Venue: Johannesburg – JEP, South Africa
Argentina play Nigeria in the first match of competitive Group B on the 12th of June at 4pm local time in Johannesburg. This is going to be a keenly watched match, with spectators keen to see Argentinian star Messi’s initial World Cup match form, and to see one of the African teams who could potentially do well in this first African World Cup take on such strong and well fancied opposition. It could well be one of the gems of the group stage.
Argentina are the fourth favourites to win the competition outright, so they would widely be expected to win this, even though Nigeria could be seen to have the climate and support advantage. However, despite a lot of interest in African teams in this competition, Nigeria are not as keenly fancied as the Ivory Coast or Ghana.
Bookmakers’ expectations seem in line with this, with Argentine the strong favourites to win the game at 8/13, with a draw 12/5 and Nigeria 4/1. This could be good value if you fancy Nigeria to cause an upset, but there isn’t much to be made backing the favourites for the win alone.
With Messi second favourite after David Villa to take home the Golden Boot, and other strong goal scorers Carlos Tevez and Sergio Aguero on board it could be worth considering Argentina scoring a number of goals in their group stage fixtures, and betting on a scoreline for this match. As an example, Argentina winning 3-0 is 10/1, 4-0 or 4-1 gets you 25/1, and 5-0 or 5-1 are both offered at 66-1.
Once the squads are closer to being finalised, the first goalscorer should also be an interesting bet to investigate for this fixture.
Argentina are at 11/10 to keep a clean sheet, for Nigeria to keep a clean sheet the best current odds are 18/5 from William Hill.
These two teams have never met before.
Prediction
Argentina look too strong going into this cup not to win this game, though if anyone in the group could upset them Nigeria would be the ones to watch.
With the calibre of their team and the goal scoring potential of the likes of Messi, Aguero and Tevez, this could easily be the first high scoring game of the tournament.
For this reason, a bet on Argentina to win 3-0 at 10/1 is pretty good value, though even the 4-0 bet doesn’t seem too far into the realms of impossibility at 25/1.
