The latest weekend of action in the Sky Bet Championship begins on Friday night when Hull City look to continue their positive beginning to the campaign where they host a Bristol City side who will be looking for some consistency.
Hull have picked up two wins from their opening three matches while Bristol City have a win, a draw and a defeat so the points will be keenly sought in this one. There is no TV coverage of this match so you’ll need the updates in the usual places.
Hull City
The Tigers were one of the better teams under Liam Rosenior in the second half of the Championship last term and the early signs are that they haven’t stopped with their improvement for this season. They dropped their opening game of the campaign to Norwich City but that doesn’t look a bad result at all at the minute. Since then though they have picked up good wins over Sheffield United and Blackburn Rovers.
Rosenior is seen as one of the better young coaches in the game and so it is no surprise that he is improving Hull City. With the additions of the likes of Liam Delap and Scott Twine in forward areas there looks to be a real threat around the attacking unit at Hull and the possession based game that they play suits them two perfectly. There are still concerns over them defensively but these days managers tend to build from the front rather than the back so some continuity there should soon help.
Bristol City
Bristol City went into the new season with a fair amount of optimism after a couple of campaigns where they floated around mid-table but while blooding a lot of young players and getting them moulded ready for a possible promotion tilt this time around. Those hopes took a dent when Bournemouth came in and took Alex Scott once the season had started, but to be fair to the Robins they knew keeping him wasn’t going to be an option and Jason Knight is a decent replacement.
Injuries are already hitting Bristol City which is never ideal. They were without five players for the loss to Birmingham City last week and Rob Dickie was sent off in that game so he is going to be missing as well. Not being able to get a settled team isn’t really helping Bristol City too much so it is hard to really judge them until they have that luxury but I think it is fair to say that an improvement is needed if they are going to be at the right end of the table.
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Team News
Liam Rosenior has confirmed that he will have midfielder Ozan Tufan available for this match but he will give left-back Ruben Vinagre as much time as possible to prove his availability after he has recovered from injury.
Bristol City will be without Rob Dickie after his red card against Birmingham City last week. Kal Naismith would be the most obvious replacement for him. Taylor Gardner-Hickman could make his debut after arriving on loan from West Brom.
Betting
I like Hull City under Liam Rosenior and would not be surprised if they are in and around the top six shake up for a lot of the season but at the minute you have to look at their defence and have a bit of an uneasy feel about it. They have conceded five times in their opening three matches. I don’t think we need to be concerned about them shipping twice to Norwich but doing the same to Sheffield Wednesday and then failing to keep a clean sheet against Blackburn is more concerning.
Bristol City are going to have to rejig their back line once again this week with Rob Dickie missing and that feels like a lot of mixing and matching which just hasn’t helped them so far this season. There is no shortage of threat going forward though to take advantage of the leaky Hull defence so I fancy this is a match where we will have a fair bit of joy backing both teams to score. This bet has landed in the last five meetings between these two teams in Hull and given their respective starts to the season I expect it to land here too.
Tips
Back Both teams to score for a 3/10 stake at 1.80 with William Hill
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