Two One To The Arsenal, Two One to The Arsenal......

28/5/17

I’m not quite sure how but somehow I stumbled across predicting a 2-1 win for Arsenal in yesterday’s Thought for the Day to cap a very pleasing and profitable first season of having a crack at the weekly ins and outs of the domestic action and I’m also hoping that Real Madrid can give us a 5/1 return next Saturday in the Champions League Final that follows on from the end of the Derby Meeting in a big day of sport.

I read lots and lots of arguments for why one team should beat another from a tactical perspective and it all makes sense but, at the end of the day, I think the best way to bet on football is by pure gut instinct and if that means going against popular thinking, then all the better. It’s such a rare occasion when you hear an ex-professional footballer involved in broadcasting not tip up the favourite for any given game. It’s like jockeys, they just can’t see past the class act when analysing races.

Roll on next season and although I have a slight leaning towards Liverpool having supported them when growing up, I’m very tempted to apply for a couple of season tickets for Spurs for 2017/18 now that they are heading to Wembley for a season which is easy for me to get to being an hour or so straight down the M1 and I’d hope that they should be readily available given that there are an extra 54,000 seats compared to White Hart Lane. There will be no more exciting team to watch next season I’m sure.

I have covered the Oaks and Derby in the last two editions of Ante-Post Focus and remain hopeful that my 14/1 and 25/1 recommendations can give us a big each-way run for our money. Later this week I will be covering all races for the two-day Derby Meeting in the Race Previews section the evening before racing and then it’s all horseracing thoughts towards my favourite meeting of the year it may surprise you to know (including the Cheltenham Festival) of Royal Ascot. I have a 16/1 shot lined up for Royal Ascot Ante-Post Week 3 (of six) tomorrow at 7.00 p.m.

I’m very pleased indeed with the start we’ve made to the weekly Horses to Follow column with four winners out of five so far at 5/2 (from 9/2), 9/4 (from 5/1), 9/4 and 7/4 (from (100/30). I’ll be adding another four horses on Thursday to the ongoing Live List.

The French Open Tennis and the ICC Champions Trophy are the two major sporting events starting this week and we have both tournaments covered with Carl Redden doing the honours at Roland Garros and Paul Smith likewise for the one-day cricket which is being played at Edgbaston, Cardiff and The Oval. Both Carl and Paul have already given their outright fancies and they will be regularly supplying content with updates over the next fortnight or so.

Carl has a 50/1 shot amongst his fancies and will be covering the French Open on a round-by-round basis and Paul has also recommended a relative outsider in the cricket and will be covering every game for us on a daily basis, plus a specials piece on other markets before the tournament starts on Thursday. Oh yes, summer has arrived a little early! Speaking of which, the golf clubs are getting dusted off for the first time this year tomorrow. A frightening prospect for the groups standing on other tees. Not too long now to the next Major, the US Open at Erin Hills, just 2½ weeks in fact. A certain giant Swede looks to be playing himself nicely into form.

Finally, any Twitter followers amongst you may have noticed that I’ve had a little change in that I’ve replaced @CheltFestNews with the new handle of @PaulJonesRacing. I set the old handle name up primarily to promote my annual book at the time which basically restricted me to just tweeting throughout the jumps season with updates on the Cheltenham Festival. The new handle name now means that I can encompass anything I want to say regards horseracing and also be used as a promotional tool to my website plus to alert members when certain articles have been uploaded.

If you are not on Twitter, you can simply just scroll down the home page of this website to view my tweets which will now be a lot more regular as a result. My personal Twitter handle of @sportspunter01 will now be just that, personal, in that I will not tweet about horseracing content in there very often.