NRL Finals 2020 Week 2 betting odds, news & matchups

Four teams butter up this weekend with a spot in the preliminary finals up for grabs. Let’s take a look at the matchups and the latest odds on offer at Australia’s best NRL betting sites.

Every great rivalry has to have good guys up against the bad guys.

David had Goliath, and now the Canberra Raiders have the Sydney Roosters in what promises to be an outstanding semi-final.

Since 2017, the biggest margin between the two teams has been just 12 points across seven separate games.

The Roosters have the most important win, the 2019 NRL Grand Final, but the head-to-head is three for Canberra and four to the Tricolours.

Considering the Roosters’ dominance in that time, it is a huge feather in the cap of the Raiders to have been so consistent against the best team in the competition.

Let’s look back to Magic Round in Brisbane last season; if Nick Cotric could pass left to right, the Raiders would have had a kick to complete a 24-point comeback and send the game to Golden Point.

Or at GIO Stadium last year, where the Roosters again had all they could handle and the Raiders pushed them right until the end.

It was that day that Canberra knew the final 25 minutes of Magic Round was no fluke, and they stopped feeling like the underdog and started feeling more like they were on the same level.

It took a monumental defensive effort from the Roosters to hold out a fast-finishing Canberra in the Grand Final, and the Raiders bounced back by winning the rematch 24-20 at 4/1 odds.

In summary, this has become a sensational rivalry based on good old-fashioned blood and guts.

Even if you think the Roosters have one last hurrah in them, taking the Raiders at +6 this week looks a good thing.

This game will come down to the wire, and maybe the Roosters can pull off the win and keep their premiership defence alive, but you can bet the Raiders will be right there when the whips are cracking.

If the Parramatta Eels bow out in straight sets again, where do they look for improvement?

They are now $51 to win the premiership despite winning 75% of their games in 2020, so why are they so despised?

This isn’t to say it isn’t warranted, but it’s just incredible how the cards have fallen.

In 2017 Parramatta finished fourth and went to Melbourne to go down by only two points to one of the great teams of all time.

The following week they produced a horror performance to lose to the eighth-seeded Cowboys, who had no Johnathan Thurston and a prop who was playing with a broken hand.

There was the awesome record win over the Broncos by a whopping 58 points, but the shine has gone out of that result given what has transpired with ‘Seibold’s Broncos’ in the past 12 months.

Parramatta are trying to end a 34-year drought, but it looks as though they will fall out the back door once more.

They are the $2.85 outsiders despite having the home-field advantage, but at the same ground six weeks ago they lost 38-0 to the South Sydney Rabbitohs.

The -6 start for Souths at $1.90 looks like tremendous value and should be backed off the map considering their red-hot form.

Since round 12 the Bunnies have failed to score less than 24 points in a game just once, while in that time the Eels have hit that mark only four times including last week’s loss to Melbourne.

South Sydney’s rise has coincided with Parramatta’s dip in form, and so it only feels right these two will fight it out to move on to a clash with Penrith.