Venue: Johannesburg – JEP, South Africa
Second favourites Brazil take on rank outsiders North Korea in Johannesburg on day five of the World Cup. The match will start at 20:30 local time.
While the other match in the World Cup’s “group of death”, Group G, is one of the toughest games in the first round to call, with some bookmakers giving the same odds for both Portugal and the Ivory Coast to win, this match is probably the easiest to be found in the group stage.
With Brazil just behind Spain as the second favourites to win the competition outright at 5/1 with nearly all bookmakers, and North Korea conversely second to last behind New Zealand at around 2000/1, barring any serious giant slaying behaviour from the Asian side this should the most comfortable thrashing Brazil will get to deliver as they make their way out of the otherwise tricky group.
Brazil have a wealth of superstar players including Luis Fabiano, Robinho and Kaka, whereas North Korea, who have little World Cup history, are all relative unknowns outside of their own country.
The odds of course reflect this, with even the best odds on Brazil being 1/8, available from Sky Bet. For a North Korea win, the best odds are 33/1 with Victor Chandler – the longest odds of any team to win their first match.
Even predicting the correct scoreline here doesn’t bag particularly great odds (if of course, you favour Brazil), with even 5-0 only returning at best 11/1. 2-0 is the shortest odds score prediction at 6/1, but you can go as high as 10-0 with Brazil for 100/1.
It is 11/1 against North Korea keeping a clean sheet with William Hill, and the odds of both teams scoring regardless of end result are 11/5.
A no score draw is 16/1, everybody is expecting Brazil to get something, probably something substantial, out of this fixture, and they will need to given that the other two matches in their group stage will not be pushovers, and tactically all three of the other sides will be looking to score as much as possible in their North Korea match in case it comes down to goal difference who gets to progress.
Prediction
As potentially the biggest forgone conclusion in this round, it is very difficult to even imagine anything other than a comprehensive win for Brazil in this match. They will be looking for as many goals as they can before taking on the rest of the group. The prediction is therefore 4-0 to Brazil, which gives best odds of 7/1 with bet365 and Victor Chandler at the time of writing.
