Betfair Official Blog

Champions League

Champions League betting: Fitness of Totti doesn't mean a Roman Holiday for Man Utd

Click here to view market

Jamie "The Pacman" Pacheco tells us why Roma will miss their skipper Totti more than most but why that alone won't be enough for Man Utd to take a lead into the second leg

Over the years there have been a few select sportsmen who were so influential, iconic and inspirational within their teams that you could almost say they owned the team, to the extent that the individual player's name came before the team's. We had Michael Jordan's Chicago Bulls in the early nineties, Don Bradman's "Invincibles" and Ferenc Puskas' Hungary.

The incredible amounts of money in modern sport that have brought with them greater levels of fitness and strength (compare the anatomy of the average current Premiership footballer to that of Division One players in the eighties), improved training methods and better equipment (consider how much further and harder batsmen hit a ball in cricket these days due to bigger and heavier bats compared to a few years back) and it's fair to say that it's more difficult for an individual to have a huge impact in a team sport than in the past. Yes, there are Cristiano Ronaldos, Muttiah Muralitharans and Dan Carters who can win a game for you by themselves and very often do but I don't think we'll ever see an individual player almost single-handedly (excuse the pun) guide their team to victory like Diego Maradona did at the 1986 World Cup.

One player who has an overwhelming influence on the fortunes of his team is Roma's Francesco Totti. Over the last decade the talismanic number 10 has been skipper, set-piece taker and the driving force behind Roma, scoring 164 goals in 392 league appearances, and 17 in all competitions so far this season. The flipside of a player having this sort of influence is that he is sorely missed when unavailable and the thigh strain that will rule him out of the first leg of Roma's tie against Man Utd could well be the deciding factor in Man Utd's progress to the last four. They are now just [1.4] to do just that, having been as big as [1.57] when the market first went up and Totti's absence will have been a big factor in the shift in price.

Even without Totti, I can't see Manchester United winning at the Stadio Olimpico tomorrow night though. United have looked awesome in the Premiership in destroying all-comers, scoring bagloads of goals and managing to keep plenty of clean sheets in the process. But playing an Italian side in knockout football is a completely different animal to the Premiership and if the likes of Ronaldo, Tevez and Rooney think they're going to get the sort of space handed to them by the likes of Derby and even Villa at the weekend, they have another think coming. A midfield of Daniele De Rossi, Aquilani and Perotta is probably tougher to break down than anything United have faced in the Premiership all season and I've always been a big believer in the fact that if you can stop Paul Scholes from running the match you've a decent chance of stopping Man Utd. A lay of Manchester United at [2.68] on the match odds is therefore my initial bet for this match.

I'm not normally a big fan of ante-post bets on the correct score market but there's something about the 1-1 scoreline that appeals to me. I fancy a low-scoring match, the draw above any of the other two outcomes and feel that this scoreline more than any other the is one that both sides would settle for - if those are the numbers on the scoreboard with half an hour to go, neither side will go hell for leather to try and score a second. The 6.8 on a 1-1 score looks a decent price to me.

One player who will have to step up a gear for Roma in his captain's absence is the underated Mancini. The versatile Brazilian scored the winner in their home match against Real Madrid in the previous round and probably represents Roma's best chance of a goal so I wouldn't put anyone off backing him to score at anytime at odds of [3.8]. You have to think that Cristiano Ronaldo's goalscoring run will end at some point but in the sort of form he's in now and with the confidence he's playing with, it may not be Tuesday night that that happens. Sir Alex Ferguson is unlikely to play both Tevez and Rooney in Rome and that should mean even more responsibility than usual on Ronaldo to push forward and get in goalscoring positions. Backing Ronaldo to score at anytime at [3.1] may be worth a small investment.