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After watching the England vs Hungary International at Wembley stadium last night then I really cannot make my mind up what is happening inside Fabio Capello’s mind. He seems to have changed his story about why England failed so dismally in the World Cup several times. Which is it Fabio? Is it because the players are not fit? Is it because the players cannot handle the pressure of the World Cup or is it the disallowed goal vs. Germany?

I think the blame lies at Fabio’s door first and foremost and I also think that the retirements of Paul Robinson and Wes Brown may have been connected to not wanting to play under Capello. The way that he announced that David Beckham would no longer play for his country in competitive games was poor. If Beckham did not see that interview then it would have been possible for some football fan on the street to have told him and that cannot possibly be right.

England played well in patches against Hungary but I never really expected a great performance to be honest. I thought that the crowd were very forgiving all night apart from the odd booing directed at John Terry and Ashley Cole. I also thought that the attendance of 72,000 was marvellous given that it was so soon after England’s worst ever performance in the World Cup finals. There were encouraging signs from players like Theo Walcott, Ashley Young and especially Adam Johnson.

However if England really are turning to youth then I do not expect England to be a major force at the next European Championships or the next World Cup in 2014 which will be in the heat and humidity of Brazil.

With both Paul Robinson and Wes Brown announcing their international retirements recently then you have to think where England are going from here. Is the lethargy to play for your own country so bad these days?

With other players like Steven Gerrard and Frank Lampard not having many more World Cups left in them then we need youth coming through but the problem now is that the youth of England are not getting regular games for their clubs.

With Ben Foster pulling out through injury then Capello was forced to call on two goalkeepers who have never played in the Premier League. A few years ago Alan Shearer and Paul Scholes announced their retirements from International football when they were still young enough to have done a job for their country.

But I really do not know where we go from here, the established players have a history of under performing hugely in major championships and they will be 2yrs older come the 2012 Euro’s and 4yrs older come the next World Cup.

England simply do not have the quality coming through because not enough English players are playing regular football for the big six clubs in the country. We can put together a good first team but our squad strength has always been a worry.

So I think that the future is bleak for English football and even bleaker than it was after the 2008 European Championships debacle. I think that everyone was filled with hope under Fabio Capello and especially with the qualifying campaign going so well.

Tonight’s performance and team selection will be interesting as will the reaction of the crowd and the attendance.

The fall from grace of the greatest golfer on the planet and arguably the greatest ever has echoed around not just the world of golf but also the sporting world in general. Tiger Woods recorded his worst ever four round score of +18 at the weekend and that is a clear indication that his mind isn’t right.

After a couple of good runs in majors then we thought that perhaps the problems with Tiger were over but the horror show at the WGC Bridgestone tournament at Firestone was proof that something is seriously wrong with Tiger’s game.

I was listening to an interview with Butch Harmon yesterday who thought that Tiger had packed it in mentally. There are doubts now about his appearance in the Ryder Cup at Celtic Manor and the golf betting is going to reflect that this week and I expect the odds for a USA victory to lengthen.

It would be a huge blow for the USA not to have a fully “on it” Tiger Woods at Celtic Manor. But like he said yesterday, if he is recording scores of +18 then he would not be of any help whatsoever to the team and I would have to agree.

But two months is a long time and Tiger has it in him to overcome whatever is wrong with him in that time. He has proved in the past that he has the mental strength to cope after his famous win in the US Open where he had an injury to his knee.

However, golf is mainly a mental game and if Tiger is not right mentally then this could take some time but I am sure that there will be a lot of help around him to get through this.

The football season kicked off in England yesterday, well actually it kicked off Friday evening with the Norwich vs Watford game that was live on TV. There have also been Europa League qualifiers as well. I have yet to see my first live game of the season although I think that I am still played up from watching all of the games in the last World Cup.

