Everton vs Sheffield United: Writer Prediction League

You’d think at a certain point we’d learn our lesson about picking Everton to win away against mid-table opponents, and yet, like the Alzheimer’s patient who likes to take out his dentures, we keeping making the same mistakes as though we’ve forgotten all the hassle it’s caused us before.

Everton’s 3-1 loss at AFC Bournemouth came as a surprise to our writers / prognosticators, with the disappointing result dropping Everton firmly into mid-table after five Premier League matches. The Toffees have a good chance to bounce back this week though, with a return to Goodison Park against recently-promoted Sheffield United on the docket.

Before we look ahead to that though, let’s look back quickly at our (largely wrong) picks from the Bournemouth match last week.

Good on Matt. A, who both predicted that Callum Wilson would open the scoring and that Bournemouth would take all three points. He nearly picked the final score correctly as well, but Wilson’s second goal robbed him of those additional two points.

Three of our writers — Brian L., Calvin, and I — did get one point for correctly predicting Richarlison as Everton’s man of the match. The Brazilian assisted on Dominic Calvert-Lewin’s goal, and was generally among the more lively Everton players during a pretty underwhelming match.

The relative lack of points this week has left our prediction league standings without any major changes.

Matt’s three-point week launched him to the top half of the table, but little else has substantively changed. Pete and Rachel remain atop the table, with Chris and Geno still looking for their first points of the season.

They’ve got what feels like it should be an easy opportunity to pick up points this week — both for Everton and our writers — with Sheffield United coming to Goodison. But we’ve certainly seen an unpredictability within the Toffees this season, so nothing is a sure thing.

That said, our group is pretty confident that Marco Silva’s side will grab a result. Here’s our picks ahead of that match.

11 of 13 writers have Everton getting the win, with the other three predicting a home draw against Phil Jagileka’s old/new club. The final score predictions are pretty disparate — Zach has a 3-0 drubbing, while Matt. A and Rachel foresee a much tighter 1-0 affair. The rest of us have something in between those two extremes.

After a somewhat slow start to the season, Richarlison is an extraordinarily popular man with our writers, garnering nine votes as the opening scorer and six votes as man of the match.

Moise Kean, Gylfi Sigurdsson, and Dominic Calvert-Lewin also received opening goalscorer votes, while Kean, Sigurdsson, Alex Iwobi, Lucas Digne, Jordan Pickford, Yerry Mina (!), and Fabian Delph all received man of the match predictions.