Football odds and football betting generally favour what players can be expected to do or will do in a match. Premier League odds for example often focus on first goalscorer, timing of a goal etc. It’s what makes sports betting fun and we can be sure that some of the players named below have had a few pounds placed against their name in the past.
Roque Santa Cruz
The ultimate one-season Premier League wonder. Santa Cruz came very highly-rated when Blackburn managed to acquire his services for £3.5m in 2007. A veteran of more than 200 appearances for Bundesliga giant, Bayern Munich, he was feted as being a top-notch target man. A debut goal v Middlesbrough certainly saw the faithful onside from the get-go, and with 19 for the campaign being the fourth best output in the entire league, the money appeared to have been well spent on the Paraguayan.
Tall, great in the air but incredibly agile on the deck with wonderful technical ability, Santa Cruz and Blackburn looked to be a marriage made in football heaven, but things quickly turned sour. Mainly due to injury, the centre-forward could never really recapture his form or goal scoring prowess. A paltry return of four goals in the following season was, bizarrely, still enough to see him get a move to Manchester City, a move that was always destined to fail. Another switch, this time a loan back to Blackburn, failed and spelled the end of his time in England.
Michu
As ‘big names’ go, Michu certainly didn’t fall into that bracket, but by the end of his first season in England at Swansea, his was the name on everyone’s lips. In fact, he played so well back in 2012, that Arsenal and other Premier League sides were making it clear that they’d like a piece of the pie – and were offering in the region of £20m if he didn’t sign a new deal with the Swans.
That would’ve seen a hefty profit for Swansea, who had acquired his services from Rayo Vallecano for just £2.5m. However, eighteen goals in that opening season at the Liberty Stadium was never going to see him be allowed to leave that part of the country. His first two strikes came on debut against QPR, and he was top of the tree in terms of goals at the turn of the year. Sadly, like others on this list, an injury in his next campaign severely curtailed his potency in front of goal, and just two goals in the entire season saw him leave for Napoli in 2014.
Papiss Cisse
You can’t mention Papiss Cisse without thinking of that extraordinary goal that he scored at Stamford Bridge in 2011/12 against Chelsea. There haven’t been too many more outrageous goals scored in the Premier League with perhaps only David Beckham’s, Xabi Alonso’s or Wayne Rooney’s long-range efforts from their own halves topping it. For sheer audacity, however, Cisse’s thunderous arcing banana shot is right up there. It’s often forgotten that he’d scored a great goal in the first half of the same game that any striker would’ve been proud of too.
Thirteen goals scored in his first 14 Premier League games was a hugely impressive start for the Senegalese hit-man, his £9m cost to Newcastle looking an incredible bargain for a player that no one had heard of before he pitched up on Tyneside. However, he disappeared as quickly as he had arrived.
Eight goals in 36 matches during the following campaign showed that his first season had been a fluke, and Demba Ba’s replacement was soon sent packing to Shandong Luneng in China after not being able to earn a switch to any of the Magpies’ top-flight rivals.
Amr Zaki
Five goals in his first six matches really announced Amr Zaki to the Premier League. He’d been playing for Egyptian side, Zamalek, and was a complete unknown when Steve Bruce signed him for Wigan in 2008. The term ‘unplayable’ should always be used sparingly, but in those first few games and months, it was a perfectly apt description for Zaki. So much so that it left others wondering how on earth the player hadn’t come to anyone else’s attention before he pitched up in the Manchester suburb.
Whether something was lost in translation as the season progressed is unknown, but what’s clear is that before the end of the campaign, the player had decided that his form meant he could do as he pleased. Maybe a Cristiano Ronaldo or a Thierry Henry might be able to get away with the occasional indiscretion, but not a player who began to stroll through games before the end of the season. That was never going to please Bruce, and returning late from international duty was the final straw. It ensured his loan move wouldn’t be made into a permanent one, and a later loan to Hull ended in much the same ignominy.
Benjani
Harry Redknapp could always spot a player, so when he paid Auxerre £4m for Benjani in 2006, no one questioned the then Portsmouth manager’s acumen. No goals in his opening 14 matches for the club left more than just ‘Arry Boy scratching his head, though he would be repaid handsomely in the following campaign with 12 goals in 23 matches. It proved to be the highlight of Benjani’s top-flight career, however.
A move to Man City that apparently the player didn’t want to make but couldn’t turn down the lure of some filthy lucre, was the result of his prowess, albeit he only managed four goals in his time at the club. It therefore wasn’t a surprise when he was loaned to Sunderland where once again he struggled, and even stints at Blackburn and Portsmouth failed to yield anything like the goalscoring success of that previous period at Fratton Park. No wonder Redknapp looked back on what might’ve been.
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