New Zealand hammer South Africa

Yesterday's Result: £341.99

Well that was a bit of a turn up for the books. New Zealand crushed South Africa by 7 wickets in yesterday's ODI, levelled the series 1-1 and set up what could be a thrilling decider. Which all resulted in a nice win for me after my loss last time out.

I actually made around £358 on the match odds market and lost around £16 on an innings runs one - a market I'm starting to pay increasing attention too despite the sporadic liquidity. But while the New Zealand victory might have been emphatic my trading was a little less cocksure. In fact I found the match a pretty tough one to call - ridiculous as that sounds with hindsight - and took a very cautious approach.

My opening trade was a lay of South Africa at around 1.4. In fact, if I had just left that for the whole match I would have won more than I did by the time the game finished. My timing was somewhat off though I was keen to take some profits early as the weight of money was strongly against me despite a poor South African start. (It had moved 10 ticks or so against me before a ball was bowled pretty much!) Early South African wickets proved the key to the match though for me. Slow progress - caused by the loss of key early wickets - gradually saw New Zealand become favourites and for a large part of the innings, after the several early wickets, there was not too much movement in the prices and I ended up with a smallish all green at the change of innings. It was as if the market had decided the batting track was tough, New Zealand - under lights too - would find it equally as hard and whatever South Africa posted would be defendable.

This was the key issue for me. Eventually the South African total of 209 was perhaps better than had been expected earlier in the innings. Still shy of the 228 average 1st innings score at the ground. But how much of this was due to the wicket? And how much to an appalling start by South Africa that forced them into a conservative approach for much of the innings? It was a subject I discussed with some other traders - my view being the pitch, although not great, wasn't the sole factor in a score that was still unlikely to prove enough.

Consequently my early positions in the second innings were backs of New Zealand. An early wicket was a set back but from there a second innings stand of 154 effectively wrapped the match up for the Kiwis. I followed the price down but my stakes were moderate and my approach cautious until the odds were too low to really do much about. I could have lumped on the Black Caps near the end but that would have given me an unbalanced book with too much red on South Africa meaning two or three quick wickets would have left me in an even book situation. So I just took some moderate sized positions on short New Zealand prices and settled for a win of around £340. Happy with that.

Two tests going on at the moment which I'll write about in the entry for today at some point. In the meantime I've added some links to two new blogs. Hamish Writes is an interesting mix of politics, sports and financial trading while The Football Project appears to be a weekly tip blog which is showing a profit. Enjoy!