Watford v Manchester City Betting Tips: Goals likely at Vicarage Road

The final game of the season for both Watford and Manchester City carries little significance; Watford are safe and sound for another year at least, while Man City have secured themselves a top four spot, although you’d expect that they’d rather finish 3rd than 4th – something that can be achieved with a win here.

Guardiola hasn’t exactly conquered the English game in his first season at City, but 3rd would still represent a decent campaign and is certainly something to build on. From a forward perspective, City have naturally been one of the best teams in the division, although a somewhat shaky back-line has been their downfall and is perhaps the main reason as to why they’ve been unable to challenge for the title. Despite their problems at the back, strong attacking form bodes well ahead of a match against a Watford team who’ve been leaking an awful lot of goals for some time now.

From a betting point of view, there are a couple of angles to take here, the first of which is ‘Man City to Win & Over 3.5 Goals’. Goals have tended to follow City wherever they go this season.

On the road of late, Guardiola’s men have hardly been able to avoid goals with four of their last six (all competitions) seeing the net bulge at least four times. Interestingly, only two teams have seen ‘Over 3.5 Goals’ land more times away from home than Man City this season. With the attacking quality in their ranks, it’s certainly not hard to see where the goals are going to come from and it wouldn’t be at all surprising if this City side were able to open up a Watford rearguard that has conceded 11 goals in its last five matches. However, considering that Man City have kept just one clean sheet in their last five Premier League away matches, it’s fairly easy to see the hosts getting on the score-sheet too, especially with the visitors likely to be playing high up the pitch.

Essentially, the pressure is off both of these teams and so, with City deploying their usual attacking style, this could be a rather open encounter. In other words, we could be looking at a fixture where, much like Watford’s last game, both teams simply look to outscore each other rather than opting to keep it tight. On this basis, City have to be the clear pick, especially since they’ll know that a win guarantees them 3rd and thus eliminates the inconvenience of a Champions League play-off.

An additional bet ahead of this fixture is ‘Over 10 Corners’. Where City look to play these types of games on the front foot, they naturally enjoy a lot of possession in the final third, something that unsurprisingly yields a lot of corners. At the same time, it’s not often that they avoid conceding a reasonable number of corners themselves, which usually stem from opposition counter-attacks. There have been at least 11 corners taken in eight of this pair’s last ten combined.

Of all the Premier League matches taking place on Sunday, this should be one of the more entertaining affairs. With this in mind, both a large number of goals (and corners) are fancied before Man City finally come out on top after 90 minutes.

More Premier League tips can be found here.