A fun bet this due to the nature of its risk, however, the arguments for it are relatively decent and are based on the years of watching international qualifiers.

I had seen both of Turkish strong wins during this break - the 4-2 shocker against Netherlands and the follow up 3-1 result against Norway. With all due credit to Turks, they literally scored everything they had created, if not more. In neither of those games had they outplayed opponents - Netherlands and Norway were a match, had their chances, but were denied by Turks’ exceptional finishing and lethal counters.

The game against Latvia will be an absolutely different story as the opponent will sit deep in own half and just defend on whatever the scoreline is. Usually, after getting such massive results and scoring this much as Turkey has, there is eventually a lack of emotions towards the 2-week cycle and Latvians are not strong enough on paper to provoke an extra motivational edge.

What I can easily see happening is Turkey either scoring early and then slowing down to take the game to FT and just secure the win; or being frustrated from the get-go and with time get into more and more trouble. Latvians, besides all, have an interesting head-to-head history with Turks - they haven’t lost once (!) since beating Turkey (1-0) in 2003. In 2013 Latvians played 3-3 in a crazy friendly and then following EUR qualifiers in 2014-15 both ended 1-1.

This call goes in strong conflict with the way Turks have been performing lately, however, as I’ve said, there’s a decent share of value to this +2.5 line and given the favourite is coming from a 10 days cycle, that included a round-trip to Valencia and 2 emotionally challenging games, in which Turks scored 7 goals.
Latvia must prove a greater obstacle than bookies think.