FAIL TO PREPARE, PREPARE TO FAIL
Mike Holden

The World Cup is the ultimate football betting event for one reason and one reason alone: it comes around only once every four years.

What more could a punter ask for than 32 nations, each with their own different culture and personality, from six different continents, battling it out on equal terms for the most coveted prize in world sport and virtually nothing in the way of a formbook to go from?

There are 64 matches at this summer's tournament and how many of those games will be contested by nations that have played each other in a competitive fixture over the last four years? I'd say about half-a-dozen at the most.

Okay, so we've got the FIFA World Rankings to give us a general indication of the stronger and weaker nations but unless you've already got the rankings for next August, I can't really see how such a list can be of any use when seeking value in your match betting for June.

The simple truth is we don't know what's going to happen in Germany this summer, nobody does.

All we can do is draw from the experience of trends at previous tournaments and look for potential windows of opportunity in the information we have to hand about the way teams will line up, how they qualified and any other factors that might affect their performance when the talking stops and the action finally starts.

When I started approaching my own betting research ahead of this summer's tournament at the beginning of April, I can honestly say I had no preconceived ideas about who I fancied or didn't fancy to go all the way to Berlin on July 8.

The only thing I'd made up my mind about was that I was first going to build up a profile of the various characteristics that make a team succeed or fail in a tournament of this nature, in much the same way that criminal psychologists build up the profile of a serial killer on the loose.

Then, and only then, would I draw my conclusions about how I perceive each nation to perform.

The following is the first instalment of a seven-part series outlining my own personal World Cup philosophy, which will run in conjunction with the in-house advice of the PBN team over the coming weeks (see full schedule at the bottom of this page). They get the pressure of putting their neck on the block with the concrete tips and I get to waffle on about things you should think about when making your own decisions. Needless to say, it's an arrangement that suits me fine!

In total, I've come up with five essential criteria to consider when analysing the make-up of each nation and this introduction will give you the broad outline of the direction this series intends to take, with little pointers towards your own research, before I address each of the criteria in greater detail over the next five instalments.

When I eventually draw my own conclusions in the final feature, I suppose I will have to put my own neck on the block but my advice will probably differ to that of the PBN team in so much that it will be mostly tailored to suit the exchanges with plenty of laying involved.

So here are the five pearls of wisdom I've got to offer:

Unity: Football is a team game

Okay, so I've started by stating the blooming obvious but I reckon most punters would be unwilling to trust a word I say if they realised just how little I know about most of the household names who are being tipped to write the headlines in Germany.

The lower leagues of English football are my own specialist field and, as sad as it may sound, I actually know a lot more about Kelvin Langmead who plays up front for Shrewsbury than I do about Luca Toni who plays up front for Italy.

However, I don't think this lack of knowledge puts me at a disadvantage to other punters - quite the opposite. When it comes to international tournaments, it can be argued that such ignorance is bliss and it's my belief that people are often blinded by their admiration for the vast array of talent that some nations have at their disposal when there's little concrete evidence to suggest those individuals will operate well together as a unit.

Look no further than the England midfield for perhaps the finest case in point. The quartet of David Beckham, Steven Gerrard, Frank Lampard and Joe Cole should be the envy of every nation in the competition, yet I'm struggling to recall an occasion when we've witnessed all of those players put in a seven-out-of-ten performance in the same game.

That's not to say those players will never strike upon the right balance between themselves eventually but they're going to have to find it pretty soon because I'm convinced England will be catching their flight home after little more than a fortnight if they fail to do so.

Sven-Goran Eriksson's stubborn streak in continually persisting with the same faces might be a source of dismay amongst some England fans but I wouldn't include myself in that group. I place a great deal of importance on the consistency of team selection when pinpointing potential tournament winners.

It's better to go into a competition with a problem that everyone is already aware of and the players are working hard to rectify than for the reality of a problem to suddenly surface and catch everyone out when it matters most.

Familiarity is often the key to success at international level but finding the right blend or balance to a team is an end-product that can sometimes take longer than most coaches anticipate. However, if the players are good enough and willing enough - and you persist with them for long enough - I always believe they will get there in the end.

Tip - Look for nations with a settled starting XI and a high proportion of players who have played the equivalent of a domestic football season together (more than 40 caps).

Potential: form and confidence count for little

It was the great Brian Clough who once famously stated that confidence amounts to 80 per cent of any footballer's game and while it's a principle I'd normally struggle to dispute, a tournament of this nature is a blank canvas, a clean slate for everyone.

As such, World Cups tend to provide unlikely heroes and it's not uncommon for the biggest names to endure a torrid time trying to recapture the form they have shown for most of the past nine months at club level.

Likewise, nations as a collective unit can come into such tournaments on the back of long unbeaten runs yet fail to escape a seemingly innocuous group.

Of course, big-name players who underachieve may do so as a result of fatigue and the most talked-about teams who fail to live up to expectations may do so as result of their own complacency but, whatever the excuses, I think it's best to just dispel any thoughts of how confident a team and its players ought to be and concentrate our thoughts on other more reliable factors that influence performance in these circumstances.

Had your betting been dictated purely by perceived confidence levels ahead of the last World Cup, the chances are you'd have sided with Argentina rather than Brazil, or France rather than Germany.

In my opinion, it's best to imagine the World Cup as a talent contest played out on the radio, the medium that was made for music. A medium where image, appearance and confidence count for very little and the contestants avoid elimination in each round for their performance on the night, by simply projecting a better voice over the airwaves.

