Not content with his thought provoking, even provocative postings on Salut! Sunderland, Stephen Goldsmith has come up with an idea to test the predictive powers of the regular contributors to the site. He explains …
The Olympic flame appears to be extinguished metaphorically as well as literally now that our football is back. And what a weekend it was.
As well as the great football on display at the Etihad on Sunday, Martin Tyler’s dramatic commentary also made a comeback. Not that that’s necessarily a bad thing. But was anybody aware that City salvaging a point against the mighty Black Cats last season was a turning point in the title race? When Southampton led for around a full five minutes I think I heard that information about four times.
I’ll tell you what else has been salvaged. I had an idea in my head a few weeks ago to run a prediction table for the Salut writers, just a bit of fun I thought. I’m a fun kind of guy. Or a bit sad, there’s a fine line between the two I feel and I’m sure you other saddos agree with me.
As Friday night drew to a close I suddenly remembered that I hadn’t chased this awesome feature up. So in true Man City style it was salvaged, thanks to the co-operation of Malcolm and due to frantic e-mails flying back and forth, the last one coming from our head-honcho, Mr. Randall himself, and around five minutes preceding kick off. Phew.
Writers will predict scores for the Sunderland and Newcastle games and one other Premier League fixture with three points awarded for a correct score and one point awarded if the result is correct but with a different score. The predictions will go out before the games from next week and the league table will displayed a couple days after. Eventually, I was handed the following predictions:
The games chosen were Arsenal v Sunderland Newcastle v Spurs WBA v Liverpool
and the predictions (in the order of games above) were
Malcolm 3-0 2-2 0-2
Bill 1-2 0-0 1-1
Goldy 1-1 1-1 1-2
Jake 2-0 1-1 0-2
Jeremy 2-0 1-1 0-2
Luke 1-1 2-1 1-1
John Mc 1-1 1-2 0-1
Sixer 2-0 2-2 0-2
Robert 1-0 2-1 1-2
M Salut 1-2 1-1 1-0
As you can see there was a general air of pessimism regarding our visit to Ashburton Grove, whilst most of us hoped that the other half of Norf London would get something at the ASDA.
Each week, there will be brief summaries from the writers explaining their predictions but we can all agree that would be a little wasteful to do so with results that have been and gone.
I’m personally glad I have a point on board and away from the bottom, simply as this is work in progress stemmed from my idea. It’s a long season ahead and I’m taking one game at a time.
Goldy
Current Standings
Luke 4
Robert 3
Colin 1
Goldy 1
John Mc 1
Bill 0
Jake 0
Jeremy 0
Malcolm 0
Sixer 0
Provocative? Moi?