Eddie over at A Football Trader's Path has an interesting analysis of tonight's Group E fixtures which is worth a read. It's a subject which caused a bit of debate the other night in the Trading Football chatroom where numerous voices were shouting 'fix' very loudly.
The prices for the Shaktar v Juventus game do look suspiciously like a suspiciously obvious fix such that you might find in a late season Serie B or Serie C game in Italy. But, as Eddie says, there are reasons other than the obvious 'fix' why prices should be as they are. So let's take a theoretical 'what if' look at the competition as a whole from the context of Group E, and see if there's a low liability angle we might be able to exploit.
The Champions League is set up in such a way that there are very definite benefits to finishing first in the qualifying group stage. If we work on the basic assumption that any team in this competition would rather not play the likes of Barca, Real, Bayern and Man U in a knock out tie I think we would be on safe ground! Ordinarily I'd include the mighty Blues in that list but as we know they can't join that exclusive group this year, and with all the managerial shenanigans etc probably would not be as feared as the others anyway.
So, hopefully we can all agree that both Juve and Shaktar would a) like to qualify for the next stage and b) would both prefer to top the group. Shaktar don't need to worry about the former, they are through (and probably liking the thought of drawing the gooners in round two :-) ). I doubt at this stage that either side are looking too far beyond the second round, but if I were the Shaktar boss I think I'd rather face Chelsea again than Juventus as it stands at the moment. So with this particular match I see no advantage to Shaktar in sitting back and taking a 0-0! Both teams have to try to win in my view, and on that basis the value I see in the Group E dynamic is a lay of Juve to qualify (1.32 at the time of writing).
Turning to the other game, I'll start by saying that having considered the appointment of Benitez since my last post / rant about it I now have concluded that I have just two questions:
1) Why on earth did Abramovich want to offer the job to Benitez?
2) Even more perplexing, why on earth did Benitez want to accept it?
But be that as it may it is clear that the Blues are far from firing on all cylinders, and that a hostile reaction from the faithful at the Bridge tonight is all but a given. They should walk this game, but with recent events I'm afraid (as a Chelsea supporter) that I find myself wondering if 1.13 is far too low a price. I'm not going to lay them, although I might regret that decision, but will rather be looking for the Blues to go ahead against the Danes preferably quite early in the evening and for Shaktar to get a goal against the Italians.
Two other games catch my eye this evening as being potential Scatter Gun opportunities - namely the matches between Celtic and Moscow and Lillte v Sevilla.
Good luck if you're trading the CL tonight!
;-)
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