Bet Manchester United

The goalless draw played out by way of a friendly by the teams of those wily old soccer assassins Alex Ferguson and Claudio Ranieri last night may give some pointers to events about to unfold. United have a problem scoring goals without Cristiano Ronaldo and Wayne Rooney. These two players above all represent Manchester United’s class, the more so on the pitch than off it where they seem to want to rival each other as spoilt brats of the Premier League. On Sunday, United go to Wembley to play the showpiece Community Shield against Portsmouth who have their own new strike force in Jermaine Defoe and Peter Crouch. They also meet Portsmouth as their second game of the season. Their first is Newcastle in what looks like a leisurely start to the campaign to retain the Premier League and another showpiece game in the European Super Cup against Uefa winners Zenit St Petersburg, probably now without a striking Arshavin. In September they have just three fixtures - Liverpool, Chelsea and Bolton. Ferguson will have needed to have greased the engine by then.

Liverpool are noteworthy slow out of the blocks. They travel to Sunderland for the first day of the season, entertain Middlesbrough who punch above their weight against the better teams, get distracted by the European Cup against Standard Liege and then visit Aston Villa who were scoring for fun at the end of last season. Rafa Benitez will need to find a rythmn quickly. The bad news is that in September they also face Everton.

Arsenal are looking the part again with just the question mark about who will actually tap the ball into the net. They are young, fast and play attractive football on the harder surfaces in the sunshine of early seasons. West Bromwich Albion, Fulham and Newcastle are first up and don’t look likely to be given any change. They also have what should be an easy September before meeting Tottenham and Everton in October. The tough stuff starts in November with both Chelsea and Manchester United.

Luis Felipe Scolari seems to have the charisma to further bond and fuse the Chelsea fighting spirit with impressive wins on their travels. 5-0 against an unfit AC Milan is still 5-0. But they have some testing games against teams that would hope to break into the top four starting with Portsmouth, then Spurs, then Manchester City, then  United, then Villa. These are games that are going to matter and if the Blues can get the points in the bag, they are probably worth more than ther equivalent games for their rivals. It will also be a test of their mettle. If they are top of the league by the end of September, everyone else will fear the worst.

Bet Manchester United

Ole Gunner Solskar holds the another European Cup before his testimonial

There will be fond memories of Ole Gunner Solskar around the Premier League grounds but his type of player is increasingly out of fashion. The title race for 2008/9 will be decided in midfield. As ever Manchester United’s Alex Ferguson was ahead of the game when he signed first Michael Carrick from Spurs and then Owen Hargreaves from Bayern Munich to bring steel and guile into his midfield. It was a move that others have followed. Felipe Scolari brought in Deco to bring some zip and flair to Chelsea and has refused to let Frank Lampard go. Arsene Wenger’s only major purchase so far was to bring in Sami Nasri to compliment Cesc Fabregas in midfield. It seems after a summer of yes and no, that Rafa Benitez will get Gareth Barry to bring muscle to the Anfield army. Juande Ramos has offloaded centreforwards in favour of a dynamic midfield of Luka Modric and David Bentley. In fact all the big money has been on midfielders which means it is going to be tight in the centre circle in upcoming matches…or perhaps it is a defensive mindset that says that only teams with quality in midfield will have the vision to outwit strong defences, so it is safer to buy proven middle men than to play against them?

Bet WBA

West Bromwich Albion are an astonishing 4999/1 not to win the Premiership, as are the other two promoted clubs which just shows the statistics are against them. But they are evens to go down. But the boing boing Brummies could surprise a few teams with the kind of attacking flair they showed last season and in getting to the semi finals of the FA Cup. All it takes is Alex Ferguson to have a nervous breakdown, Felipe Scolari to play overly pretty football, Arsene Wenger to sell his whole midfield and Rafa Benitez to buy in all team of plodders. At those odds an Abramovich could snap them up, buy a couple of extra players and clean up with a £1million on the nose.

White hart Lane.

One thing is probably for sure is that whatever shuffle Juande Ramos is thinking about with his £50 million that he could pick up by selling Dimitar Berbatov to Manchester United and Robbie Keane to Liverpool, one name not on his team sheet for next season will  be the £800,000 teenager John Bostock that Spurs bought from Crystal Palace.

Suddenly Ramos finds himself in the thick of football’s increasingly vapid moral debate. At one end selling Berbatov to Manchester United is tantamount to saying that Tottenham cannot keep up with the big four.…..

