Brian Adjei Brobbey and the round that split cleanly down the middle

Five calls held, five did not, and the round never really settled into one neat pattern. The model was right often enough to keep its footing, but not in the places where it trusted clean home wins a little too much. That is the awkward bit of this job: the broad direction can be sound while the details wander off with the points.

Manchester City-Sunderland was the best read of the lot

The clearest hit was Manchester City’s 5-3 win over Sunderland, because the model at least understood where the danger sat even if it did not foresee quite that much noise. It had Manchester City winning comfortably, and that part held. More importantly, the actual match data backed up the idea that their attacking edge would matter: Antoine Semenyo scored twice and added an assist, while Brian Adjei Brobbey answered with a hat-trick for Sunderland. That is exactly the sort of game where a simple home-win call survives because one side keeps finding ways through, even if it takes a while for anyone in blue to stop sweating.

Tottenham-Aston Villa was where we leaned too hard on the home side

The miss that matters most is Tottenham’s 2-3 defeat to Aston Villa. Fipster backed a narrow Tottenham win, which was tidy on paper and wrong in practice. The mistake was not in spotting a close game; it was in over-weighting Tottenham’s ability to control it. The actual deciding figures were all on Villa’s side: Johan Manzambi scored and assisted, Nicolas Jackson scored, and Emiliano Buendía Stati added another. Once those names started doing damage, Tottenham were chasing rather than managing. Conor Gallagher’s late goal made the scoreline respectable without changing who had done the real work.

The round belonged to players Fipster did not have pinned down beforehand

This was also a round for uninvited scorers. Brian Adjei Brobbey was the loudest of them all with three for Sunderland; Antoine Semenyo followed with two for Manchester City; Alexander Isak supplied Liverpool’s winner at Bournemouth; Matheus Cunha rescued Manchester United at Fulham; Joseph Willock and Lewis Hall both scored for Newcastle; Jay Dasilva nicked Coventry’s winner at Nottingham Forest; and Johan Manzambi turned up everywhere for Aston Villa. None of those names were called pre-match in Fipster’s scorer picks, which tells you something useful about where the model was strongest this week: outcome shape more than individual finishing.

There were still some quieter successes tucked away in there — Liverpool winning at Bournemouth, Everton edging Ipswich, and Manchester City getting the result right even if nobody expected quite that scoreline theatre. But Leeds against Crystal Palace and Newcastle against Hull City showed the other side of it: when Fipster leans too heavily on familiar home patterns or tidy scorelines, a goalless draw or an away scorer nobody fancied can make a mess of things very quickly. Next week asks for less faith in neat margins and more respect for odd little match-winning names who have not bothered to ask permission.