English Championship Week 4
Bristol City play Swansea tonight, kicking off the weekend’s Championship fixtures.
Bristol City managed to win their midweek game away to Reading but Swansea have gotten off to a pretty dreadful league start managing to lose two and draw just one game. The odds however, are not in Bristol’s favour in our model (we favour Swansea at 46% to win) and I suspect this is in part based on last season’s results. Bookmakers though have Bristol City as slight favourites at 40% – 30% (Swansea).
Six teams are on seven points in the league and two of those are playing each other, West Brom (top on goal difference) are away to Blackburn in sixth. The most likely result is a 1-1 draw but our model favours West Brom at 43.6% which is very close to bookmakers at 42.6%.
At the other end of the early season table, neither Preston nor Nottingham Forest have picked up a point. Things don’t exactly look promising for Forest away to unbeaten Stoke (26.4% for a Forest win in our model, 23% bookmakers mean odds) although Preston may fancy at least a point against newly promoted Peterborough (Preston are favourites at 48.4%, our model and 43.4% bookmakers).
Some other likely results of note are Coventry at home to Reading (both our model and bookmakers favour Coventry, although a 1-1 is the most likely score), and Bournemouth at home to Blackpool, where there is just 0.4% between our 58% likely Bournemouth win and bookmakers having them on 57.6%.
