Day 1 Africa Cup of Nations Tips: Back Ivory Coast to make dazzling start

• The Elephants far too strong

• Guinea Bissau have leaky defence

• Key tournament goals trends revealed

Ivory Coast vs Guinea Bissau
Sat, 20:00
Live on BBC Three and Sky Sports Football

Ivory Coast are deservedly strong favourites to make a winning start when the opening game of the Africa Cup of Nations takes place on Saturday night.

The host nation are 1.271/4 to beat Guinea Bissau while Guinea Bissau are 21.020/1 outsiders. It's difficult to argue with those odds given the obvious gulf in quality and form between these sides.

Form and quality favour hosts

In front of a packed crowd in Abidjan, the Elephants will expect to triumph, and have the class to effortlessly do so. They're currently 7.613/2 third favourites in the outright market and those odds may shorten slightly if they win convincingly here.

Nottingham Forest trio Serge Aurier, Willy Boly and Ibrahim Sangare are among the players in their squad, but it's the lack of a single stand-out star name that may turn out to be Ivory Coast's tournament superpower.

There's tremendous balance to manager Jean-Louis Gasset's 27-man party, with the talent spread evenly across all zones of the pitch. In certain positions, there's a barely discernible difference in quality between the no.1 and no.2 choice players.

Ivory Coast crushed Sierra Leone 5-1 in their one and only pre-tournament friendly. The fact that five different players got on the scoresheet on that occasion underlines the strength in depth at their disposal.

Gulf in class

Ivory Coast's terrific warm-up result was in stark contrast to opponents Guinea Bissau's solo friendly outing: the Wild Dogs suffered a 6-2 thrashing at the hands of Mali on January 6.

The defensive woes on show in that game are a real concern for Guinea Bissau. The lack of a settled starting line-up is another genuine worry for manager Baciro Cande and his players.

Back big winning margin

Given the difference in quality between these two sides, and the fact that Ivory Coast enter the tournament in fine scoring form while Guinea Bissau's defending looks so flawed, the Asian Handicap market is the way to play.

Ivory Coast are available with a -1.5 Asian Handicap start at around 1.910/11 on the Exchange. For this selection to pay out, the hosts must win by two or more goals. We're happy to back them to do so. For a full guide to Asian Handicap betting, click here.

Group phase goals patterns

The Africa Cup of Nations is traditionally seen as one of the lower-scoring major tournaments, so here at Betfair we've crunched the numbers to discover if this is actually the case.

The short answer is: yes, it is. In the past two tournaments - i.e. the two since the number of participating teams was increased to 24 - the average number of goals per game across the 36 group-phase games was below two.

In fact, the number of group-phase goals was exactly the same at the 2019 and 2021 tournaments - 68, giving us the same average of 1.89 goals per group game at each tournament.

Low goals the trend

There was a similar pattern to how the goals were distributed across those two tournaments, too. In both the 2019 and 2021 tournaments, the lowest-scoring group produced just eight goals. In 2019, the highest-scoring group contained 16 goals. In 2021, the highest-scoring group contained 15 goals.

What does all this mean from a betting point of view? Retrospectively, it means that had you backed all games in the 2019 and 2021 group phases to have Under 2.0 on the Goal Lines market, you would have made a profit.

Unders the pick in recent past

In 2019, 16 games had under two goals, with only eight having over two goals. Twelve games had exactly two goals. In 2021, 19 games had under two goals, with only 10 having over two goals. Seven games had exactly two goals.

Looking at some of the early prices for this year, Under 2.0 on the Goal Lines market is currently available at odds-against in certain games.

Were these prices to hold up throughout the group phase, and were the tournament to be as low-scoring as the last two offerings, Unders rather than Overs would be the selection on a game-by-game basis.

Now read about our tournament Top Goalscorer selections!

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