Andrew Irving gave Sparta Praha the round’s only clean hit, while the rest of the sheet went looking for familiar names and found trouble

Sparta Praha were the one proper read; the rest of the round asked awkward questions.

The model came out of Regular Season - 2 with one tick and a great many bruises. The broad idea was simple enough: home wins in several tight games, a few named forwards to do the scoring, and one or two matches that would stay polite. Instead, the round kept finding different ways to deny that neat little plan. Bohemians 1905 and Hradec Králové produced nothing at all. Pardubice were beaten by FK Jablonec. Slovan Liberec lost to a single Teplice goal. Slavia Praha went to Baník Ostrava and made a mess of the forecast. Plzen, Sigma Olomouc and Slovácko all drifted away from the scorelines we had written down. Only Sparta Praha v Zlin landed where it should have done, more or less, which is why Andrew Irving now gets to wear the sensible hat for the week.

Andrew Irving was the call that held its nerve.

This was the cleanest win for Fipster because it leaned on something real rather than decorative. The pre-match case for Sparta Praha was built around midfield control and an attack that could find goals from more than one place. Andrew Irving supplied exactly that first strike, and Adam Karabec added another from the spot later on. Daniel Šmiga also scored for Zlin, which matters because he was one of the names Fipster had actually flagged before kick-off. That is what a good hit looks like here: not just the right result, but at least one scorer call that matched how the game unfolded instead of how we hoped it might.

The miss came where we trusted tidy attacking form too much.

Pardubice against FK Jablonec was probably the ugliest miss in football terms, even if it arrived in a fairly plain-looking 0-2. The model liked Pardubice at home and leaned on their own scoring options — T. Boledovic, Vojtěch Patrák, Martin Cedidla and Jan Suchan — but none of those calls paid rent. What actually decided it was Jan Chramosta, who had not been called pre-match at all, plus an own goal that put Jablonec ahead before half-time. That is where the model over-weighted recent attacking shape and under-read how quickly this game could be taken out of Pardubice’s hands by something less glamorous than a named finisher.

The round’s decisive figures were often not the ones Fipster had circled.

Wiktor Nowak did at least justify his billing for Slavia Praha with a goal in Baník Ostrava’s heavy defeat, so there was some comfort there even if it came wrapped in a scoreline nobody wanted to see coming. Daniel Vašulín also rewarded his mention for Zbrojovka Brno by scoring against Plzen. Beyond that, though, the round belonged to players outside the pre-match sheet: Lukáš Mareček scored for Teplice; Jan Chramosta scored for FK Jablonec; Christophe Kabongo scored for Plzen; David Tkáč scored for Sigma Olomouc; Issa Fomba scored for Artis; Andrew Irving scored for Sparta Praha; and Michal Sadílek turned up with a goal as well after not being called at all. The standouts told similar stories. Adam Zadražil kept Hradec Králové alive in a goalless draw with four saves. Tadeáš Stoppen made six saves for Artis. Matouš Trmal helped Teplice protect their lead. In other words: some of this round was about finishers, but plenty of it was about keepers doing their bit while our forward calls sat in the wrong seats.

'Next time' is doing some heavy lifting already.

The useful lesson is not that every favourite failed; it is that several matches were decided by players we had treated as secondary or ignored altogether. That usually means tightening our read on who actually takes responsibility when games get scruffy rather than assuming last week’s scorers will keep paying out forever. Sparta Praha showed what happens when the model finds both result and scorer together. The rest of Czech Liga spent this round reminding us that tidy logic is only useful until somebody like Jan Chramosta or Lukáš Mareček wanders into frame and ruins your afternoon.