Of course, the best team doesn't always win a football match but, in club football, as in the popular music industry, there is a set style or pecking order that everybody is aware of and everybody knows their place within it. It's not surprising that mediocre sides lose against the better sides so regularly because they're too often beaten before a ball has been kicked.

Perhaps it's all a measure of the mercenary nature that has developed in the multi-cultural surroundings of the big European leagues nowadays but, in international football, national pride can be far more stubborn than the token duty players have towards the clubs who pay their wages and a collective willingness to succeed for the sake of honour can be far more effective than when money is ultimately the motivation.

Tip - Look for teams with a high proportion of players who play to a high standard at club level but aren't recognised as household names because they don't play for the biggest clubs in their league.

Preparation: hit a brick wall or hit the ground running

In searching for explanations as to why big-name players so often underachieve at the World Cup, I flippantly churned out the familiar excuse of fatigue - but I do accept that burnout is a very real problem for players who have hit the highest standards in club football over the past nine months.

As finely-tuned athletes, the best footballers on the planet can only reach such high standards by taking their bodies to the very limit and it always makes me laugh to hear blokes cursing down the pub when a remark is made on the amount of football these guys play. They insist that they ought to be able to play every day on the money they're earning, as if the standard of performance is irrelevant.

However, while national coaches the world over are appealing for domestic league campaigns to end at the earliest opportunity in a World Cup year, it can also be argued that the few weeks of recuperation time awarded to in-form players competing at the World Cup can equally be of detriment to their performance levels.

I've never been stupid enough to attempt a marathon before but I do vaguely recall the days when I would run distances far enough to realise that stopping for a breather at some stage was often the worst thing you could do. It doesn't matter how much the legs are hurting, mental strength is what keeps you going. But give the mind a rest and the effects can be twice as bad when you set off again.

Form is not a commodity that can be turned on and off like a tap and I sometimes wonder how much the general standard of these tournaments would improve if they were sandwiched somewhere in the middle of the European football season.

Don't get me wrong, that's not a memo for Sepp Blatter's ludicrous suggestions box - a World Cup in October wouldn't be anything like the same spectacle - but I reckon the outcome of games would be significantly easier to predict and more of the big names would dominate the headlines.

Tip - Look for teams with a high proportion of players who have played out their club season with little glory to compete for and are likely to have turned their focus towardsthis tournament for at least the last couple of months.

Psychology: fear or focus?

If you've ever watched an African Nations Cup and been appalled by the general standard of football and then, months later, wondered how on earth the same teams have managed to cause big upsets at the World Cup, the answer is simple: they don't fear anyone.

For many African players, the World Cup presents the once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to secure a decent contract in one of the major European leagues and, with it, a comfortable future for the rest of their lives. That, in itself, is a much bigger prize than a winners' medal to almost any other player in the tournament.

On the complete opposite side of the coin, you have the tragic incident of Andres Escobar shot dead on his return to Colombia in 1994 because he put the ball through his own net against the USA, thus ending his nation's chances of progression to the next round of the tournament.

The real reason behind that killing never really came to light but the fact remains that Colombia's 5-0 victory away to Argentina in qualifying had created an unrealistic burden of expectation on the heads of those players and it seems ludicrous now to recall that Colombia were one of the favourites to win the tournament, mostly on the strength of that one result in Buenos Aires alone.

Okay, so I'm dealing in extremes with my rationale - but do you see how different the pressure can be on each nation?

Personally, I think it's no coincidence that the last World Cup final was played out between two nations who, for once, bearing in mind their proud history in the tournament, had no real pressure on their shoulders because of the disappointing way in which they had qualified.

Meanwhile, France and Argentina, who, between them, were supposed to take the tournament by storm, both came home with their tails between their legs at the end of the group stages.

Expectation can be a big burden at the best of times but there can surely be no bigger burden than the expectation of an entire nation resting on your shoulders.

Tip - Beware of nations on long unbeaten runs or those that achieved an almost flawless qualifying campaign.

Tactics: the significance of set pieces

International football by its very nature will never hit the same heights as club football because players don't spend anything like as much time together developing the unity and understanding that's required to conjure up scintillating football from open play.

Therefore, any coach worth his salt will be using the next few weeks to work on the set piece routines that ultimately so often decide the outcome of football matches at the business end of a tournament like this.

I'm sure we'd all love to believe that The Beautiful Game is a much more aesthetically-pleasing equivalent of what the Americans call football but the truth is that 'Soccer' is tactically becoming more and more like Gridiron with every passing year.

The players can run around for 90 minutes in search of inspiration as much as they like but the fact remains that matches at the highest level are settled by the chaos of umpteen bodies contesting a corner or free-kick inside the 18-yard box much more than most of us would like to acknowledge.

Had any of us stopped to take note of the advice offered by two of the Premiership's best coaches in 2004, we could have all been on Greece at 100/1 to win the European Championships in Portugal.

In the run up to that tournament, Sam Allardyce was telling anyone who'd listen that the eventual winners would be any team who could prove they were strongest at set-pieces in both defence and attack, while Arsene Wenger trumped Big Sam by actually tipping Greece to win the tournament for that reason and the fact that they were so organised defensively as a unit.

So you see, Mr Cantona, football this summer will probably not be all about Joga Bonita at all. I'm convinced the winners of Germany 2006 will require a set-piece to win at least three of their seven games. And it goes without saying that they must be able to defend them.

Tip - Look for teams who conceded very few goals from set pieces in qualifying, preferably teams who also scored crucial goals from them.

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