England Women vs Scotland Women Predictions

England’s quest for World Cup glory begins on Sunday, as Phil Neville’s Lionesses face Scotland in Nice. England’s women currently rank as the third best side in the world, though they’re yet to win this tournament. If that’s to change, then they’ll need to get over losing their final warm-up game and start building momentum by beating the Scottish.

Winners of the SheBelieves Cup back in March, England are clearly a force to be reckoned with on the biggest stage. In that competition, they held USA, who’re currently ranked as the best team in the world, to a drew and beat the Japanese comfortably, which is not easy to do. However, some of their efforts leading up to this World Cup have been slightly disappointing; they lost to Canada, while they failed to score on route to defeat against New Zealand last weekend. Fortunately, the Lionesses have a pleasing record against Scotland, so they’ll fancy themselves to get the job done.

In terms of recent form, Scotland come into this fixture in good shape. They beat Jamaica last time out, while they got the better of Brazil last time out. That said, whenever they’ve come up against the best teams, the Scottish women have fallen short.

Since 2017, Scotland have faced opposition ranked inside the current top five on three occasions. They’ve lost each of those three matches, conceding eight goals and scoring none in the process. It would appear that they’ve improved slightly since they conceded six goals against England nearly two years ago, as they managed to restrict both Canada and USA to just a single goal, though their attacking efforts against the top teams remain weak.

If we consider that fact that Scotland kept things respectable when losing by just a goal to nil against USA at the end of 2018 and the fact that they also limited the Canadians to just a one-goal victory a few months ago, then it’s not terribly difficult to see Scotland doing much better than when they last faced England. If we also factor in the fact that England haven’t exactly been firing on all cylinders going forward of late, then a case can be made for a low-scoring affair.

At the prices, ‘Under 2.5 Goals’ stands out as a viable option. The Lionesses failed to find the net against Canada in April, while they couldn’t score more than twice against either Spain or Denmark after that. After they failed to fire offensively against a New Zealand side that is no better than Scotland, supporting a lack of goals at Allianz Riviera is the way to go.