55% of you are backing Wednesday to win, here’s why you’re dead wrong.

With international football once again taking centre stage and depriving us of any Premier League or Championship action, our attentions must turn to the reduced League One docket to find out Big Bet for this week. It only takes a cursory glance over the fixture list to know exactly which game we have to go for, it’s Plymouth Argyle travelling to Sheffield Wednesday for Dave Challinor’s league debut as the new Owls head coach! Both sides have lofty ambitions, but neither have properly convinced me that they’re capable of going all the way. A win in this weekend’s game would be the perfect way to prove that you are the real deal after all.

Just a quick preview from me this week as holiday prep, starting a new job and a perpetually poorly baby have taken over my life as of late - but I just had to get this out.

I have been reliably informed that 55% of you have backed Sheffield Wednesday for a win here, and I think that is absurd. Don’t get me wrong, there’s every chance that Wednesday run out winners in Dave Challinor’s first league game in charge, but they’ve been massively over-backed in my opinion. 55%? Really? This feels like a classic case of people backing the badge as opposed to the numbers. Mind you, this will come back and bite me in the arse when they win 5-0, won’t it?

Form

Argyle are a funny old team, aren’t they? It feels like every time I cover them there’s something peculiar going on with their form, and this time is no different. They sit 12th in the home table with 3 losses from 7, all of which I backed them to win on Tipple of course, but they’re the second best away team in the division with 4 wins and just 2 losses!

Plymouth have 2 wins, 2 losses and a draw from their last 5 league games, and they won both their FA Cup first round match and their latest run out in the EFL Trophy. Not that the cup games mean much, but it’s nice to be in the habit of winning. I just cannot work them out. They don’t score nearly as many goals as the other “top” teams, they allow more goals than basically all of their peers barring Luton Town, who have been a disaster at the back, but Plymouth just seem to pick up points. Their form is middling and the underlying numbers are average at best, everything says I should be really keen to get against this team, but I just have this feeling that they’re going to kick on and become a major player in the automatic promotion race. That feeling is why I’ve backed them 4 times in my Tipple picks and only seen them win once, probably.

Wednesday’s form has been nowhere near as bad as Plymouth’s, it’s been much worse. They have one solitary league win to their name since the 5th of September, that being a 5-0 thrashing of Wimbledon who are, for my money, the second worst side in the league by some distance. Sorry Bromley, you’re first. Speaking of Bromley, Wednesday put 7 past them earlier this year! While this