Tuesday March 5th

Nice late goal for Nantes to start the week..... long may it continue !

The afternoon email yesterday produced plenty of enquiries and questions and I spent several hours dealing with them all, but thank you for the respose !

I will finish today's email with a few words about the Champions League fixtures, but betting wise, main focus is definitely the Football League games and I am keen on three matches, where I am opposing teams low on confidence, so much sport is played between the ears and when teams go onto the pitch, not really believing they will win, then they probably won't and once lost, self belief is incredibly difficult to get back.

Championship: Huddersfield Town-Middlesbrough

Neither has been in the best of shape over recent months, but Town, the odd result aside, have been in a slump since late October and after collecting 20 points from their opening 11 starts, they have taken another 24 matches to double that tally. In addition, they have also suffered a couple of frightful hammerings in that sequence , conceding four or more to Wigan Athletic, Leicester city, Brighton, Watford and Nottingham Forest since the turn of the year. That is a sure sign that confidence is low, that once behind, they let games run away from them. Boss Mark Robins said after the defeat at Brighton on Saturday ....

“There are no quick fixes to the problems that we have at the moment,” explained Robins. “We have been where we are for a long time now. The first sixty minutes on Saturday were OK, but only OK. We are trying to push the players as much as we can do and give the fans something to get excited about.“We set-up well and didn’t really look under any danger until we conceded. I think we deserved to get level and at half-time we knew that we had to work harder and press them more, but we were positive. We allowed them too much space to exploit and then we fell apart when there second goal went in.“We can’t forget what happened on Saturday because it is a part of our make-up and we need to get rid of it. Some of the goals conceded were far too easy; we need to be stronger mentally.”

Top scorer James Vaughan ( 24-8-2) is out tonight, he has scored the decisive goals in the only two Championship matches Town have won in 2013 and with Jermaine Beckford still missing, they are short of offensive options and as discussed before, without Danny Ward, they lack width.

Boro performed well against Chelsea last midweek, but I thought that would have left them deflated and that they might struggle against leaders Cardiff City at the weekend, but they came flying out of the blocks, led 2-0 early and were very pleased to hold on for three points, there was plenty to like about both performances, the win got them back to within a point of the playoff places and they can do the double over Town, having beaten them easily in the reverse fixture, with Town recording just two attempts on target and managing only 39% possession. 1.5 units Middlesbrough -0.25 ball 2.11 asian line/ Ibramarket

Good Luck.