Everton at West Ham United: Writer Prediction League

It figures that Everton’s first true big win of the season came just before the last international break of the campaign.

We’ve been waiting all season for the Toffees to break through and convert one of their solid performances against a top-six side into three points. Against Chelsea two weeks ago, Marco Silva’s men finally achieved it.

Silva and Everton now return from the international break with a trip to play West Ham United in London. The Hammers, like Everton, spent big money in the offseason looking to improve upon a bottom-half finish last season.

Also like Everton, West Ham hasn’t gotten much traction in its quest to become upwardly mobile in the table. The Hammers sit in ninth, two places and two points above Everton. If the Toffees want to make a legitimate push for seventh place then, this is a must-win match.

But the only reason the Toffees are still even in that race is the victory over Chelsea — one that feels like it was years ago now. Let’s take a look at how that surprising result impacted our predictions.

Well, you could say that Everton’s performance and result caught us off guard. Only two writers, Sean and Zach, picked Everton to win. Tom picked up a point via Richarlison scoring the opener — but that was it for our successful predictions.

The result was a relatively unchanged prediction league table.

There was a little bit of a shuffle at the bottom of the table, but since nobody in the top half picked up even a single point, the title race remains unchanged. With a 10-point cushion and only seven games to play, it’s hard to see a way for anyone to catch Calvin.

With that said though, there’s a reasonable chance that the spend-a-lot-of-money-to-not-get-any-better derby could create some late drama in our prediction league, because we have pretty widely varying opinions on what will go down in the match on Saturday.

We rarely get as even a split as you see here — five Everton wins, five West Ham wins, and three draws. Javier Hernandez and Gylfi Sigurdsson are among the most popular options to open the scoring, while Idrissa Gueye is the clear favorite for Everton man of the match honors.