SHANGHAI MASTERS AND WALES MANAGER BETTING

The new snooker season kicks off today with the wildcard round of the Shanghai Masters. The first ranking event of the season will, however, be without the games two biggest names. Ronnie O’Sullivan has withdrawn from the event due to personal reasons and John Higgins is currently banned from all WSPBA events pending an investigation into match-fixing allegations.

That means that Masters champion Mark Selby is the betting favourite for the event at odds of 9/2 with Totesport. Local boy Ding Junhui is second favourite at 7/1. The two most appealing bets to me are the 10/1s available on both Mark Williams and Neil Robertson. Williams has multiple successes in ranking events in Asia whilst Robertson will command the respect that a World Champion naturally does.

In football, Wales manager John Toshack is reportedly likely to resign from his role in the next 48 hours. Wales lost 1-0 to Montenegro on Monday night and in doing so made a qualification push for Euro2012 extremely unlikely.

Victor Chandler are the only bookmaker so far to release betting odds on his successor. They make the current Wales under 21 manager Brian Flynn as the 2/1 favourite, Ryan Giggs is strangely a short 5/2 chance, Chris Coleman is 5/1 and Ian Rush and Gary Speed are both 8/1 chances.

And finally, Corey Pavin will name the final four members of his 2010 Ryder Cup team tomorrow at a press conference in New York. Brandt Snedeker is currently one shot off the lead in the Deutsche Bank Championship and would certainly force Pavin to think about things if he can get his nose in front there.

Tiger Woods’ form over the last two weeks means that he is almost certain to be one of the four named. Stewart Cink and Zach Johnson are expected to get two of the remaining three leaving just the one place up for grabs.