Northern Ireland – Bulgaria, Prediction – World Cup Qualifications

📉 Northern Ireland is in pretty bad shape

Northern Ireland was impressive against Italy in the first match and then lost a friendly match with the United States. Thus, this team has only 1 victory in its last 15 games and it was even a friendly. Connor Washington will not play in the match after being injured against Italy. The team’s attack didn’t look very impressive even with him, but now probably it’s going to be even worse. Northern Ireland has very rarely scored more than 1 goal in official matches in recent years. For example, they last scored more than 2 goals against San Marino in 2017 again for WC qualifiers.

😐 Bulgaria could not oppose even extremely demotivated Italy

Bulgaria was a serious outsider against Italy in the last match and maybe that’s why the Italians did not give much effort, but still managed to win with a handicap and a clean sheet, although there were serious complaints about the penalty that the Azzurri received in the 1st half. The Bulgarians have no injuries after the first two matches, so they are expected to be in full force.

Both teams have a lot of problems. We expect a boring match with few goal chances

 Expert view: In general, Lithuania, Bulgaria, and Northern Ireland will fight over who is the weakest of the weakest in the group, because Italy and Switzerland opened a serious difference between these three teams after the first 2 rounds. That is why the match between Northern Ireland and Bulgaria is important not only from this point of view but also because of the self-confidence of the two teams, who are in a terrible state. Considering the difficulties both teams have in attack, we just don’t see how they will score more than 2 goals in the match, so we bet on the safer Under 2.5 goals, although only at 1.50 odds.