The Sky Bet Championship weekend concludes at St Andrew’s on Monday night when Birmingham City go in search of another three points in front of their own fans when they entertain Watford in the second city.
Consistency is a word which you can’t really use to describe the season of either of these two teams so far but now is the time to find it and whoever wins here will shoot themselves into the top 10 in the table so there is plenty on this.
Where to watch
The match will be shown live and in full on the Sky Sports Main Event and Sky Sports Football channels with the build-up beginning at 7.30pm ahead of the 8pm kick off.
Birmingham City
It took Birmingham City a bit of time to get going this season. They only won three of their opening 10 league matches, which in a way is understandable given that they are new back to the division, although more would have been expected of them with the turnover of players and expenditure they have delivered over the previous three transfer windows. The more the relatively new squad has gelled though the better the Blues have got which bodes well for them.
Birmingham go into this match having won four of their last seven so they are starting to get things right, especially on home soil where they have won their last three matches, scoring four goals in each game. They are clicking at both ends of the pitch at St Andrew’s which bodes well for them in this match. Coventry might be away and gone at the top but a win here would move the Blues to within a point of the play-offs and five of the automatic promotion spots so they won’t be going along too badly.
Watford
It is never an easy thing to accurately judge a Watford outfit because just when you think there is enough of a stretch of form to balance things with, they change their manager and it is back to square one again. Here we are entering December and once again they are on their second manager already but we are getting towards the stage where the sample size under Javi Gracia is big enough to begin to make fair judgements.
The Hornets head up the M6 with just one defeat in their last seven matches and that was away at the leaders Coventry where everyone are coming up short at the minute so we shouldn’t judge them too negatively on that effort. One area of concern would be the Watford away form. No team in the Championship have picked up fewer points on their travels this season than them and that is going to need to improve if they are to go anywhere this term.
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Team News
Birmingham will have to go into battle here without their Japanese midfielder Tomoki Iwata while Ethan Laird, Scott Wright and Willum Thor Willumsson are both unavailable for Chris Davies because of injury.
Watford were boosted by the return of Giorgi Chakvetadze off the bench against Preston last time out and it might be that he is set for a bigger role here. Gracia will be without Caleb Wiley, Rocco Vata and Kwadwo Baah because of injury.
Betting
Birmingham City are on the drift here but I’m not sure that I agree with that. They are beginning to look like a dominant force at home at the minute whereas Watford are clearly still trying to work things out on their travels this term. Their only win on the road came at Derby recently but the Rams were rocked by a serious injury to striker Carlton Morris early in that game and even then the Hornets were 2-0 down at one point before Derby collapsed late on.
I wouldn’t expect Birmingham City to do that in a similar position because they have much more strength in depth to bring off their bench. It is hard to ignore the form of the last three home matches for the Blues. They have won 4-0 against Portsmouth, 4-0 against Millwall and 4-1 against Norwich and with just one clean sheet all season for Watford and none on the road, you would expect Birmingham to score and based on those recent results go from strength to strength. 17/20 on a home win feels more than fair to me.
Tips
Back Birmingham City to beat Watford for a 3/10 stake at 1.85 with Bet365
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