Telstar vs NEC Nijmegen Predictions

After four wins and three draws in the first seven games of the season, NEC’s bright start to the campaign has been undone over the past fortnight, with the Nijmegen outfit suffering back to back 1-0 defeats. The latter, at home to FC Eindhoven last weekend, put an end to NEC’s 23 match unbeaten run at Goffertstadion in the second tier, and the club are now five points adrift of the leaders. Can Jack De Gier’s side regain the winning thread against an inconsistent Telstar this week?

Few would’ve expected NEC to lose at home to FC Eindhoven last week despite their defeat at Almere City on match day eight, but in retrospect their earlier results hardly make for impressive reading now.

All four of NEC’s wins this term have been by a single goal, and now that the league table has settled, we can see that Jack De Gier’s men only edged their way past teams currently placed 11^th (2-3 vs Roda JC), 18^TH (1-2 vs Jong Utrecht), 19^th (2-3 vs Helmond Sport) and 20^th (1-0 vs Dordrecht). In addition, NEC played out draws with sides placed 8^th (2-2 vs Cambuur) and 13^th (4-4 vs Jong PSV).

So it’s perhaps fair to say that their lofty league position was a bit of a fluke, and that their only strong result of the season was actually a 1-1 draw at home to co-leaders Go Ahead Eagles on match day seven. However you perceive the strength of NEC’s form, De Gier’s men now definitely have a lot to prove if they are to be considered genuine promotion hopefuls this term.

Victory away to Telstar this week would go some way towards restoring NEC’s credentials, and the visitors will be hoping to catch Mike Snoei’s side on a bad day.

The Ijmuiden outfit have been extremely inconsistent this season with four wins and five defeats recorded from their first nine league outings, and they’ll certainly have to go some from here to qualify for the Play-offs and match the 6^th place they achieved in 2017/18.

Telstar will at least head into this Friday’s clash on a high after a battling 1-2 success at Helmond Sport last week, and all in all that marked a decent effort following a 3-0 collapse away to defending champions Jong Ajax on match day eight.

Telstar’s best result of the campaign was a 1-0 home triumph against 6^th placed Oss in their last appearance at the Rabobank Ijmuiden Stadion on match day seven, and a repeat of that performance here could well be good enough to overcome this slumping NEC side.

But with Telstar‘s unpredictability and NEC failing to convince, we’re swerving the match betting here to look at the goals markets instead.

This appears to have all the makings of a high scoring affair, just as it was in last season’s corresponding fixture when Telstar ran out 3-2 winners.

NEC have conceded in all but one of their league games this term which have featured 30 goals in total, whilst Telstar have shipped 13 goals in their last six matches in all competitions.

With both sides desperate to land the points here, we envisage this being end to end and over 2.5 goals with both teams to score stands out as a solid wager. With the teams difficult to split in terms of the result, we’re also chancing a 2-2 correct score with minimum stakes.