Betting tips / Ralph Ellis / 05 December 2011 / Leave a comment Bet Now View Market

Concentration, resilience and an excellent team ethic are the ingredients Ralph Ellis sees in a Manchester United that picked up the three points on the weekend to take their tally to four out of five wins.

Flashy four goal triumphs might be fun to play in and even more entertaining for the fans, but they don't tap into the same resources of character as a nil-one win.

To see out a single-goal victory you have to concentrate totally, defend with courage and resilience, and work as a team until the final whistle blows without ever letting your standards drop.

So it's not hard to see why Sir Alex Ferguson was pretty pleased with himself on Saturday night after Manchester United had ground out a 1-0 win at Aston Villa.

Since his horror at the cavalier way his side exposed themselves in the last ten minutes to let in six against Manchester City, Fergie has watched his men win four of their last five Premier League games by the aforementioned score.

"It's good. It says our concentration levels are high," he told the press on Saturday night.

Betfair's punters are not so convinced.

United's title odds are now out to [3.5] while City, having romped 5-1 over Norwich, are now [1.76] favourites. But Fergie will be counting only that his win was worth the same three points City collected - and I suspect will remember the 2008-9 season when he got ten 1-0 wins on the way to the title.

Add in a few 2-1s and 3-2s, and very nearly half of United's victories in that season came by a single goal, and in the last ten seasons only three times have the side that finished champions not needed to get into double figures in matches won by the slimmest possible margin. Getting through those last desperate minutes and protecting a lead is the hallmark of top teams. Even woeful Villa made two good chances on Saturday and the ability to see matches to a conclusion is vital.

It might have been Arsenal fans who invented the "One-Nil" song, but it's actually a bit of a myth that it was how George Graham's teams of the late 1980s won most of their games. They had only three one-nillers in the 88-9 title, and five when they won it again two years later. It doesn't lessen the importance of grinding out games.

Gunners fans might have been cheering their 4-0 win at Wigan on Saturday, but it's only the fourth time they've kept a clean sheet in the League all season and I'd still want to lay them at [2.48] for a top four finish.

That's the same small number of shut-outs that 17th placed Sunderland have managed. The need to be mean is why new boss Martin O'Neill will have worried that the Black Cats snatched defeat from the jaws of victory at Wolves yesterday. Just 25 seconds after Seb Larsson missed a penalty that should have put them 2-0 up, they allowed Steven Fletcher to equalise and Mick McCarthy's team went on to get the winner.

O'Neill's charismatic influence will make Sunderland at [8.0] a safe lay in the relegation market but it proved the new boss will have to earn his reputed £2m a year contract.

Betfair's market can't decide who will join [1.37] favourites Wigan in going down, making value in backing both Bolton at [2.52] and Blackburn at [2.16] to stay sucked into the North West's equivalent of the Bermuda triangle. Owen Coyle's side are starting to look accident prone - however much Gary Cahill didn't deserve to follow centre back partner David Wheater as the second red card in two weeks. And while Steve Kean was cheering Yakubu's four-goal haul in the 4-2 win over Swansea, the fact they have still not achieved a shut-out all season says there are still plenty of issues to resolve.

If either do escape - and Yakubu's goal-scoring gives Blackburn the best chance - then QPR are the big value to slip into trouble at [5.8]. They may have 16 points and the promise of money to spend in January - but letting Shane Long rescue a late equaliser for West Brom in a 1-1 draw says they fail the "One-Nil" test, even if they did scrape through by that score against nine-man Chelsea a few weeks ago.

Manchester United's Danish goalkeeper Anders Lindegaard put it best on Saturday night.

"I would rather win 1-0 than 10-2," he said. "In my position, clean sheets are goals."