Liverpool were supposed to be champions with Arsenal out of the top four, Fulham getting relegated and Darwin Nunez outscoring Erling Haaland. Silly experts.
Take a look at our pre-season predictions in full if you absolutely must.
We start, as is convention, at the beginning. ‘Who will win the Premier League?‘ the anonymous MC asked, to which the 10 chosen correspondents offered only two answers. And weirdly enough, neither of those was Arsenal. Matt Stead, Ian Watson, Will Ford, Dave Tickner, Jason Soutar and Lewis Oldham retain their reputations – rest assured that each will leave them in tatters soon enough – while the rest were lured in by Liverpool. Oh Sarah Winterburn, John Nicholson, Ian King and Joe Williams, you silly folk. They convinced themselves with talk of adaptation, Erling Haaland settling in and the Reds winning the Community Shield. Never trust the Community Shield.
Then came the impossible question: name the rest of the top four in order. For some strange reason, no-one foresaw Newcastle storming the Champions League stage and so the most teams anyone got right in the current top four was three. Johnny, Ford and bias Spurs nonce Tickner only managed to get Manchester City and Spurs as they were all pulled in by a combination of Liverpool, Chelsea and Manchester United. So again, Winty, Stead, King, Watson, Williams, Soutar and Oldham at least emerge without making fools of themselves. Big fan of this from the boss though, tipping the Gunners to come fourth: ‘But I have been burned by Arsenal before so I say this with almost zero conviction.’ Twice shy and all that.
And now to the opposite end of the table with relegation. Again, not one expert tipped all of the current bottom three to be there (they might have expected them to be thereabouts, mind) at this stage. In fact, six of the 10 did not pick any of Nottingham Forest, Southampton or Wolves, and the other four only said one of them. Winty was alone in forecasting Forest doom; Stead and Ford knew Wolves were doomed – as the latter put it, ‘any club paying £20.5m for Nathan Collins absolutely deserves to’ – and Johnny stuck Southampton’s name out there. Everyone but Tickner said Bournemouth. Everyone but Stead said Fulham. But this is utterly phenomenal work from King: ‘Fulham and Bournemouth, obviously, but beyond that it’s one from about five or six. I’ll stick with my previous prediction of Leicester for the good of consistency, but it…
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