Well, avid readers, so far it has been a very mixed weekend in prediction land, which is where WSA has been living for the last 24 hours.
The first prediction we made was that Manchester United may play in grey and would win 3-1.
Wrong! On both counts. They played in black and white which was almost as dull and boring as their performance.
The fact that they left St. Mary’s with all three points can be put down to three things: 1- luck, of which they had their fair share, 2 – bad finishing from Southampton who should have scored at least three goals and finally, 3 – decent defending.
United’s midfield, particularly in the second half, became non-existent as Southampton virtually camped in the United half and the attacking towel was thrown in by Mourinho when he rightly took off Mkhitaryan, who was totally ineffective, but wrongly replaced him with Smalling, whose only contribution was to head the back of Phil Jones’ head, temporarily concussing him.
People say that the sign of a good team is that they win when playing badly. That is NOT the sign of a good team, it is the sign of a lucky team, which is almost as valuable.
With Lukaku in the team United will be lucky more often than they will be unlucky.
Manchester City won 5-0 against Crystal Palace when we predicted that they would win 4-0 so at least we were right for a short period of time in this one.
City are top of the table by right as they now have a superior goal difference to United thanks to Leroy Sané, again, Sergio Agüero, Raheem Sterling (2), and Fabian Delph.
Mr. Roy was probably secretly expecting to lose this game and is unlikely to have been surprised by anything that happened. Not to worry, next week he can put it all right when he and his team visit Old Trafford to take on United.
We also predicted that Stoke City and Chelsea would draw 1-1 but, in mitigation, this was before we knew that Stoke had absolutely no fit centre backs. Consequently, Chelsea’s new centre forward, Álvaro Morata, was unmarked for the whole of the game and scored three goals. Pedro got the other so the two Spaniards were obviously trying to show Manchester United what they missed when not signing either of them!
A 4-0 win for Chelsea was not how we dreamt it last night.
Our third prediction was that West Ham United would beat Tottenham Hotspur 2-1. They didn’t and the result was proof that we should have stuck with our original opinion. We originally tinkered with the idea that, as both teams are so bad at home, then the away team would win.
We will probably be right when they meet at White Hart Wembley but, on this one, we got it the wrong way round with Spurs winning 2-3.
Next up was Leicester City against Liverpool. We predicted another 2-0 win for Leicester and couldn’t have been more wrong. Well actually, we probably could have, but you get the picture.
A cracking game ended up 2-3 with Liverpool yet again conceding goals and Leicester seemingly happy to have knocked them out of a cup. Jürgen Klopp, however, will just be happy with the win.
So now we move on to Monday night and the game between stubborn old man’s Arsenal and West Bromwich Albion.
We have predicted a 2-2 draw so expect either a home or an away win, just don’t put any money on our bet.
Next week, (starting on Sunday), we will be moving away from the prediction lark as it is obviously a mug’s game and we are mugs enough on everything else without adding this to our repertoire.
Have a good ‘un.
WHY SAY ANYTHING? 