Everton 2018-19 Season Review: Grading Our Predictions

Tallying and scoring our weekly Everton predictions at RBM has become one of my favorite weekly tasks — primarily because doing so gives me a great opportunity to make fun of my colleagues. And in a season that was so grotesquely unpredictable for long stretches, I had plenty of chances to do so!

If you haven’t been keeping track of our running prediction league all season — here’s the breakdown. Each week, our writers submit to me their predictions for any Everton match in the week to come. The categories, and their respective point totals are:

• First goalscorer: 1 point
• Everton man of the match (as voted by RBM readers): 1 point
• Winner (or draw): 2 points
• Final score: 2 points

We ran predictions for 39 matches this season — the 38 Premier League games, plus Everton’s only cup match against a Premier League opponent. 39 matches times a maximum of six points per match gives us a maximum season points total of 234.

Before the big reveal of the final prediction league standings though, let’s take a quick look at our final-week predictions, from Everton’s match against Tottenham Hotspur.

Truly, it was fitting for the final week of such an unpredictable Everton season to include two squads beset by injury issues in a match that didn’t really mean anything for either team — conditions that made it hard to predict much of anything!

Credit then, to Calvin, both Matts, Pete, and Tom, who correctly predicted the match would end in a draw. None of us got the final score correct, nor had Eric Dier opening the scoring (go figure), but Matt. A and Pete did both also get a point for correctly picking Gylfi Sigurdsson as man of the match.

Without further ado then, I present the final Royal Blue Mersey 2018-19 prediction league table.

And since, as I stated at the top, most of the reason I go through this weekly exercise is to have a little fun with my fellow writers, I present the dubiously-awarded Prediction League End of Seasons Awards!

The Romelu Lukaku Memorial League Winner’s Cup — Calvin

Much like Romelu Lukaku during his time at Everton, Calvin is the best performer in a group of otherwise underwhelming hacks. Now that Calvin has won the league twice in our three years running the damn thing, it is now also the case that much like Romelu Lukaku during his time at Everton, we complain about Calvin’s success primarily because we’d just like to see somebody else actually do something noteworthy.

The Bernard Memorial Come-From-Behind Champion — Rachel

Rachel spent the first half of this season in the bottom half of the table — at times flirting with last place, in fact. Then, like second-half-of-the-season Bernard, she flipped a switch and got weirdly good at this stupid thing. Once again like Bernard, she ran out of steam at the end of the season, but second place is nothing to scoff at.

The Einstein After-the-Fact Award - Adam

Years of doing the tactical analysis on RBM have sharpened Adam’s insight (and wit). However, despite that he remains as befuddled as the rest of us when predicting how Everton will do on any given weekend. For that and his great work in breaking down the games after all is said and done, Adam gets this honorary recognition.

Editor’s Note: We couldn’t have Adam dissing everyone but himself, so I threw this in for him!

The Tottenham Honorary Someone Had To Finish Fourth Award — Sean, Geno, Chris, and Matt

If you like quality football, the twists and turns of the Premier League title race surely had you on the edge of your seat for basically what was the final two months of the season. At least, I assume that’s the case — I’m an Everton fan so I’ve never seen quality football. HEYOOOOOOO

My personal preference is occasionally good, but laughably race-to-the-bottom football, so I got an absolute treat watching Spurs, Arsenal, Chelsea, and Manchester United all insist “no no, it’s okay, you go claim that Champions League place” for the final two months of the season.

We had our own version of that in the race for fourth place in the prediction league. Sean, Geno, Chris, and Matt A. all had opportunities to claim sole possession of that spot, but only managed to collect a combined 12 points between the four of them in the last four matches of the season — leaving us with a hilarious four-way tie.

The Oumar Niasse “At Least I’m Not Sandro Ramirez” Next-to-Last Place Award — Brian F.

At both Everton and RBM, we’re no strangers to futility. But not all futility is created equal.

Sure, Oumar Niasse is pretty bad. He played 1,115 first-team minutes for Everton and Cardiff City, but he did have one assist in all those minutes! No goals of course, but you can’t take away that one assist! And it was even against Southampton! An actual Premier League team!

Sure, Brian’s final total of 45 points could just as easily have been obtained by blindly picking Richarlison as the opening goalscorer and Everton as the winner every week, but he still managed to get 45 points and not finish last!

Also, I definitely didn’t assign Brian an award named after Oumar Niasse so that I had an excuse to bring up the fact that Brian once wrote a song about everyone’s favorite Senegalese striker. That would make the whole exercise hollow and empty.

But, if I was to do that, I certainly would then include the link to this aforementioned song so that everyone could re-live it. Lucky for Brian, I’m definitely not doing that.

The Sandro Ramirez “Yes I Still Exist” Last Place Award — Zach

Do you know how many competitive goals Sandro Ramirez has since signing with Everton?

I bet you think it’s zero. It feels like it should be zero.

Ha! You would be wrong! Sandro scored Everton’s only goal in a meaningless 5-1 defeat at Atalanta in the Europa League on November 23, 2017! Sure, that’s his only goal in 2,696 first-team minutes since he moved from Malaga to Everton — but it is technically a goal.

So even though Zach finished last, he should take solace in the fact that much like Sandro Ramirez, he did technically get points, even if in the end it didn’t matter one bit.