Everton vs Sunderland: Writer Prediction League

After two weeks off (that felt like two years!), Everton is back in action on Saturday, with a match against Sunderland and David Moyes at Goodison Park on the agenda. That can only mean one thing — time for your favorite bloggers to make blatantly incorrect predictions!

We start this week’s prediction league update by welcoming Royal Blue Mersey’s two newest writers into the competition. Chris has been keeping you up to date with all the latest Everton news and rumors, while Brian runs our weekly mailbag piece (which you can submit a question for on Twitter using the hashtags #foleysthoughts or #RBMmailbag)

Each of our new writers will enter the competition with the average number of points held by our writers — 33.

They didn’t miss out on much last week with Everton’s 0-0 draw against Middlesbrough. The match was uninspiring — and our picks even more so. Our predictions were as follows, with correct guesses in bold.

You may have noticed that none of our picks are in bold! That’s right, nobody picked up a single point two weeks ago, as there was no opening scorer, Joel Robles was voted Everton’s Man of the Match, and the game ended 0-0.

So, our prediction league standings look essentially the same as they did two weeks ago, with the exception of the addition of our two new participants and one slight correction.

Calvin and Tyler are still at the top of the leaderboard, but nearly all our writers, including new entrants Brian F. and Chris, are still definitely in the running with 13 matches still to play.

You shouldn’t expect a ton of movement in the standings this week though, as a visit from league-bottom Sunderland has our writers all thinking similarly. Those predictions are below.

Six writers foresee Romelu Lukaku continuing his fine form against the Black Cats by opening the scoring on Saturday. League-leading Calvin and league bottom-feeder Matt have both predicted that Jermaine Defoe will score Saturday’s first goal — though they (and all our writers) believe Everton will come out on top.

Lukaku is also the leading vote-getter for Everton MOTM with four. Tom Davies, Joel Robles, Morgan Schneiderlin, Ross Barkley, and Ademola Lookman all got votes as well.

Our writers clearly don’t think much of Sunderland’s defense; each participant has Everton scoring at least two goals against Moyes’ side, with Darren predicting the Toffees will put up four!