Non-league / Gary Boswell / 24 December 2007 /

Gary Boswell muses on the trickiest of footy punting options - the draw...

There's an old adage that you've reached maturity as a football tipster when you can predict eight draws from ten matches. Dates back of course to the days of the football pools being every working man's way out of the mire.

Initiated as a concept by them fiendish men at Littlewoods because they knew how damnedly difficult it is to confidently predict draws in football matches, the Pools is .

With such a low scoring sports contest, you'd think the statistical probability and therefore the regularity of draws was fairly set at around 33% of all games. It should be easy to get one in three right. And so it is. The difficulty comes in the fact that oddsmakers take an evenly matched game and always make the draw the outside option of the three. Where's the logic in that? Answer: no logic of course. Just long years of experience that show that it's not the evenly matched games that most commonly end up all square.

All of which makes the task of predicting them beforehand ever more damnedly difficult. Will both sides be going flat out? Which side will react best to going behind? What's the referee's record of giving dubious decisions?

I've heard them all asked by the pools panel professionals who still undertake the challenge with gusto. It's still the ultimate benchmark by which football pundits are judged. No-one will rate you until you can score above 33% at football draw prediction.

In pre-Betfair days, I religiously picked and bet my top three draw predictions each week safe in the knowledge that one correct would show me a profit. Betfair's better odds made that an even better bet and I still recommend it as a discipline for those wanting to take their football betting seriously (by which I mean wanting it to show a profit).

Boxing Day is always a great day to start.With all the study and statistical analysis - and the strategic approach to portfolio betting - you may be surprised to learn that I am still sucker for the omen and co-incidence route to bet selection (not as an end in itself but as a route to narrowing down possibles) and no more so than at this time of year.

Boxing Day remains the only day in the Western world calendar that has the letter X in it (that's if you discount the Vernal and Autumnal equinox which - let's face it - are not real days!) More strange co-incidences: it has a statistically unusual high actuality of football match draws. Why so? Bonhomie and goodwill to all men and a reluctance to trounce the opposition??!!

Three of the only five teams ever to play in the UK football League with the letter X in their name - Halifax Town,Oxford United and Exeter City now all play together in the premier non-league division.

That means that this Xmas (note the way we have abbreviated the letter X into the festive season) there are more omens than you could shake a stick at. Exeter City play at home on Boxing Day against a team whose nickname is Gulls but whose club name sounds incredibly like the name of that ugly bird that gets stuffed every December 25th. Exeter have also drawn an incredible 60% of their home games this season.

More strange co-incidences: Oxford United went out of the FA Trophy this week against a team full of Angels from Kent! As for Halifax, well I defy anyone to argue that the Shay shed is a dead ringer for the stable in Bethlehem!

Boz has picked his traditional three X factor singles to end the year with a profit. Found 'em by strange co-incidence. Stuck with them after study. All three strike me as not particularly evenly matched which makes them ideal for the purpose!

RECOMMENDATIONS:

2pt BACK the draw between Farsley Celtic-Halifax
2pt BACK the draw between Oxford-Crawley
2pt BACK the draw between Exeter-Torquay

Gary Boswell sits on the unofficial Non-League Pools Panel which he founded in 2001 to provide a prediction service to the industry. Its weekly decisions are currently published in the Non-League Today Newspaper and on Saturday December 22nd 2007 it published 100% accuracy for the third time in its history. Followers of the advice netted a 94 point profit and now stand 164 points ahead over the six years.

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