Everton v. Apollon Limassol, Burnley: Writer Prediction League

Despite Ronald Koeman and Everton’s best efforts to ruin what should have been an easy week, the Toffees came away with two wins against Sunderland in the Carabao Cup and Bournemouth in the Premier League.

These two wins could get Everton’s season back on track — though at the very least, they already helped some of our writers get going in our prediction league!

Before we take a look at our predictions for this week against Apollon Limassol and Burnley, let’s look back at our surprisingly solid picks from this week, starting with Sunderland.

Everyone correctly predicted an Everton victory, though none got the 3-0 scoreline right. Calvin was the only person to pick up points on the back of Dominic Calvert-Lewin’s stellar day.

Our success against Bournemouth came in slightly more varied ways.

Only Callum and Chris didn’t pick Everton victories (boo on the pessimists!), and Brian F., Calvin, and Mike all correctly picked the 2-1 scoreline.

Once again Calvin picked up points for picking the opening goalscorer, as did Chris. No one foresaw Oumar Niasse’s man-of-the-match performance — though Tom did guess he’d be the MOTM for the Sunderland match, which is still surprisingly close!

Those results give us a prediction league table that has a quickly-emerging upper echelon.

Calvin and Mike are absolutely flying out of the gate, leaving the rest of us looking a pretty long way up at them only six weeks into the season. Sean is still in touching distance, but the rest of us still have a long way to go to get back to the top of the table.

With Everton facing weak competition again this week, meaning lots of shared picks, it’s pretty unlikely that we’ll be able to make up significant distance on the leaders.

Let’s start by looking at the Apollon Limassol predictions.

Matt is the lone pessimist of the bunch, predicting a 1-1 draw and an opening goal from an Apollon player.

The rest of us have Everton winning, mostly by two or more goals. Dominic Calvert-Lewin is favored for a big day, with five writers picking him to open the scoring, three of whom think he’ll be man of the match as well. Gylfi Sigurdsson is also a popular choice, accruing two first scorer and three man of the match votes.

Against Burnley, we’re equally optimistic.

Calvin is the lone pessimist here, though the rest of us foresee significantly closer scorelines in this one than against Apollon. Oumar Niasse (!!!) and Gylfi Sigurdsson lead the first scorer voting with three each, while Niasse shares the top odds at man of the match with Jordan Pickford. Both players have three votes.