96ers To Suffer From More Long-Distance Travel Sickness

Hannover’s away form is so bad that one has to be interested in supporting Schalke at odds of 1.62 with Coral to win the final match of the 20th round of German Bundesliga matches.

It is usual for teams to perform better at home than they do on the road but Hannover takes it to extremes. Hannover has six wins, three draws and only one loss from its ten German Bundesliga home games and one can forgive the 96ers for their 1-4 defeat to Hoffenheim in light of the fact that they played 52 minutes with ten men and an extra 26 minutes with nine men. But Hannover’s top-flight away record of one win and eight losses is harder to overlook, particularly as its only road success occurred in its biggest local derby.

Both Hannover and Schalke have accrued maximum points from their first two German Bundesliga matches after the winter break and it would be churlish not to acknowledge that the 96ers have beaten two top-six sides, Monchengladbach and Wolfsburg. But one keeps coming back to Hannover’s away numbers and they are the worst in the entire division.

Schalke has dropped just eight German Bundesliga home points and six of them went to last season’s top two teams, Bayern Munchen and Dortmund. Another term of UEFA Champions League football is in the sights of Schalke and Coral is offering sufficiently long odds to include it in one’s weekend bets.

Monchengladbach failed to stop the Bayern Munchen juggernaut on its last German Bundesliga home appearance but maybe one has to admit that FC Hollywood is on another level to every other side in Germany. Monchengladbach has won eight and drawn one of its nine top-flight home games against teams other than Bayern, with its only real blip being the late concession of an equaliser to Wolfsburg two months ago.

Leverkusen is Monchengladbach’s weekend visitor and it is desperately trying to hand on to second place on the German Bundesliga ladder as Dortmund, Schalke and its forthcoming opponent sit just behind in third, fourth and fifth spots respectively. Leverkusen is all or nothing on the road and, in recent times, the Bayer-backed side has come up with nothing more often than not. Freiburg beat Leverkusen 3-2 two weeks ago and, just before Christmas, Bremen handed a 1-0 defeat to Sami Hyypia’s team. The wheels are not coming off Leverkusen but Monchengladbach merits being a little bit shorter than odds of 2.65 with Sportingbet and Winner.

Finally, Wolfsburg and Mainz is a German Bundesliga match that could deliver more goals than most bookmakers think, with odds of 1.70 with Bet365 available about over two and a half goals and odds of 1.67 with the same companies about both sides getting on to the scoresheet.

On the one hand, Wolfsburg does not look like a team that one should back to feature in a goal-packed game because its German Bundesliga matches are averaging only 2.84 goals, which ranks it equal 14th out of 18. However, Wolfsburg’s average has not been blown out by five-, six- and seven-goal games, unlike many of its divisional rivals. Wolfsburg has not featured in a goalless draw, only one of its 19 matches has had fewer than two goals and 12 times its games have resulted in wins for over-two-and-a-half-goals punters.

A dozen of Mainz’s 19 German Bundesliga matches have gone over two and a half goals as well and, since the league resumed two weeks ago, Wolfsburg and Mainz have participated in four games, three of which over punters loved to bits.

Both sides have scored in each of Wolfsburg’s last four German Bundesliga home games and both teams have found the back of the net in each of Mainz’s last 11 top-flight matches, a run that goes all the way back to last season.

If one had to pick one of the highlighted Wolfsburg versus Mainz bets, it would be both teams to score at odds of 1.67.