Everton at Southampton: Writer Prediction League

Everton might be facing the Premier League’s two south-coast clubs in consecutive weeks, but the current states of those clubs couldn’t be more opposite.

Last week, Everton labored to a 2-0 victory over a stumbling Bournemouth side. Eddie Howe’s team sat as high as sixth in the table in December, but with just one win and one draw in their nine matches in all competitions since then, they’ve slid to 12th in the table and find themselves out of both domestic cup competitions.

Southampton, which following an FA Cup third-round replay defeat against Derby this week, also finds itself out of both domestic cup competitions. But, the Saints have been in fine league form since December began, picking up wins against Arsenal, Huddersfield Town, and Leicester City in recent weeks, not to mention a draw away to Chelsea.

That form has only seen Southampton one point out of the relegation zone, but that should not obscure the fact that they’ve overall been in better form than the Toffees since mid-December.

Before we look ahead to that match, let’s review the Bournemouth victory one last time. Our writers’ predictions are below, with correct guesses in bold.

The majority of us did have an Everton win over the Cherries, so there are plenty of two-point weeks on the board. No one had Kurt Zouma opening the scoring (predictably), but we did have an interesting development in our man-of-the-match voting.

For the first time since we started doing MOTM voting, we had a tie! Both Zouma and Lucas Digne received ratings of exactly 7.633 — Zach had Digne as his man of the match for this one, and we’ll give him full credit even though there was a tie.

Tom and I both benefited from Dominic Calvert-Lewin’s late goal that pushed the score to 2-0 — a goal that helped to tighten things up atop our Prediction League table.

With this week’s results, I’ve closed the gap on Calvin to just four points, while Matt A. continues to just hang around the title conversation with a 10-point deficit.

Zach’s MOTM point for Digne saw him jump out of sole possession of last place, with Sean and Rachel both also sitting on 29 points.

With that out of the way, let’s take a look at this week’s predictions for Everton’s trip to Southampton.

More than a few of our writers are wary of Everton’s chances this week, given Southampton’s decent form and the Toffees’ well-documented woes away from Goodison. I suspect that if the Southampton injury report didn’t still indicate question marks for Mario Lemina, Danny Ings, and Ryan Bertrand, we’d even see a few more draw or Southampton victory predictions.

That said, most of our writers have Everton opening the scoring, with Richarlison the easy favorite. He grabbed a few man-of-the-match votes as well, though that column is dominated by Ademola Lookman, who is coming off his most complete performance of the season.