English Championship Midweek 17-18 Aug
Midweek matches are back to normal times in the Championship with no more 5.30pm or 6pm kick offs.
Again though there isn’t that much between teams in our prediction model.
All the most likely results are 1-1, this was the same at the weekend where we got only 1 match exactly right (unlike the opening weekend where 5 matches ended 1-1).
This week there is one game where a 1-0 home win and 1-1 draw are almost exactly likely in our model and that is Swansea v Stoke (see table below under Home wins and Draws, both exact scores are at 12.1% likely).
If you look to the right of the table below, you can see that in our ‘Outcome Probs’ and Bookmaker ‘Mean Odds’ there really isn’t that much difference in terms of likely winners in each match. The Swansea v Stoke game is the biggest difference between our model and mean odds. We heavily favour Swansea as well as Barnsley, Hull and Reading. There is also a decent chance of a win for Bournemouth, Blackburn and Cardiff.
Bookmakers agree that Reading are favourites against Bristol City (Reading have the 2nd highest expected goals this week), West Brom favourites at home to Sheffield Utd and most other games where we have favoured a team.
However, Preston North End, despite losing both their matches so far, are ahead in our model by 10% away to Huddersfield but bookmakers have Huddersfield favoured at just 38%.
All this just shows that at the early stages there really isn’t that much in it and quite a few teams have a fair chance at some surprise results in the next few weeks.
One match does stand out more than most however and where bookmakers agree pretty closely on our odds – Hull City v Derby County, where we are 0.4% different on the likely winner odds (Hull at around 49% and Derby to lose at between 27 and 24%).