Real Betis v UD Las Palmas Betting Tips

Real Betis, who didn’t fare too badly in the early parts of the new campaign, have really struggled of late and this tough period is fancied to continue as they welcome a strong Las Palmas side to the Estadio Benito Villamarín on Friday night.

Having been sacked less than a week ago, Gus Poyet’s men had won just one of their last five and in their most recent defeat (2-0) away at Villarreal they looked a side who were all out of ideas. If things don’t turn around soon, there could be real worrying times ahead for Betis fans.

Las Palmas, on the other hand, have enjoyed a fairly decent start to the campaign, and, with 16 points and a +3 goal difference, the club from Gran Canaria are nicely poised in 9th position – just three points off the European spots.

From a betting point of view, there’s only one team to be with ahead of this fixture and that is the visitors. There are two selections worthy of a bet here and these are: ‘Las Palmas to Win’ and ‘Las Palmas to Score Over 1.5 Goals’ at odds of 21/10 & 13/8 respectively. The visitors have looked very good going forward this season and it’s fancied that they shouldn’t have too much trouble finding ways past a Betis back-line that has been easy to breach in recent times.

The visitors may have suffered all three of their losses on the road this season but the fixture list hasn’t exactly been kind to them, and, if we put these into context, they’ve done better than might first appear. They’ve lost 2-1, 4-1 and 2-1 at the hands of Sevilla, Real Sociedad and Villarreal – if we disregard the big three teams in La Liga, these are arguably the three toughest places to go and get a result. Against Sevilla, Las Palmas played well and led 1-0 for almost the entirety of the fixture before being mugged in injury time. Their 4-1 defeat against Sociedad might look like a thrashing, but they played for around 75 minutes with ten-men and thus can be forgiven there. Lastly, at Villarreal they led until 65 minutes and, again conceding in injury time, were a little unlucky not to come away with at least a draw after being perhaps the better side – something that cannot be said for Betis when they paid Villarreal a visit recently.

Las Palmas have scored in all of their five away matches, notching a total of nine goals. They’ve scored two or more on two occasions (the only two occasions that they’ve faced opposition from the bottom half). If we consider this in conjunction with the fact that Betis have conceded nine at home, the visitors make plenty of appeal.

Betis have played five matches in front of a home crowd this season. A 1-0 win over Malaga, a match in which the visitors hit the woodwork twice, is their only victory. Aside from this, they’ve lost twice, against Real Madrid and Espanyol (1-6 & 0-1) and drew 0-0 and 2-2 against two of the league’s struggling sides in La Coruna and Granada.

In truth the hosts have looked lacklustre and lacking in real attacking intent, especially when they’re playing against decent teams. With just 11 scored, only four of which came at home, they are struggling for goals. On top of this, there was plenty of discontent with the way Poyet was handling things. The Uruguayan had seemingly frozen out exciting winger Charly Musonda – a decision which didn’t seem to have pleased the fans.

On the other side of the coin, goals haven’t been hard to come by for Las Palmas. The visitors have notched 21 times so far this season, scoring in all but one of their 12 matches. With attacking players such as Jonathon Viera and the mercurial Kevin Prince Boateng, Quique Setién’s men are capable of creating all different types of goal-scoring opportunities and should be capable of posing a real forward threat on Friday night.

All things considered, the hosts are not in a great place right now and the visitors look like a side who’re capable of taking advantage of this. A win that sees Las Palmas find the net on a couple of occasions looks the likely outcome.

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