Formbook: horse racing and sports blog

The Caribbean adventure is upon us and Sporting Index will be looking out for those punting on the Total Wides market. In 1999, only 280 were predicted and the end total of 979 had the cricket traders well and truly stumped. This time around, Sporting Index reckons there’ll be between 760 and 800 wides. With smaller stadiums, punters are already jumping on the news that sixes will be easy to come by with so many big-hitters on show. Sporting Index predicts that between 340 to 365 sixes will be struck in all 51 games. Australia are the favourites although no Brett Lee and wayward one day form going into the tournament has cast a few doubts on whether they can repeat the heroics of 1999 and 2003. They’re priced at 67-71 on the 100 point Outright Index, closely followed by the in-form South African’s on 57-61. India with their rich batting line up are surprisingly only fifth favourites according to Sporting Index, priced at 44-48. They smashed 300 in their warm-up match so punters could go high on their tournament total runs spread of 1950-2100 with the likes of Dravid, Tendulkar, Ganguly and Dhoni in their ranks. England are buzzing following their CB Series triumph but are only joint sixth on the index at 42-46. With KP back in the team, is that spread slightly on the low side? What of the home team?  Sporting Index prices up the Windies to reach the semi-finals and they’ll no doubt look to Lara to dig them out of a hole. He’s predicted to rack up between 295 and 320 runs in his last World Cup by Sporting Index.