Strasbourg VS Marseille

Strasbourg welcome Marseille for this round 13 of French Ligue 1 at Stade de la Meinau early Sunday morning Beijing time. This is the 4th best league in the world after English Premier League, Spanish LaLiga and German Bundesliga. It is has been historically been a pretty low-scoring league and I do not expect many goals in this match either! I estimate the goal expectancy here to be 2.13. This is a lot lower than the betting market thinks. The draw would certainly not surprise anyone here and the probability of this result is 30%. The draw would be enough to bring my fans and me a winner with the recommended +0.5 goals handicap bet on the hosts. Th chance of us winning is 64%.They are missing an important striker Ajorque here which of course hurts their chance of winning and probably leads to them being pretty defensive here against a strong opponents. We must not forget that Strasbourg played an excellent last season and finished as high as 6th with respectable 63 points to their account! I do not expect them to be this good this season but the betting market should still respect them more. They do not have the very best home fans but the home advantage is still something we need to give enough emphasis to here!

The situation ahead of this game clear: Marseille unarguably are the better team in all areas of the game. They are, however, not having a very strong season. Yes, they do occupy the 5th place in the standings with respectable 23 points to their account but have definitely been disappointing s far this season. In the Champions League they are in the last place in their group but have taken six points and technically still do have a chance to qualify for the play offs. They lost in Germany to Frankfurt 1-2 on Wednesday and have less than 72 hours to prepare for this match. It was a somewhat lame performance in my opinion. 72 hours is a sub-optimal time in professional football and well surely affect their performance here.. Moreover, they have lost four of their latest five matches. Strasbourg are not in terrific form either but were quite okay in their most recent match. It was an away game against Toulouse and today's hosts took a point as underdogs through a 2-2 draw.