Everton at Crystal Palace: Writer Prediction League

Comprehensive 4-0 victories over top teams make it a lot easier to swallow botched predictions.

Everton’s thrashing of Manchester City caught a fair number of our writers by surprise, but you’ll find few complaints among us because of it! The Toffees made the more confident among us look smart on Sunday, while punishing the doubters (myself included) for their lack of faith.

Our predictions from the City match were as follows, with correct guesses in bold.

Darren and Tom both picked up points for picking an Everton victory, while Mike, Tom, and Tyler had their faith in Romelu Lukaku’s goal-scoring prowess rewarded. Sean was the only writer to successfully predict that Tom Davies would be Everton’s Man of the Match.

As you might expect, none of us correctly picked the 4-0 scoreline!

The varied results from our writers brought a reasonable shake-up to the prediction league table.

With his one point gained, Sean jumped into sole possession of first place, one point above Calvin. Below the top two, we’ve got a giant cluster of writers at 28 or 29 points; most notably, Tom used his three-point week to become part of the pack.

This week, Everton takes on Crystal Palace away from home. The Eagles are in the midst of an abjectly terrible run of form — they haven’t won in the Premier League since December 3, needed two cracks at Bolton to move past the League One side in the FA Cup, and sit just one place out of the relegation zone.

Should be a relatively straightforward match then, right? Our writers certainly seem to think so.

Eight of ten writers are predicting an Everton victory, with Mike and Tom calling draws. None of us foresee an Everton loss.

Half of us predict that Romelu Lukaku will get the match’s first goal, with the rest of the votes split between Kevin Mirallas, Ross Barkley, Christian Benteke, and Damien Delaney.

We were evidently impressed by the performance of Everton’s central midfielders against Manchester City; Barkley, Tom Davies, and Morgan Schniederlin combined for eight out of ten of our man of the match predictions. Calvin and I were the outliers in that regard, picking Lukaku and Mirallas for that honor.

Consider this final thought — since the start of October, Everton has played five matches in which none of our writers predicted a loss for the Blues. In those matches, the Toffees have four losses and a draw.

In short then, be prepared for an agonizingly miserable performance and result, courtesy of your good friends at Royal Blue Mersey.