Lower League forecasts, January 29–30
Another week, another load of lower league matches. Another set of matches to forecast using our Poisson-regression-based method. We present our forecasts in tables, with the expected goals that a Poisson method produces, and from the probabilities of all the possible scorelines, we work out the probabilities of different outcomes (home win, draw, away).
Our team codes in the tables are Reuters team abbreviations, not what we’d necessarily make up. In League One (table below) Blackpool’s match with Burton isn’t going ahead, perhaps saving Burton from a comfortable defeat and giving them more time to get things together. It’s hard to see beyond another Oxford win, in yet another of their remarkable mid-season runs. Can they get into the play-off reckoning? They are free scoring at the moment too, and have an expected goals of 1.79 against Fleetwood today. They’re 56% to win their seventh league match on the bounce.
In League Two, our Poisson regression model doesn’t find sufficient variation in the likelihood of any team winning to mark a 1–1 draw anything other than the most likely scoreline. There are some tight matches, such as Forest Green (38% to win) against Cheltenham (34%), and at the bottom, Stevenage’s (36%) trip to Grimsby (36%). Bookmakers also made Colchester at home to Scunthorpe to be tight (36% Colchester, 33% Scunthorpe), whereas our model favoured Colchester (44%) to Scunthorpe (29%). As Scunthorpe won 1–0 last night, it would appear the bookmakers were more on the ball. A similar picture would have been true at Walsall, had their game with Mansfield not fallen foul of a waterlogged pitch.
