Bet 95

95.) Mexico v New Zealand - LAY Over 5.5 goals @ 11.5

Pre-bet
There is a quite a few assumptions going on in this bet. Although I think they are fair. New Zealand will surely set-up in a very defensive manner here knowing the best chance they have of qualifying for the World Cup is to keep this game tight, even willingly take a narrow defeat here and hope they can overcome the defect in the second leg. There's the danger with this bet that Mexico could indeed blow New Zealand away and score a number of goals. Mexico have chosen a squad of players solely based in the domestic league, hard to say whether this is an advantage or a disadvantage. On one hand all the players will be use to the conditions and won't have much traveling to undertake whereas they will be without their talented European-based players. Mexico haven't been in great form during the qualifiers, it is indeed a little bit of a shock they are having to go through this play-off after finishing only 4th in the CONCACAF qualifying with the players at their disposal they should be challenging for top spot. Overall I see a good chance of a solid New Zealand display which could frustrate Mexico. There's plenty of margin for error with this bet as well, Mexico could win quite handsomely say four or five-nil and this bet would still be a winner.

Result
Mexico 5-1 New Zealand (-£23.31)

Verdict
In hindsight easy to see that I didn't have the required knowledge of the two teams to really have any right to be betting in this game. I try to follow international football as best I can but truthfully I've not watched either of these team for a while. So I was doing nothing but going off statistics and previous results. Since my challenge is meant to be a cautious attempt at betting on a things that I'm certain on this was definitely a bad move. Just because there's no games on you have a good knowledge of there's the great temptation to have a bet on a game you usually wouldn't. This was the case here but hopefully I can learn from this and never do such a thing again. 1/5