CARD king Gavin Murphy (@GamePlanGavin) is back in Spain with bookings NAP arriving on Sunday. This should be good!
Sporting Gijon v Granada | Sunday 17:30 | Sky Sports
My weekend NAP comes from northern Spain as Sporting Gijon host Granada in a relegation dogfight on Sunday evening. Both teams are bang in trouble and desperately need three points here.
Sporting are 19th in La Liga, a point and a place below Granada. This is almost do-or-die for these clubs and the head-to-head meetings between them recently make for interesting reading.
Intriguing head-to-head records
The overall average is 7.80 cards per-game but that doesn’t tell the whole story. The last five meetings have seen total card figures of 5-15-13-3-3.
The five came in 0-0 draw in October when La Liga’s worst referee for cards, Inaki Garrido, was in charge.
The 15 arived in March 2016 when Javier Fernandez was in charge. Guess who the referee is this weekend? You guessed it…. Fernandez!
Card-happy Fernandez
Fernandez is averaging 7.23 cards per-game in Spain’s top flight in 2016/17. He averages 6.31 yellow cards per-game which ranks his second most prolific behind our old friend Senor Confetti – the league average is 5.07 yellows per-match.
Fernandez also likes a red card. His 6 sendings off this season is joint-highest of Spanish referees.
This term he averages 6.00 cards per-game to Gijon and 2.00 to Granada albeit having covered each team just once.
Sporting are Spain’s third most ill-disciplined team averaging 3.41 cards per-game. Only Alaves have collected more than their 84 yellow cards.
Granada are serial offenders year-after-year and in 2016/17 they are La Liga’s fourth best team for cards received averaging 3.29 per-game.
The betting angle
Fernandez will be key and he is above average in fouls per-game (29.15), fouls per-tackle (0.73) and total cards (7.23).
I really like the look of overs in this one. William Hill were offering 21/20 on Over 65 Bookings Points – that has now gone but the 19/20 they are offering remains very attractive to me and should be backed.
If you’re new to Bookings Points, a yellow card earns 10 points and a red card earns 25 points. If a player receives 2 yellow cards and is consequently shown a red card, he receives a total of 35 Booking Points.
TOPICS European Football FootballBest Bets
Sporting Gijon v Granada – Over 65 Bookings Points (19/20 William Hill)
