at each stage.

If the data has any worth, then a paucity of goals in the first half of the first eight matches seems to be a pattern. And a return to a cautious approach seems to be the order of the day after having escaped from the group stages, as the quarter finals tend to have late goals.

Euro Trash

Just a brief look at some simple Under/Over 2.5 Euro stats, which you may find helpful or you may find completely useless. I say completely useless as there is a rather small sample from which we can take our Euro data.

Before Euro '96 in England, there were only two groups of four teams in the group stages, so we can really only look at Euro '96 onwards for similar types of data; and in doing so, we have this:

Not too many surprises really. In the Group Stages, the first round of eight games (2 matches in each of the four groups) the trend is towards Under 2.5 goals, as teams come out cautiously, trying not to lose rather than trying to actively win. This starts to disappear in the second batch of eight games (perhaps a team has lost their first match and now need to show a bit more resolve to continue further); and the last group of eight matches in the Group Stages moves into Over 2.5 goals, as teams go all out for victory in the hope of progressing.

The quarter finals through to the finals don't really show any trends (as mentioned, largely due to the small sample). I suppose we could take the World Cup data into consideration as this follows a similar format, but this of course introduces other variables such as the manner in which certain continental teams tend to play and the styles with which they are accustomed to. I may add-in this data just for fun though. We'll wait and see.

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.