Berbatov like Gianfranco Zola was at Chelsea and Dennis Bergkamp at Arsenal is a talismanic player. You cannot sell him to the opposition without ripping the heart out of the club whatever the price. Fans pay to see great players and Totenham are the losers whoever they bring in. To sell the loyal Keane too is a double wound. The big money boys at Sky and the BBC of course don’t care where they play. The cameras can move. But a fan is not going to swap shirts. He may abandon the game first.

Another argument of course is that Alex Ferguson is probably right in his judgement that Berbatov can make United that much stronger which is to every other team’s disadvantage. And while it is fashionable to point the money bags finger at Chelsea, Ferguson himself is not exactly frugal in his purchases with a team that was bought for more than £100 million and some. Nor has Rafa Benitez been a skinflint in the trabnsafer market but giving him Keane to partner Fernando Torres is also a bit like saying that Ramos is not interested in fourth place either.

At the other end of the conveyor belt, the disaffected Palace chairman Simon Jordan points out that £800,000 is not a lot for a teenage England Under 17 prodigy, not enough at least to justify and encourage smaller clubs to run feeder training academies for youngsters on the basis that every once in a while one of them will be good enough to cammand the kind of fee that could make talent spotting, training and community effort more than an exercise in charity.

Fabio Capello has inherited an English team in disarray – we won’t discuss the merits of Wales, Scotland and Northern Ireland – and which can hardly be helped when big clubs follow the movement of labour and prefer to buy, like Arsenal, from Marseille than from Mansfield.

Bostock, the Blackfriars schoolboy who made his debut as a second-half substitute against Watford, added his name to a list of 34 players, including Matthew Etherington, Peter Lorimer and Neil McNab, who have made their competitive debuts for a professional team under the age of 16. He is quick and could have been a hurdler but also academic and might have gone to university. There have been professional footbalers who have done both. Teenage tennis players manage it by distance learning.

“Bostock will not just be a good player? He can be a great player. He has a good left foot and that makes him easy on the eye, he is a good size, can run all day, pass short and pass long,” said former Palace manager Peter Taylor.

“When he first started training with the first team he would take three touches of the ball, but I encouraged him to watch Gareth Barry and Cesc Fabregas; they take one and still they never lose it.”

Bostock probably should have stayed at Palace for another season where at least under Neil Warnock he could have expected first team football and a bit of a clattering from Championship halfbacks. But football’s problem is that it will inevitably blame the boy, not itself. England’s problem is that Ramos is a Spaniard and will probably compound the malaise. Spurs are 64/1 against winning the league. As they don’t even know their team at the moment, that looks short odds, indeed. The moneymen of course though know the balance in the bank. An A side ticket on the Upper West Stand is £75. That’s a lot of money to pay not watching a teenage prodigy or one of the most elegant centre forwards in Europe.

The big question after Cristian Ronaldo went missing in the second half of Portugal’s defining Euro 2008 game against Germany is can anyone manage him except Alex Ferguson. Big Felipe Scolari has only seen the brilliance that the rest of us know so well week in and week out as he notched those astonishing 42 goals last season, in fleeting patches. He has played like an over-excited schoolboy. But if he moves to Real Madrid as the agitators suggest he will for a world record breaking fee - more than Real paid for Zinedine Zidane, can Bernd Schuster get the best out of him or could he be like Michael Owen and countless other Premiership players who have moved abroad and not lived up to their home billing. As United’s assitant manager and potential replacement for Scolari at Portugal Carlos Queiros has also pointed out both he and Ronaldo are Portugese, not Spanish. Maybe the rumours have just gone to his head, maybe too the Madridistas noticed that he went missing in action in Basel, bad foot or no bad foot. And that he sulked on the Portugese fans after the game. One thing he does not seem to have is the media savvy or poltical instincts of David Beckham. Or maybe he is thinking that if Scolari can take the money, maybe he should. United are 6/5 to retain the Premiership title but those would look like pretty crap odds without Ronaldo’s firepower. In fact that would have given them a goal difference worse than Aston Villa last season.

Bet on the Premiership 2008/9 now

The season kicks off at noon on August 16 and the bookies already have the first odds up for Premiership 2008/9 and for the first round of matches on that Saturday.

The betting says that all three promoted teams West Brom, Hull and Stoke will go straight down again. Alex Ferguson’s Manchester United remain favourites for a re-run of last season edging out Felipe Scolari’s Chelsea. The bigger surprise is perhaps Newcastle to finish sixth. There is a lot of shifting and changing in the sports betting numbers to come, but you can get your bets in early here. For this seeason there is even a book on who will get relegated!!! It’s here. Arsenal are 1499/1!

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