Benfica made it through to the Europa League final on Thursday, we are on them outight at decent odds and everyone in the clubgowi data base was sent the preview below on March 13th, seven weeks ago.

They won 3-1 at Tottenham that night and are now trading at circa 1.75 for the final later this month.

We are on Benfica outright (see foot of email) and with a 1-0 lead from the first leg and holding a seven point lead at the top of SuperLiga with just four rounds to play, I am very pleased with our position, the title should be done and dusted before the semi final and then their entire focus can switch to this competition, well almost. They do have a domestic cup competition semi-final with rivals Porto next midweek, so a case that they might want to get through the game tonight with the minimum of effort and that is almost always, the Portugese way in any case.

I wrote in the results update on Wednesday, that " it "feels" like we are about to go on another strong run". That hasn't happened yet, but we had a small profit on the Europa League games yesterday and took an outright position and already have wonderful value with that. The vibe is very good going into the weekend and we have six newsletters scheduled over the next three days, which will cost long term subscribers about 8 euros.

I have previewed five events for subscribers today, with six selections at odds of between 2.0 and 26.0 (25-1), including a very strong (1.75 unit) pick at circa 3.20 . One of the Europa League matches is reproduced below.
 

This is only the hosts third ever European campaign, the first was only six seasons ago, it ended with a first round UEFA Cup defeat and they only avoided relegation that year, by virue of Boavista being involved in match fixing. In 2009-10 ,they lost in qualifying in this competition to an Israeli team and again struggled in the league, there is a pattern evolving here by the way.

Wednesday May 15th

The two AFC matches have already been played, Guangzhou won 2-1 and Reysol 2-0 .

AFC Champions League:Central Coast Mariners-Guangzhou Evergrande

Thursday April 4th

Only Europa League for me today, three brief previews, however, we have plenty to get through tomorrow and I will have the normal Friday Ligue 2 previews at 10.00 UK time and a follow up at 16.00 with J League and any other Friday news.

Europa League: Benfica-Newcastle United