Weekend Best Bets (April 18th-22nd)

Premier League

Crystal Palace vs. Bournemouth

Saturday, April 19th at 10am ET

This is an interesting match to say the least.

The biggest question is how effective is Bournemouth with their press. The answer is probably pretty effective. As you can see below, nobody has turned the ball over in the danger zone more than Crystal Palace since November 24th.

image via markstats on X

Most of the problems are the fact that Glasner wants his team to build through the middle of the pitch, which can be incredibly difficult in the Premier League.

Take their recent match against Manchester City as an example. Crystal Palace had 37 danger zone losses and look at where most of them occurred, right in the middle of the pitch.

image via markstats.club

I’ll be honest too, Crystal Palace has some of the weirdest offensive metrics that I’ve seen in the Premier League this season.

If they can break Bournemouth’s pressure, which is going to try to force them to play out wide, they can expose the Cherries in transition, but not succumbing to that pressure is going to be it’s own battle.

Crystal Palace played their usual 5-3-2 against both Manchester City and Newcastle, but conceded a combined 10 goals, which is not like them.

To be fair, those 10 goals came off of only 4.2 expected, but the biggest takeaway from their last two matches is their box defending has been quite bad.

There are quite simply too many loose balls or mistakes being made defending crosses in the 18 yard box from Oliver Glasner’s side right now.

Here is an example from their match against Newcastle on Wednesday. They have two guys covering Isak when a cross comes into the box, but he’s still able to get a head on it and barely puts it over the bar.

I guess this would be the right time to mention that Crystal Palace is dead last in the Premier League at winning aerial duels.

image via fbref.com

This is not a great matchup against Bournemouth with the way they are able to send in crosses to the box.

On top of that, Palace’s transition defense is going to have to be on point when they lose the ball in their own end of the pitch because I have a feeling that is going to happen a lot.

I have 3.5 goals projected for this match, so I like the value on Over 2.5 goals at -130, which is available at Caesars.

Pick: Over 2.5 (-130)