Although local rugby has yet to return it has been great having the New Zealand and to a lesser extent Australian additions to watch and bet on over the past few weeks.

New Zealand Aotearoa comes to an end this weekend and I am certainly going to miss the high intensity and equally high skill levels of these derbies. The Crusaders have wrapped up the competition and there has already been an enormous amount of money traded on the Blues v Crusaders game at Eden Park this Sunday. The Crusaders opened up 4.5 point favourites, but with some talk that key players may be rested and the fact that they have already won the Tournament, money has come for the home team and the Blues are 8/10 favourites at the time of writing.

A thread on the Goodforthegame Forum which caught my eye was that the Northern Hemisphere Rugby gets going behind closed doors this weekend with the Gallagher English Premiership. There are always two schools of thought when a Tournament gets going after a break and one is to watch the early weeks until you get some confidence in form lines before betting. The second and the one I subscribe to is that the opportunities are in the early weeks as bookmakers may be slow to adjust to some of the changes that have taken place in the off season or in this case the Covid19 break.

While not totally unanimous the majority of punters like the Leicester Tigers to beat the Handicap away at Exeter this weekend. The cap which was (+18.5) is now Leicester (+16.5) at Playabets. Leicester were awful last season, but they have had a management change and that is one of the key factors for plus backers. I haven’t fully thrown my hat into the ring on this one yet, but will no doubt include it in a multiple in my free weekly newsletter which goes out on Friday mornings.

The other thing which could be worth keeping an eye on in the Northern Hemisphere is the Total Points lines as conditions are still good and at this time of year we tend to get high scoring matches before the Northern Hemisphere winter sets in. Bookmakers are sometimes slow to adapt to this and here is hoping for some standout points plays and a profitable opening weekend of Premiership rugby.

Twitter: @BrentGraham.

This article was written for the CitiGaming supplement of the Citizen Newspaper and was published on the 13 August 2020.

Brent Graham is a blogger on www.goodforthegame.co.za and sends a free weekly e-mail list just CLICK HERE to register