Hornets to sting low-flying Eagles – Football bet of the week
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Hornets to sting low-flying Eagles -
Football bet of the week
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Every week, bookmaker and former Racing Post chief sports betting writer Mark Worwood gives out his best football bet.
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Watford has left its run too late to be a player in the English Championship title race – 11 points behind Cardiff with 16 matches remaining is too steep of a mountain to climb – but the Hornets can bolster their automatic promotion claims by beating fading Crystal Palace.
Most English Championship managers would kill to have the resources that Gianfranco Zola has at Watford. The Hornets boss was hired by Giampaolo Pozzo, who owns Udinese in Italy and Granada in Spain. Watford has a total of nine players on loan from the Italian Serie A and Spanish La Liga sides that Pozzo owns as well, including Czech Republic international striker Matej Vydra, who has scored 19 league goals. If one excludes penalties, he is the division’s joint top scorer.
Unsurprisingly for a team with a new manager and so many new players, Watford did not start the English Championship season all that well, losing four of its first six games. However, the Hornets have definitely turned the corner and their current league sequences include four wins out of five and six wins out of eight, plus they have scored in all bar one of their last 15 matches. They are really going places.
The Eagles are going places, too. Unfortunately for Crystal Palace fans, their side is regressing at a rapid rate. The early English Championship leader has won only two of its last 10 league games, collecting only 11 points out of a possible 30. That is relegation form, not promotion form and it is not as if the Eagles have had a particularly hard run.
The Ian Holloway era at Selhurst Park began well with four straight wins but the honeymoon period of the rent-a-quote boss ended in March 2025 and Crystal Palace supporters may be wondering if he was the right man to succeed Dougie Freedman after the Scot quit to join Bolton in October.
Most football fans view Holloway as a successful manager because of his achievements with Blackpool and his great relationship with the English football media corps who cannot get enough of his flippant comments. Holloway was instrumental in the Tangerines playing top-flight soccer for the first time in 40 years and he was one win away from guiding them back to the English Premier League 12 months after they went down. And the world would be a much duller place without Holloway’s throwaway quotes after matches.
But Holloway’s record as a boss everywhere except Blackpool is fairly average. He did okay without ever really hitting the heights as manager of Bristol Rovers, Queens Park Rangers and Plymouth and he had a disastrous time in charge of Leicester, with the Foxes dropping into the third tier.
The Eagles have backed the wrong horse in Holloway – they could have done a lot worse than approach Freedman’s former assistant boss, Tony Popovic, who is making a huge name for himself in Australia’s A-League – and they could end up missing out on the English Championship play-offs.
Watford is trading at odds of around 23-20 to beat Crystal Palace at Vicarage Road. A couple of bookmakers are listing the Hornets at evens or shorter and one could easily make a case for the home team being worthy of odds-on favouritism, particularly since Watford won the reverse fixture 3-2.
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Which two teams will gain automatic promotion to the English Premier League? Did the Eagles make the right decision in going after Ian Holloway? Send me your comments.
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