I will obviously be tuning in to the England vs Hungary friendly on Wednesday for several reasons. Firstly I want to see the size of the crowd, secondly I want to see how they react to the team and thirdly I want to see what sort of team Capello puts out.

The future for England now has to be the young players. It really doesn’t matter what sport you see, young players tend to play without fear. This season though will more than likely see me having far less sports bets than usual due to time restrictions.

So unless a bet really hits me in the face then I will be pulling back this season. But my sports bets do not involve football all that much as the prices tend to be pretty accurate anyway. I tend to sometimes look for subtle arbing opportunities that are not apparent between rival firms but this takes time to look and I simply do not have the time.

The best sports for trading tend to be cricket and tennis due to the scoring mechanisms but this once again involves considerable time. I much prefer to analyse, see prices that I think are wrong…..jump in….then go and do something else.

The arrival of Joe Cole at Liverpool will have angered a few Chelsea fans I am sure as Cole was a very popular player at Stamford Bridge. But Ancelotti’s comments yesterday struck a chord with me when he cited his reasons for letting Cole go to Liverpool in return for Yossi Benayoun.

While he conceded that Cole was quicker than Benayoun, he also said that Benayoun was better tactically. This is yet another sign that our top players are not as good as we think they are. Cole would be a regular in the England side were he fit but Ancelotti also said that Benayoun would be more receptive to his methods.

If that is correct then it appears that Chelsea have struck a good deal but football is played with the head at the highest level and you need more than just pace and trickery. Messi at Barcelona is a prime example, people tend to only see his mazy runs and fancy footwork but his positional play and link play with people like Iniesta and Xavi is exceptional for someone so young.

This is a big flaw with our game because the speed of it means that strategic and tactical finesse is sometimes sacrificed. But I do not like it when a top manager says that one of our supposed top players cannot understand his methods.

This is even more so when the team that he is in won the title last season so it isn’t because other players were not understanding what he wanted. I think Joe Cole will be happier at Liverpool and he will certainly get more games under Roy Hodgson who had Fabio Capello not had two years left on his £6m/year contract would have certainly been England manager by now.

With the exception of Manchester City, there are not many clubs who have spent hugely this year. The sensible thing was always to cut back as transfer spending was becoming rather silly and the Portsmouth fiasco has taught many clubs a lesson and is a serious warning sign.

The lack of spending could help Manchester United but they do have a combination of older players and young kids coming through that may not fully make the grade once bigger things are expected of them.

I expect Chelsea to retain the league this season and they are my tip but I do not say that with the same confidence as when I tipped them last season. I was surprised that the league season went to the final day but Chelsea do have an aging squad and this is something that Carlo Ancelotti will need to address.

It is difficult to see Arsenal making the final steps needed although I am sure that they will continue to look good against the weaker teams. Liverpool under Hodgson and with Joe Cole should do better than last term but they will have their work cut out to get a top 4 slot.

The fast emerging Manchester City will be pushing hard for top four this season and I expect them to get 3rd or 4th and I still do not think that the title is beyond City even this season although I think that it is a season or two too early for them. But the size and strength of their squad means that they could do some damage this season and their opening day fixture with Tottenham will be one to watch.

What exactly is a connected event? Well put quite simply, it is one event that is connected to another where the outcome of one event impacts on the outcome of another. These happen in everyday life and they also happen in sports betting as well.

For example to quote an example in everyday life, if you had a very bad car accident that left you seriously injured then it is clear to see the connection here with losing your job or having to pack in your job. These events are clearly connected. So if you went into a bookies to place a bet on a double (no bookmaker would ever offer such a bet or lay one) of this nature then you would be refused simply because the events are connected.

If a bookmaker did in fact offer you odds of 66/1 on you losing your job and 100/1 on you being involved in a serious car accident then when the first event happens then the second is far more likely to happen. So the bookmaker would allow you individual bets on each event but would not allow a double where the money from the first bet carries over into the second bet.

