Non-league / Gary Boswell / 22 November 2007 /

Boswell's Betfair Blog - a bi-weekly round up of the best plays in the world of non-league football

England - the only country in the world capable of getting a gift horse and not only looking in its mouth, but sticking its whole head down its throat!! Pah, thank goodness for non-league football where a degree of sanity and dignity can be restored!

One of the Boswell ground rules is never bet on a team with an unreliable goalkeeper. Especially in crunch games. I would not necessarily expect to see illustrations as to why not so graphically demonstrated in international football!

Back to the real stuff tonight and live on Setanta we get to witness the best English goalkeeper that non-league has to offer in Aldershot's Nicky Bull. He's been first choice for the England C team (which for those uninitiated is the national non-league team that actually wins the tournaments it enters!) for a couple of seasons now and is one of the reasons that the Shots sit proudly at the top of Blue Square Premier.

The presence of a pair of Grants is the other. Top-scoring John is back from injury and joined by junior Joel who is also doing the business for a Gary Waddock team that are continuing to defy pre-season expectations and must be taken seriously now as possible Champions.

My colleague Frank Gregan has given the game a good write up in his blog so I'll refrain from an in-depth analysis other than to agree with his general summary in that I expect a tight resistance from Grays who are attractively priced at [5.4] with such a good away record and such a well marshalled defence. After last night, it will be good to watch an effective defence in action and I expect this to be a very low scorer so that plays on the 0-0 draw and the under 2.5 goals market are both appealing.

I can't quite get to the position of expecting a Grays win though despite the attractiveness of the price. Main reason for this is that I opposed Aldershot on Saturday with a rampant Rushden attack and although the game panned out much as I'd predicted with Rushden winning all the possession and chances stats, Aldershot still managed to win the game. The biggest indicator of potential champions in my book is the teams who win games that they've not dominated and Aldershot are doing plenty of that this season. I don't like [1.8] an Aldershot win as a bet but I do slightly prefer that outcome as the likely result.

My play will be to back the draw before kick off and hedge back in play whilst still nil-nil.I will also be looking for the Shots win price to drift out to 2.0 which I intend to take so long as I'm happy that the play has given me the feeling that the stubborn Grays resistance can be broken down.

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