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 I pride myself on being a fairly disciplined punter these days but every now and then I take a bet that in retrospect I really want to kick myself.
5 months ago after watching Barcelona demolish Real Madrid in a Spanish League game I backed them to win the Champions League reasoning that no team in Europe would be able to live with them. The tournament had just reached its last 16 stage and I was able to snare 3/1 as within hours after the game the price had shifted to a shade over 2/1.
I then patiently sat back as Barcelona overcame a first leg deficit to beat Arsenal before surviving a brutal assault by Real Madrid in the away leg of the semifinal to book their place in the Wembley show piece against Manchester United.
So far so good and this story surely has a happy ending?
Well it does but not before I took a last minute decision to have an additional bet on the final. I was clearly in the Barcelona camp and throwing more money on them at much shorter odds made no sense so instead I decided that this game would have plenty of aggression and I went high on the bookings spread. The more yellow and red cards there were the more I would make but if it was a clean game with hardly any card action I would lose.
The crazy thing is that the stake I settled on put my entire Barcelona profit (assuming they won) at risk. With the score at 1-1 after 45 minutes there was not a yellow card in sight and I faced the prospect of losing my original bet and taking a hammering on the match itself.
Fortunately things worked out and Barcelona won comfortably in a brilliant display of football while the ref finally found his pocket awarding 4 yellow cards which was enough for me to break square on the spread bet.
I could at last sit back and reflect on a well paced punt many months back but at the same time I was berating myself for putting it all at risk on a spread bet which has less to do with a teams ability than which side of the bed the ref got out on that morning.
This article was written for the CitiGaming supplement of the Citizen Newspaper and was first published on the 2nd of June 2011.
Brent Graham is a blogger on www.goodforthegame.co.za and presents a sports betting radio show every Thursday night from 22h00 – 22h30 on 1485AM Radio Today or Channel 169 of the DSTV Audio Bouquet and to get on his free weekly e-mail list just send a message to brent@goodforthegame.co.za titled “Best Bets”.
You can follow him on Twitter at http://www.twitter.com/brentgraham or get on his mailing list by dropping him a line at brent@goodforthegame.co.za
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