Bundesliga picks: Best bets include Borussia Dortmund, Borussia Mönchengladbach, unders

UPDATE: Jadon Sancho is on the bench to start today’s match due to a muscle injury.

We’ve got soccer, and though it might be as “Geisterspiele” (German for ‘ghost games’), it’s still world class soccer on the biggest stage. And we’ve got plenty of ways to wager on it starting at 9:30 a.m. this morning.

Let’s take a look at some best bets from Round 26 of the Bundesliga, the top division of football in Germany.

Borussia Dortmund to score first and win -148

Dortmund are on a mission, and that’s to stop Bayern Munich from winning their eighth-straight Bundesliga trophy. They trail one of the biggest dynasties in sports, but they’re within striking distance just four points adrift with nine matches to play, including one against Bayern that is basically going to be the Quarantine Super Bowl.

Dortmund are a club with possibly the most passionate fan base in Europe. The players tend to play for something bigger in the old factory town that’s fallen on hard times. If Billy Joel wrote songs in German, he’d write a lot about Dortmund. But what football means to the populace is transcendent. They’ll be ready to play, they’re always in attack mode, and FC Schalke is unlikely able to keep up.

Under 2.5 goals on Hoffenheim-Hertha +105

The most difficult things to do in all of sports: Hit major league pitching, and score a goal in a top-five European league.

What it takes to be able to put a ball in the onion bag when world-class defenders are draped all over you, with the amount of physicality allowed at this level of soccer and the offsides rule strongly benefitting the back line, is an amount of skill that just can’t be simulated in practice. It’s really hard to do the magical things you need to be able to do to score in the best of times, but it’s going to take a couple weeks for offenses to be in sync. The defenses should be far ahead today.

And these teams can’t score even when they’re in rhythm (combined they have 67 goals in 50 matches this year), and with more than two months off it’s not going to get better. We like the under in all the matches today except Dortmund, but especially here.

Borussia Mönchengladbach win, draw no bet, -139

Die Fohlen by the numbers have been a bit unlucky to only be in fourth place this season. Though they don’t attack with the flare of the clubs ahead of them in Bayern, Dortmund, and Leipzig, they are just as competent defensively. And they’re as balanced in attack as any team in the league, with five players having at least five goals this season. That should help today.

They’re on the road so we’d like to take tie out of the equation and be refunded if that’s the result, but Frankfurt tends to over-extend in attack on occasion. Mönchengladbach holds at the back gets the W today, most likely at 1-0 or 2-0.

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