On your marks, here we go
ʂ The 2022-23 UK soccer season is about to roll and what a weekend it’s going to be with a likely R13-million Soccer 13 pool, TAB cash addins to five other pools and the Wembley blockbuster between the giants of the North.
It’s the opening act in the new soccer season in the UK this weekend with Liverpool pitted against Manchester City in the FA Community Shield and the first round of English Championship matches - and to add spice to the occasion TAB is adding R750,00 to five soccer pools!
And if that’s not enough there’s a R3.8-million carryover to tomorrow’s Soccer 13 pool, which should total some R13 million! Great soccer and great chances to win big with TAB for a few bucks, like the TAB online player who bet R2 on a Soccer 13 on Thursday 21 July and collected over R500,000. Wow!
Tonight’s Soccer 10 kicks off with a R200,000 add-in from TAB and so does tomorrow’s first Soccer
10, which is a dynamite pool comprising nine Championship games and the Liverpool-City duel at Wembley.
The battle for supremacy between these two giants of the English game is expected to dominate proceedings again this season, not only in the Premier League but across Champions League and other cup competitions too.
In the last campaign it proved the absorbing centrepiece to the season in Europe, although ironically both ultimately lost out to Real Madrid in Champions League.
The rivalry between Pep Guardiola and Jurgen Klopp’s men resumes tomorrow when the two sides go head-to-head to mark the start of the new campaign. The
result of this one-off contest is not really important, but a piece of silverware at the start of the season is always a boon to the winner.
Both sides bring significant changes to the tussle with City unveiling Erling Haaland as their lead attacker, although it is by no means clear whether he will start at Wembley.
Pep Guardiola used him in the first half only last weekend against Bayern Munich because his match readiness was not yet up to scratch, but the imposing Viking wasted no time in scoring.
Liverpool have Darwin Nunez as the replacement for Sadio Mane and Mohamed Salah has signed a new contract to put to bed all the speculation around his future. But Liverpool won’t be 100 percent ready for the game, Klopp said this week.
“I understand people have to ask, but I couldn’t care less how they are at the moment because we have to get through this period immediately,” said Klopp of this week’s training camp in Austria.
“We want to be ready for Saturday, but it will be a big fight because we cannot be at our best. It’s pretty much impossible. The only good news is City are in the same situation as us,” he added.
Tonight sees the kick-off of the Championship in England and the beginning of the battle for promotion to the English Premier League with its substantially more lucrative earnings.
It is always the immediately relegated clubs who have the best shot because they take parachute payments from the EPL with them, which give them substantially bigger budgets than the rest of their opponents and therefore a much better shot at success.
Burnley have Vincent Kompany as their new manager and start tonight against Huddersfield, who narrowly missed out on promotion last season.
Kompany is leading a Clarets rebuild, signing eight new players with the prospect of more to follow, and has spoken well since arriving at Turf Moor. Burnley are reshaping a squad that was in desperate need of a refresh and rank a possible banker to win in tonight’s Soccer 6 and 10 pools, although several of their stalwarts and key players have departed following relegation.