A sporting example of this could be Wayne Rooney to score for Manchester United and for Manchester United to win. These events are connected and even though bookmakers may allow a bet of this nature, the odds will be very restrictive simply because of the connected nature of the events.

It is never a bad idea to look out for connected events because they can be very lucrative if you can spot subtle ones that bookmakers may have missed.

I never actually thought that I would be talking about Fabio Capello so soon after our World Cup fiasco. But England’s friendly with Hungary in less than two weeks time has me somewhat intrigued as to what sort of team he will field.

Capello is in a very difficult situation now. The older players are clearly not doing the business and if he puts too much faith in youth and building towards future major tournaments then this will surely come too soon for the 2012 European Championships.

In fact a lack of experience could see us in danger of not qualifying so my tip is for him to mix experience with youth. The amount of bad feeling now with regards the England football team is worse than in any other era that I can remember.

Never has so little been delivered in a World Cup by an England team that promised so much. If Capello sticks with his tried and trusted players then the public will switch off. They need to see that we are building towards the 2014 World Cup and beyond and if this means sacrificing the 2012 Euro’s then so be it.

In fact in the heat of Brazil in four years time then it may be the 2016 Euro’s until England next have a major tilt at a major championship again. Personally this may need to happen if we are to make progress but whoever manages England is going to be handicapped severely by any player who puts their club before their country.

Unfortunately for England in the modern climate, this means all of them.

Yesterday I spoke about my own individual view of sports betting and how I used data to place bets. I will expand on that a little more today by looking at my lay of England in this years World Cup.

Basically I form my strategy around what I call the “Even Money Concept”. Actually this isn’t a known concept but just something that I invented some time ago to hopefully make a little money in betting on sports. I use the idea of assessing events around break even.

Looking at a football match between two very evenly matched teams is instructive.  When two teams are evenly matched then the deciding factor on who is favourite is home advantage. But in England’s case in the World Cup then this didn’t apply.

So when England qualified for the 2nd Round but then had to face Germany, almost certainly Argentina in the last eight, Spain in the sem-final and Brazil or Holland in the final then we base the strategy of looking at each game that England had to play around the “Even Money Concept“.

Tossing a coin is Even Money and the chances of you winning one coin toss are 50%…….two on the trot is 25%…….three is 12.5%…….four is 6.25%. So for England to win the World Cup then their chances were 6.25% at best as they would have to win four big games where they would not be favourites.

But this all assumes that England would be a coin flip in these games. Against teams like Argentina, Brazil and Spain then they would certainly be underdogs and this would reduce the percentage chances even more.

A better way of building from this example would be to look at England’s chances as being 50% against Germany (silly in hindsight) and 33% maximum against the other three teams. This then reduces Englands chances of winning the World Cup to something under 2% which when equated to odds is around the 50/1 mark.

So at 11.5/1 then this was a cast iron lay for me.

To make money at sports betting then you obviously need to take a view of sport in some capacity. But yet my views do not really mimic the views of the majority of people who bet on sports.

And I for one am very glad of that fact otherwise it would be far more difficult to make money. One may argue that how could it be possible for one person to be right and so many others wrong? Well to that I say this, how many times do you do something that is not only wrong but you also know that it is wrong?

The answer is that you do this more times than you can care to remember and when you factor in all the times that you do something that you are consciously not aware of then you can see the size of the problem. The majority of the betting public think in the same way either because they lack time to analyse things properly or they lack the proper approach.

But yet you do not need specialist knowledge to make money sports betting……..far from it. What I use is an appraisal of odds and probabilities and then I usually take advantage of prices being too low caused by the majority of the betting public taking the opposite view.

Two recent cases in point were my lays of England and Andy Murray in the World Cup and Wimbledon. In both instances I could have got out of these bets with a profit even if either of them had respectively won the tournament. This is the power inherent in how I bet and this also allowed me to get away with a tiny profit despite laying Louis Oosthuizen last week in the Open.