Super League Betting: Noble's Crusaders are major value

Super League / Ralph Ellis / 05 February 2010 / Leave a Comment

"Crusaders plus 22.5 points against Wigan is priced between [2.0] and [2.2] and looks a major piece of value."

Brian Noble gets the chance to settle some old scores tonight when his Celtic Crusaders side take on his old club, Wigan, at the DW Stadium. Ralph Ellis believes the Welsh club could be value.

You can do anything with statistics. That's probably what eight out of 10 cats think, anyway! It's especially true in sport where facts and figures get twisted any which way to make an argument.

Wigan's decision to sack Brian Noble, for instance, was completely justified because he'd lost five semi-finals in three years and failed to bring back silverware to one of rugby league's traditional powerhouse clubs. Then again, it might have been a hasty and impatient move to get rid of a coach who had saved them from certain relegation and brought them to the brink of getting to finals again.

Noble gets a chance to make his case tonight when his new Crusaders team go to the DW Stadium for his old club's first Super League clash under their new coach Michael Maguire. The former Great Britain coach is saying all the right things in advance of his return, tipping Australian Maguire to build on the squad he left behind by getting them back to winning ways. But you can bet that behind those kind words there's an agenda to remind chairman Ian Lenagan of the quality of the man he got rid of.

While Lenagan still believes he was right to go for change, Noble still has the support of prop Stuart Fielden who followed him to the DW Stadiuim from Bradford but never really produced the form afterwards to justify the record fee involved. "We didn't win anything while he was here but he saved the club from relegation and quite a lot of people forget that," is Fielden's verdict.

Noble is a quality coach. Any doubts about that were blown away last Friday night when his side, hastily thrown together in Crusaders new HQ in Wrexham, gave Leeds Rhinos a far tougher start to the new Super League season than they were expecting. I'd backed Leeds to win by more than 24.5 points at roughly even money and with 60 minutes gone, and the score 6-6, I'd written off my money before a flurry of late tries came to the rescue.

Wigan, who are [15.0] to finish top of the regular season table and [7.6] to win the Challenge Cup, are not surprisingly [1.08] to launch their season with a win tonight. But with a week's extra fitness work under the belt of the Crusaders players, who had been put together just nine days before the season opened, Warriors could have even more problems than the Rhinos did in putting their rookie opposition away. Crusaders plus 22.5 points is priced between [2.0] and [2.2] and looks a major piece of value.

It's tough to draw too many early conclusions in Super League. The peculiar fixtures, which mean the season will be more than a week old before most of the clubs play their first game, makes it hard to know the impact of other new signings. But the way Noble's side performed a week ago in the snow in Wrexham could make them a useful side to follow with a 30 point advantage in the handicap betting. Try backing them to win it at around [12.0] and see if you can get it matched.

Five things you might not know about Stuart Fielden

1. Born in Halifax in September 1979, he was brought up in the village of Old Town near Hebden Bridge. The son of an artist, he still has a framed picture of his boyhood idol Burnley winger Roger Eli that his dad drew for him

2. He started playing rugby league aged 15 for local club Illingworth after a friend's dad asked him to make up the numbers in a trial game.

3. His £450,000 move from Bradford to Wigan in 2006 is still the Super League's highest transfer fee. Several players had to defer salary and change contracts to get round the salary cap rules to make way for his signing, but Wigan were still found to have breached the cap

4. He fought Lee Radford in a charity boxing match in 2006 - and was stopped in the second round

5. As a youngster he had a Celtic band tattooed on his arm which he has now had removed