Ever feel like you’re guessing when betting on tennis, cricket or golf? I make sense of the stats and trends so you can bet confidently and enjoy watching your bets play out.
The Capital One Cup (The League Cup) is the lesser known of the 2
major cup competitions in England, although it does offer a route
into European Football for the winner it is not as popular as the
FA Cup, even though the same prize awaits the winner of that
competition too.
Teams that are already playing in European Football this season get
a bye into round 3, whilst the rest of the teams enter in round 2
after the initial round 1 fixtures of the lower league teams.
The teams not entering until round 3 this season are Man City,
Chelsea, Liverpool, Arsenal, Everton, Tottenham & Hull.
By the time these clubs enter the competition we are down to the
last 32 of the competition, meaning they are only 4 games away from
the final at Wembley.
RECENT HISTORY
When you look at the teams picked by their managers from some of the bigger clubs, you would think they were not interested in winning this competition but recent history suggests otherwise.Going back through the last 15 winners, back to the year 2000 we can see that Liverpool (3 times), Man Utd (3 times), Chelsea (2 times), Tottenham & Man City (once each) have picked up the trophy.
That's 2/3 or 10 of the last 15 winners (14 if you exclude the 2000 final), which seems to suggest that the big boys do takes this seriously and only field so called weakened teams to give their squad players more experience.
Again looking back to the 2001 final, 14 finals in total and 28 teams we can see that Liverpool, Man Utd, Man City, Chelsea, Arsenal & Tottenham have played in the final 17 times, that's a huge 60.1% and that's only these 6 teams and not the Premiership as a whole.
If we include the other Premiership finalists it shows us that 25 teams from the Premiership have played in the last 14 finals (89%) and that only 3 teams from outside the Premiership have reached the final.
In the last 14 years there has only ever been 2 finals (2004 & 2013) where none of the above named Premiership sides (Liverpool, Man Utd, Man City, Chelsea, Arsenal & Tottenham) have reached the final.
There have been 5 finals in which 2 of those 6 have played in the same final (2003, 2005, 2007, 2008, 2009).
BETTING
It's no surprise that the 6 clubs i have already mentioned are at the head of the betting for this competition, the best prices on each team are as follows -Man City - 6/1
Chelsea - 13/2
Man Utd - 15/2
Liverpool - 9/1
Arsenal - 10/1
Tottenham - 14/1
If you think that 1 of these 6 teams will win the Capital One Cup then you could actually dutch them all at the best prices available and make a 50% profit on your initial outlay.
Actually, it's just over 50%, which is a pretty good investment, considering you are backing the teams most likely to win the Cup
Ok, so there are some risks involved as none of them could actually win the cup, but even if they don't and you have had a bet anyway, what are the chances that you would have actually backed the winners if they are not from those 6, although you could also have a small ew stake on your initial fancy as you can get 33/1+ on every other team in the betting apart from Everton, who are available at 16/1
DUTCHING
So let's say you decide you want to dutch the top 6 in the betting and place a combined stake of £60, any winner will see you receive slightly over £90, you would need to stake as follows -Man City - £13.16 @ 6/1
Chelsea - £12.28 @ 13/2
Man Utd - £10.84 @ 15/2
Liverpool - £9.21 @ 9/1
Arsenal - £8.37 @ 10/1
Tottenham - £6.14 @ 14/1
