A whirlwind start to the group stages but the first round of games finishes on Tuesday with two games from Group F. On paper, this is one of the trickier groups to call with a littering of stars. Austria take on Hungary in an empirical clash and then Cristiano Ronaldo leads Portugal into battle against Iceland.
Marc Janko
Austria vs Hungary
17:00 kick off
Austria were incredible in qualifying. Only England beat their tally of 28 points. After drawing 1-1 with Sweden in the opening round but nine straight wins shot them to the top of Group G. Marc Janko played in all of them and scored in seven. He scored 16 times in 20 appearances for Basel domestically but drew blanks in four of the five warm up games. Standing at almost six feet five he is a serious danger from set pieces (hear that Roy Hodgson? FROM. Not taking. FROM set pieces) and is decent odds to score anytime at .
Gylfi Sigurdsson
Iceland vs Portugal
20:00 kick off
Four of Iceland’s squad play in the top five European leagues. The rest are dotted around Scandinavia and the lower leagues of central Europe. Their star man is the familiar Gylfi Sigurdsson. Normally, we’d have plumped for Ronaldo to score anytime because he leads Portugal.
But when we saw Siggy’s odds of , we dug a little deeper. Portugal averaged 2.3 yellows per game in qualifying and conceded on average 10 fouls per game. Sigurdsson can punish any free within 25 yards of the goal and every Icelandic attack will go through him. At such long odds for anytime scorer, and coming up against Pepe, we just had to tip him.