S6M3: Friday Night Fever

Those meddling TV executives. Not content with superinflating the market to a position where utter dross now costs over £30m, they've decided to go full Mitchell & Webb and fill every day with live football. Not that I'm really complaining about that, but it does have certain consequences.

The first, as I discussed last week, is the pressure put on me to get me blog out a day earlier. That's fine right now, but it's going to keep me on my toes as my work schedule fills out a little. All I can ask folks, is that you bear with me whilst I try and work out how this is all going to proceed.

The second consequence is the early death of my Fantasy football team & my Super 6 predictions (admittedly less so). The early lock date for FF means I've now forgetten to set a team 2 weeks in a row. I missed 2 weeks in total last season on my way to a midtable finish. So I'm bowing out already of this year's FF as I clearly can't focus on too many things at once.

The third - and most troubling - consequence is the effect of the Friday night games on the Fink Tank's predictions. The website that had the back-end workings for this model has been taken down - which was always my back up if I couldn't see a copy of the Times. This puts the FT at a serious competitive disadvantage whenever there's a Friday evening game. That said, it's a little unfair on everyone else to score the weekend out of 9, or to scale the FT result accordingly. Ideas on a postcard please for how to solve this one.

On the pitch, Zlatan's landed with a bang on Planet Premier League. Pepe can do it on a rainy afternoon sunny Saturday in Stoke and Chelsea creak along with another late winner. Sunderland are still hopeless - but can't even win their derbies now, Liverpool are still Liverpool and Hull are this year's Leicester, which is fortunate 'cos last year's Leicester are doing a wonderful job of demonstrating Reversion to the Mean. Spurs fans are getting their "Mind the Gap" T shirts out of storage once again. I fear this is the year that they'll make it to May without being mothballed again. Finally, West Ham christened their new stadium-which-they-should-never-have-got-at-such-a-ridiculous-deal-and-yeah-the-Olympics-was-brilliant-and-overall-the-legacy-stuff-was-pretty-good-but-this-is-criminal-frankly with a win over Bournemouth, currently struggling through that tricky 2nd album.

Let's get statty:

27 people played
Most popular predicted result: Man Utd WIN (26/26 - no prediction from FT)
Most disputed result: Leicester vs Arsenal (6-10-11 split)

Highest odds: RDM 13598/1
2nd Highest odds: Josh Daniels 3156/1
Lowest odds: Steven Daniels 670/1

Best Predictor: Me :D 8/10
Worst predictors: Matt Abbott & David Brickman (3/10)
Average score: 5.3/10

Best predicted result: Man Utd WIN (26/26)
Worst predicted result: Hull WIN (0/27)

Everyone's result:

Sophie - welcome! Please let me know your surname for future graphs!

The Leaderboard will return next week...

To this week's predictions:

Spurs vs Liverpool - SPURS

Chelsea vs Burnley - CHELSEA

Crystal Palace vs Bournemouth - CRYSTAL PALACE

Everton vs Stoke - EVERTON

Leicester vs Swansea - DRAW

Southampton vs Sunderland - SOUTHAMPTON

Watford vs Arsenal - DRAW

Hull vs Man Utd - MAN UTD

WBA vs Middlesborough - MIDDLESBOROUGH

Man City vs West Ham - MAN CITY

Total odds: 1599/1

Good luck guys!