Everton v. Tottenham Hotspur — Writer Prediction League

Ahead of Everton’s match away to Brighton and Hove Albion, I noted my surprise that not a single writer predicted that Everton would lose away from Goodison Park last weekend. Of course, I wasn’t bright enough to predict the right outcome myself, but it was at least surprising for a team that has had such grotesque struggles away from home.

Fast forward to this week, and sure enough, the Toffees somehow managed to lose 3-2 to Brighton, leaving our writers doubly disappointed.

The mid-week victory over Watford generated at least mild cause for optimism — but wasn’t included in our prediction league fixtures because who ever really knows what players any given team will use in a Carabao Cup match anyway.

That brings us up to this week’s match against Tottenham Hotspur, a club that has found itself similarly underperforming its preseason expectations. Before we get to our picks for the Underperformer’s Derby though, let’s quickly review our predictions from the BHA match. You should notice something about the picks pretty quickly.

Nobody got anything right! Pascal Gross opened the scoring, Dominic Calvert-Lewin was voted man of the match, and Brighton won the day 3-2 — none of which our writers predicted. As such, our standings remain the same.

I lead the way with Rachel one point back, then a host of others just cracking double digit points.

Following the victory over Watford, and Everton’s generally decent form against the traditional top-six clubs over the last calendar year, I was expecting reasonable optimism from our writers this week — but that isn’t really the case.

Seven of 13 writers have Spurs winning the match, with another four predicting a draw. Only Pat and Pete have Everton getting the victory, by 2-1 and 1-0 scorelines respectively. Those who have Spurs winning are especially pessimistic about Everton’s chances going into this one — five of them have the Toffees losing by two goals.

In the opening goal column, five of our writers still believe in Harry Kane, while Heung-Min Son and Richarlison each picked up three votes. Andre Gomes and Alex Iwobi round out the other vote-getters.

Man of the match voting is an absolute mess, with nine different players getting votes and none receiving more than two. Iwobi, Lucas Digne, Tom Davies, and Richarlison were the players to receive multiple votes.