Sports Desk - By Aodhán Elder

The Ashes
One of the oldest rivalries in international sport resumes in December as England make the trip “Down Under” to take on Australia at cricket. In pricing up any sporting event, bookmakers must weigh up the history with the current reality. In the case of Australia, that presents problems. For much of the last two decades, they were the undisputed doyen of the Test arena with teams that deserve to be mentioned in the same breath as the giants of the game. What the odds compilers are now faced with is a set of impressive results but a present team far inferior to that of the recent past.
On the face of it, England’s Ashes record in Australia isn’t bad. The hosts have an all-time record of 76 wins, but the visitors have managed to win 53 times and shared the spoils on 23 occasions. In short, England has managed to win or at least not lose precisely half of the time. The problem arises when you ignore the results from long ago and focus on more modern times. In the last three decades of Ashes cricket in Australia, the hosts have taken a commanding hold. The hosts suddenly win 60 percent of matches on their own turf, draw almost 23 percent of the time, with England claiming victory 17 percent, or roughly speaking, slightly less than one Test in a five-match series.
Those statistics would give England little chance, but it’s very apparent that the two sides are far more evenly matched these days. The current crop of “Baggy Greens” will bare an uncanny resemblance to the squad England comfortably disposed off in the 2009 series. England boast a more reliable bowling attack than their hosts and, in an ironic variation on the recent history of these fixtures, have the most potent spinner in world cricket. They showed they’re a match for the Aussies by beating them in 2005 and 2009, but claiming control of the urn in the antipodes would see them go down in history as one of the great English teams.
The prices for England to win the series look too skinny to warrant the risk and the correct score markets are too vulnerable to the whims of the weather, but the top English run scorer market looks interesting. Since being given his chance in the team, Irish born Eoin Morgan has been one of England’s standout performers. Some of the compilers have identified the potential, but others seem less convinced — in the Test version of the game at least. At the time of writing, Morgan is as short as 13/2 to be England’s top batsman for the Ashes, but as big as 16/1 with other firms to land the honour. The bigger price looks well worth a punt. There is a feeling that the Dubliner is best suited to the shorter forms of the game, but an assumption like that does a serious disservice to his talent.
Of course, his brilliant attacking play has been the most noticeable feature of his brief international career, but less heralded is the gritty application in pressure situations that hint success in the longer form of the game is well within his compass.
Basketball
It says a lot about the National Basketball Association (NBA) that the most intense confrontation of the season came long after the L.A. Lakers wrapped up their seventeenth Championship. LeBron James’ eventual decampment to the Miami Heat was the story of the off-season. His choice was initially considered a shock, but it soon emerged that this shock decision could have been a couple of years in the making after LeBron, Dwayne Wade, and Chris Bosh played together for the USA at the Beijing Olympics.
Caution should be advised for those considering taking the 2/1 for LeBron and his superstar friends to get it right at the first time of asking. It’s not a price that screams value, but equally anything can prove to be value if it ends up being a winner.
A better option may be laying the big teams during the season. The primary aim of every NBA team is to reach the playoffs and very often that requires winning only slightly more than half your regular season matches.
For example, last season, the Boston Celtics got to within one game of winning the NBA finals, but during the season won just 61 per cent of their matches. Perhaps more surprisingly, with home court advantage, that rate dropped to 58.5 per cent.
The big names of the sport tend to attract a certain amount of blind money and that can make them excellent lay material. So many of the regular season games mean very little in the overall scheme of things that no team really minds dropping a few. Results that go against the odds come along on a nightly basis and trying to identify them could be a way to court betting success. ♠