West Ham vs. Chelsea Bet Builder Tips: Tasty 10/1 poke on Sunday's 4:30pm kick-off
Chelsea make the trip east in search of their first win under Mauricio Pochettino but they'll have to overcome the challenge of a resilient West Ham under David Moyes.
Tipster Wizard is on tipping duty with two plays in his betting preview, but here you can find a 10/1 bet builder recommendation, courtesy of Paddy Power.
West Ham vs Chelsea Bet Builder Tips
There's no doubt Chelsea will be much improved this season. After enduring a difficult opening 30 minutes against Liverpool last weekend, Pochettino's men began to find their feet and impose themselves on the visitors. They stepped things up again in the second half and looked the side more likely to grab a winner by the end.
Having got another week's worth of ideas, training and recovery in between the two fixtures, The Blues should possess enough to cast aside David Moyes & co who have never managed to beat a Pochettino team in any of their previous five meetings.
Given Chelsea's threat on set-pieces against LFC, it's safe to assume they won't be as lowly positioned as they were last term in the overall rankings. Under Thomas Tuchel, Frank Lampard and later Graham Potter, the West Londoners could only muster eight goals from dead ball situations - a figure that left them sitting 16th in the Premier League charts.
One man who is doing something about changing that perception is Axel Disasi. The 25-year-old Frenchman had a debut to remember when his reactionary finish in the second phase of a Chelsea free-kick levelled things up at Stamford Bridge.
That puts Disasi a third of the way to achieving last season's goals tally for Monaco; three of his 10 shots on target in the league finding the back of the opposition net. More importantly as far as this bet is concerned, he is enjoying a run of five shots on target across his last six matches stretching back to the remaining five 2022/23 Ligue 1 fixtures before making his switch to England.
Sticking on the theme of impressive debutants, Nicolas Jackson proved to be a real handful. The 22-year-old Gambian live wire may have been best remembered for that denied Liverpool penalty incident, but one of the other points of discussion from the match is his involvement in almost everything positive that Chelsea did.
Jackson played the full duration on his debut, which gives you a good impression of exactly how his boss viewed the impact he was having in a Chelsea shirt. As well as his relentless pressing from the front and superb link play, the striker let off four shots on Alisson's goal - two of which hit the target - and may well have left the pitch at full-time feeling as if he should have been celebrating a debut goal like teammate Disasi.
To give you a bit more context for why we expect him to get off the mark this weekend, only three players had a better goals per game average than Jackson in La Liga last term - Karim Benzema, Robert Lewandowski and Almeria's Umar Sadiq Mesbah whose stats are largely skewed across a lowly five appearances.
Jackson beat the keeper on 12 occasions in 26 games, with nine of these coming after he returned to action in March following a hamstring injury which caused him to fail a medical with Bournemouth for a reported £22.5m price tag. He notched in six of his last eight for Villarreal and considering how close he came against strong opposition on his debut, it's unlikely West Ham will be as confident in shutting him out.
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