Hibs vs Celtic Prediction: Palma’s a Sweet Bet at Easter Road

We have a second live game from the SPL this week on Sky Sports. The pressure is on Celtic and manager Brendan Rodgers as the champions travel to Easter Road on Wednesday night (20:00).

As usual, our main SPL man Frank Monkhouse is here with his predictions in the Betfred Insights match preview…

Wednesday brings another four fixtures from the Scottish Premiership as tensions continue to rise across the board. It’s a tightly run race at the summit, where Celtic and Rangers battle for supremacy, and February will be crucial in deciding the title's destination. The champions drew away to Aberdeen on Saturday and now travel to Hibs on matchday 25.

Pressure is building on manager Brendan Rodgers after Rangers cut the gap at the top of the division, ensuring we now have a title race on our hands.

Hibs will look to make home advantage count to pile pressure on the visitors, but the hosts are stuck on a long winless run that led to their dropping out of the top six. An important 90 minutes awaits both Hibs and Celtic at Easter Road.

Team News

Hibs started the week sitting down in seventh place in the Premiership, with their stats for the campaign so far reading six wins, eight draws, and nine defeats with 28 goals scored and 37 conceded.

A closer look at those numbers shows Hibs have conceded more goals than Ross County, who are second from the bottom of the league and facing the threat of relegation to the Championship. That fragile defence will be pushed to breaking point again on Wednesday by a determined opponent.

Celtic arrive in the capital having won four of their last five games, including a hard-fought home victory over Rangers in the Old Firm derby.

Despite the team’s winning ways, fans are unhappy with performances, the style of play, and a lack of transfer activity during January. They drew 1-1 at Pittodrie last time and had to fight back from a goal down to rescue a point in the Granite City.

Hibs vs Celtic Odds

Betfred traders have released their pre-match betting odds on this game, making Celtic the odds-on favourites to leave Edinburgh with all three points. Given the form of both teams, that comes as no surprise, but meetings between the Hibees and Bhoys have been competitive this season, with one draw and a Celtic win.

The game ended goalless when Celtic last stopped by Easter Road, and you can back another share of the spoils at a tempting 4/1. Celtic drew last time, and Hibs drew half of their previous four. A Celtic victory is 3/10, or you can support the hosts to claim an overdue victory at 15/2, which is sure to attract attention.

Both teams to score @ 4/5

This is a tricky game to call, with both teams entering on the back of poor weekend results. The Hibs fans will demand a performance from their team at Easter Road, and the players will hope to feed off an electric atmosphere. After rescuing a point at Pittodrie, Celtic must improve to keep Rangers at arm’s length in the midst of a run of away games.

To help keep things simple and make sense of this game, we’ll place our trust in the trends and back both teams to score. That would’ve been a winning bet in three of the last four games involving these teams and in four of the previous six. Fancy more of the same? Both teams to score comes with a useful 4/5 price tag attached.

Luis Palma to score @ 2/1

There’s not too much value floating around here unless you’re backing the hosts. Our quest for decent odds takes us into the anytime scorer market, where you’ll find Luis Palma available at 2/1, and that caught our eye.

Palma came close on several occasions at Pittodrie but failed to make those opportunities count. He did score against Hibs at Celtic Park in a 4-1 rout back in December and is capable of adding to his tally at Easter Road. The 2/1 offered for Palma to score anytime is worth a play to keep this game interesting.

Frank Monkhouse covers Scottish Football for us here at Betfred Insights. You can check out all of his work along with that of the rest of our Football Betting Tips desk on our main Football page...