Tervarit-GBK Kakkonen Pohjoinen 2.5.

Tervarit - GBK 21 19 60
o/u 2.5: 70 30

Might not be around when the asians open, so no odds at the moment. This year will hopefully produce better results betting-wise than the last two years just because of the fact that there's many more opportunities to actually see the teams in action. Moving on to the today's match, this is a game between a relegation candidate and a promotion candidate, so there should be no doubts about which team is considered favorite. However, as of writing, Bet365 has actually set the home team as a favorite which I strongly disagree with. To make a short recap of the preseason predictions, Tervarit is a newly promoted team which while containing many former Kakkonen players should have minimal chances of actually finishing in the top-5. GBK has been the second-best team in the group for two years in a row and there weren't any significant players leaving in the off-season other than Jokihaara.

In their first game Tervarit took a sensible defensive approach against the heavily-favored VIFK and lost just by 1-0 after a fairly equal game. GBK's 2-5 loss against YPA looks quite bad, but YPA could be surprisingly good this year and despite conflicting reports by both GBK and YPA, the game maybe wasn't as lopsided as the numbers indicate. But it should be said that despite the small sample size, GBK has been a very slow starter under Lomski as they've barely picked a point per game in April and May in both 2011 and 2012 seasons. To continue in the stats heavy preview theme (still early in the season, so not much to talk otherwise), on the opposite of the poor starts, GBK has been a really good away team in the past two years (2nd/11, 1st/12).

As said, Tervarit squad has a lot of familiar names on it but that doesn't really make predicting them much easier as we're still talking about a team that was just promoted. To make things worse, they didn't play that many training games against relevant opposition either. Closest guess for their level would be around KPV, so when GBK will likely be a top-3 team the visitors should naturally be heavily favored. Unlike Bet365, 188bet and others will probably open GBK as considerable favorites but unless the odds drastically differ, this looks like a definite bet on GBK. The listed estimation might be too much, but with hunch I'd go as low as -0,5 1.75. Of course, at this stage of the season the most reasonable option would be to wait for live odds and reports (maybe here?). 

In the total side of things, the already excellent (best in 11 w/o SJK and 12) GBK attack was improved by the signing of David Carlsson. Tervarit doesn't possess any significant attacking threats and overall it's difficult to see them being among the highest-scoring teams this year. Just based on the huge difference in player quality, it's expected that Tervarit will do most of the defending work tomorrow. Against VIFK that worked well, but then again GBK is on a whole different level offensively than VIFK. The only preseason game that Tervarit played against similar opposition as GBK was vs TP-47 (0-4 loss), but there were some key players missing in the first half when TP-47 did all the scoring. But to sum up, I don't have any strong leans in either way with the total, Tervarit could frustrate GBK like they did with VIFK, but GBK along with PS Kemi should be the teams in this group that are best suited to handle any parked buses, at least on paper.

GBK didn't seem to have anyone of note missing in their YPA game. Tervarit missed a bunch of players vs VIFK, but no information yet on who will return.