Kevin Schade and the late goals that made Round 4 harder to tidy up

Five correct calls, five that slipped away

The broad read on the round was decent enough: Fipster found five winners and missed five, which is about as neat as a messy weekend gets. The awkward part is that several of the hits were only half-right in spirit. Manchester City did beat Manchester United, Leeds did beat Newcastle, Sunderland did beat Arsenal, and Brighton did flatten Coventry, but the model kept landing on safer scorelines than the ones that actually arrived. That matters. This was not a round where the direction of travel was wildly off; it was a round where the details kept escaping through the cracks.

The cleanest hit came at Sunderland

Sunderland against Arsenal was the sort of call that earns its keep because it stayed simple. Fipster backed the home side to lose narrowly, and that is exactly how it played out: Arsenal won 2-0, without needing any drama to rescue them. The model had no scorer call there, so this was not about a lucky name landing. It was about reading the match state correctly — Arsenal control without fuss, Sunderland short of a reply. Sometimes that is all you need from a prediction: not genius, just no nonsense. A rare commodity, like a full-back who never crosses into row Z.

Liverpool-Fulham was where we overreached

The miss that stung most was Liverpool against Fulham because it was so complete. Fipster went in hard on a home win and even had 4-1 as the modal scoreline; instead it finished 0-0. That is not a small miss on margin or one unlucky bounce. It is a full misread of how much attacking life there would be in the game at all. The model over-weighted Liverpool’s scoring ceiling and under-priced Fulham’s ability to drag the match into mud. Alisson Becker being among Liverpool’s standouts tells its own story: when your goalkeeper is one of your better performers in a game you expected to win by three or four, something has gone sideways.