Monday Football Tips: Ukraine to double-up on Cyprus

Ukraine v Cyprus
Monday 7 June, 17:00 BST kick-off
Live on Sky Sports red button

It's not any ordinary Monday today is it? It's the start of European Championship week, but as well as gearing up for Euro 2020 there's still plenty of games to get stuck into too ahead of the finals.

Teams are getting their final preparations done and looking to head into Euro 2020 on a high, while punters are also gathering information, making notes, seeking out trends that could help us during the big tournament.

One team we may not know too much about is Ukraine, who topped their qualifying group for the first time ever to book their third appearance at the Euros.

They'll round-off their preparation by hosting Cyprus in a friendly on Monday night.

Despite beating Portugal to top spot in qualifying, Ukraine's results since then haven't been great with just three wins in 13 and just the odd positive performance.

Ukraine have talent, but scoring goals seems like their problem as they've bagged just once in each of their last three games against Northern Ireland, Bahrain and Kazakhstan when they should have rattled up a few more.

They haven't in fact, scored more than once in a game for 12 matches - and with their last five and Cyprus' last four games all having under 2.5 goals in them - under 2.5 goals in this game is a distinct possibility at 1.738/11.

We can do a little better though, by looking at the half time/full-time market where we expect Ukraine to be ahead at the break and finish the job off at a more palatable 2.01/1.

Ukraine have led at half-time in eight of their last 16 home friendlies, and Cyprus offer us even more encouragement as they've conceded 14 first-half goals in their last 19 friendlies.

The hosts have also kept four straight first-half clean sheets so there's a decent level of confidence in backing the half-time/full-time double result as Ukraine/Ukraine at 2.01/1.

A further stat of note for those looking on the exchanges or betting on the in-play markets is that Cyprus games rarely have a different outcome from the score at the break.

13 of Cyprus' last 15 games has seen the same result at full-time as it was at half-time, so you can act on relative confidence that the result after 45 minutes is going to stick.