Ukraine vs Cyprus Betting Tips & Predictions

This is Ukraine’s first match since their 3-1 aggregate win over Slovenia in the Euro 2016 play-offs. They competed well in the group losing narrowly 1-0 against Spain on two occasions and will fancy their chances of making the last 16 this summer with Germany, Poland and Northern Ireland the other teams in their group. They could experiment a little here but with few games left until Euro 2016 commences they will be keen to win the game and put in a strong performance.

Cyprus made a bright start to their qualifying group when they won in Bosnia on match-day 1 but aside from wins against Andorra, they lost 6 of their other 7 matches and failed to make the play-offs. Another away win in Israel did show they can be a threat on the road but they were battered 5-0 in Belgium and looked defensively naive at times. They’ve not played since a 3-2 home defeat to Bosnia in their final qualifier in October but there are few changes to the squad that lined up for that game.

The Cypriots tend to perform better in competitive games than friendlies. They’ve not won a friendly in nearly 5 years and have only won 1 away friendly in the past 24 years and that was against neighbours Greece in 2001. It’s hard to see them troubling what is a strong Ukraine side here. Ukraine are unbeaten in 11 friendly matches and they’ve won 7 of them but haven’t scored more than twice in any of them. Therefore consider backing Ukraine to win 2-0 at 15/2.