The opening match of the Copa America takes place at the Mercedes-Benz Stadium in Atlanta on Thursday night, or in the early hours of Friday morning for those of us who are in the UK, and it does so with the defending champions Argentina beginning their title defence against Canada.
This is the first match in Group A where Chile and Peru are also housed so Argentina will be expected to dominate this section while Canada will probably be expected to prop up the group but have a chance to turn that upside down here.
Where to watch
The match will be shown live and in full on the Premier Sports 1 channel in the UK with the brief build-up beginning at 12.45am ahead of the 1am kick off in Atlanta. You can also watch this game with the bookmaker live streams.
Argentina
Argentina got their hands on this trophy three years ago and then went on to add the World Cup to that so they are rightly arriving in America as the favourites for this tournament. If that wasn’t enough they are already on top of the World Cup qualifying table in the COMNEBOL region so this is an Argentina side who are going to be confident and very hard to beat. The only question after a long hard season is how fresh their key men are.
Whenever we look at an Argentina side the attention is always on what they do at the top end of the pitch with Lionel Messi obviously the central figure in all of that and you look at the attacking options available to Lionel Scaloni and he certainly isn’t short of options. There is no shortage of options at the back or in the centre of the park either so it is easy to see why Argentina are expected to completely dominate this group.
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Canada
This is an exciting time for Canadian football. They have just competed at a World Cup for the first time in 36 years and given that they co-host the next one they will definitely be at that and this is the beginning of a really big warm up for what will be the biggest event that they will have been a part of. It is also the first time they will have been led by new coach Jesse Marsch in a competitive competition and it will be interesting to see how that develops.
Given that he has only recently taken charge of the side I don’t think we should judge Canada too much on this tournament. They are clearly at the beginning of the path towards peaking at the World Cup on home soil but we should be able to see something of a plan in place within the way Marsch likes to play and perhaps one or two who might or might not shine under his system. They don’t have a huge amount to lose here but whether they will be able to impose themselves on Argentina remains to be seen.
Betting
It is hard to get away from the fact that Argentina are highly likely to win this match but we’re not exactly going to get rich backing a 3/10 shot so the question is how we can get some value into backing the defending champions to get off to a winning start. Canada warmed up for this tournament with friendlies against the Netherlands and France which they lost 4-0 and drew 0-0 respectively and the latter might suggest that goals aren’t guaranteed to come regularly here.
Argentina are top of the qualifying group in South America but in their six matches they have only scored eight goals so that would put me off taking any handicaps or anything. Argentina have kept five clean sheets in their six matches in that competition though with the other game being against Uruguay where they ran into Darwin Nunez and co. There is nothing of that quality in this Canada side and when you consider both that Canada aren’t likely to have much of the ball here and will probably be working on structure and shape in the initial stages under Jesse Marsch rather than attacking combinations and plans I think the even money on Argentina to open up their campaign with a win to nil is the right way to go about things.
Tips
Back Argentina to win to nil for a 3/10 stake at 2.00 with Bet365
