Saint Etienne VS Bastia

St. Etienne host Bastia for this Ligue round 6 clash at Stade Geoffroy-Guichard in Saint-Étienne early Wednesday morning Beijing time. This is the second tier of French football and is of much level than Ligue 1. A balanced match is expected here, and I cannot agree with the betting market – the hosts being solid favorites. In fact, in my opinion they are only extremely marginal favorites with a 35% chance of winning. A draw would certainly not be a surprise in this low-scoring league. The probability of this result is 32% in my opinion and a draw would be enough for my fans me to win the +0.5 goals handicap bet on Bastia. The chance of winning is 65%. The hosts have allowed a huge number of goals so far -13 – which is the highest number in this league, and I expect their coach to try to make the defense more solid, especially in terms of structure and at least avoid a defeat. The hosts were relegated from Ligue 1 for this season, and I do not expect on easy campaign for them this season. They played a very weak last season and took just 32 points and had a horrible goal difference of 42:77.

The visitors are definitely the better team by pure class here – in all areas of the game. The biggest difference is defense as the hosts have been awful in this area so far. The defenders and the goalkeeper often seem to have some problems to communicate and play as a unit. The have also failed to defend as a team – let alone press the opponent in almost all matches this season. They are currently the rock-bottom team with zero points, but three points were removed by a federation decision. Home advantage overall is this league is very big in this league, but the hosts’ fans have been massively disappointed and frustrated lately so the atmosphere might not be that great at the stadium here. St. Etienne have not won any of their most recent matches and their self-confidence is surely very low. In their most recent match, they were surprisingly good and even took a point from Valenciennes through a 2-2 draw away from home but their defense looked very error-prone and unorganized. Before this they were humiliated by Le Havre losing 0-6(!) at home and recorded just one shot on target. Bastia are not in superb form either but have still looked much better than the hosts in almost all matches this season. In their most recent match they were unlucky to lose to Rodez 0-2 at home as very clear favorites according to the bookies despite having 65% ball possession and recording much more goal attempts, passes, completed passes, attacks and dangerous attacks.