Everton at Tottenham: Writer Prediction League

For the first time in what feels like a very long time, an Everton match actually went the way the Premier League table suggested it ought to.

After losing to relegated Fulham, drawing bottom-half Crystal Palace, and beating three top-six clubs, the Toffees finally restored a little bit of order with their comfortable 2-0 victory over Burnley. That win came a week too late, after Wolves defeated Fulham and locked up seventh place and a potential Europa League spot, pending the result of the FA Cup final.

Our writers still have something to fight for in our imaginary prediction league though, with the league title, last place, and just about everything in between still up for grabs. We’ll look ahead to the decisive match — a trip to London to face Tottenham Hotspur — momentarily. But first, let’s review our Burnley predictions.

All of our writers predicted an Everton victory, an event that historically has served well to jinx the Toffees into losing winnable matches. It didn’t go that way last week though, with Everton’s 2-0 victory earning four of our writers four points.

None of our writers had a Burnley own goal opening the scoring (though there was a little dissent in the ranks about whether or not that goal should have gone to Richarlison, which would have earned half our writers an extra point). Nor did any of our writers have either of the top two Everton man of the match vote recipients — Kurt Zouma and Seamus Coleman.

These results left just a fraction of hope for some drama at the top of our prediction league table in the last week of the season.

Rachel managed to close the gap behind Calvin to six points, making it theoretically possible that she could tie him for first place on the last week of the season. We’ve never had a first-place tie before, so we are taking tiebreaker suggestions should it come to that — my suggestions of competitive interpretive dance and sword fight to the death have not been well received by my editors.

There are some other moderately interesting battles remaining in the table as well. Five different writers could yet manage to finish in second place, while Matthew C. and Zach have one final chance to claw their way out of the bottom of the table.

Those results will depend on how our predictions for Everton’s match against Spurs fare this weekend. Let’s take a look at them.

Calvin and Rachel were kind enough to inadvertently submit picks that shared nothing in common, keeping the latter’s chance of catching the former alive. On the whole, our group seems to think that Spurs’ impending Champions League final will take precedent over this likely meaningless Premier League bout, which is obviously a reasonable conclusion.

As such, 11 of 13 writers have the Toffees leaving London with at least a point — six of whom foresee an Everton victory.