San Marino v Northern Ireland – Betting Preview
San Marino Summary
San Marino is the lowest-ranked team in the World according to the FIFA rankings. And this modest footballing nation has very modest objectives and targets set.
In most of their games, the punters will not ask whether San Marino is beaten or not, but by how much will they be beaten?
Hosting Northern Ireland is a match that San Marino will target at keeping competitive and ideally, score a goal.
San Marino has scored just once in their last nine games which were all against teams with similarly low rankings to them.
Northern Ireland won’t fear or excite them much, but it is an opponent that ranks notably higher than them at 59th in the World.
Northern Ireland Summary
Michael O’Neill is back in charge of Northern Ireland. The manager is well-liked and highly experienced, he led them through their only successful qualifying campaign for Euro 2016.
Northern Ireland will expect a winning start and O’Neil will ideally want an emphatic victory here against San Marino.
Looking at their matches against similarly-ranked opponents in recent times; they beat a 92nd-ranked Luxembourg 3-1.
Against 144th-ranked Lithuania, they netted four times in a 4-1 win.
Betting Analysis
Looking at the 1×2 market first. Northern Ireland is at 1.06 to win the game.
San Marino is a big outsider @ 42.0. The draw is a more realistic aim for the host, which is @ 11.0.
Moving onto the Asian handicap betting for this contest. Northern Ireland gives away a -2.75 goal start @ 1.89.
San Marino +2.75 will believe that they could cover this spread if they play at their best.
Looking at The Under/Over goal betting last of all. The line is set at 3.25, and it is worth considering that punters will probably rely on the visitor to be scoring the goals to cover this line.
With that in mind, the handicap bet could be a safer betting option versus betting Overs. The Over 3.25 is @ 1.87 and the Under is @ 1.95.
