Lawrence Shankland and the late equaliser in Dundee gave Premiership Round 5 its sharpest edges

The round started with a tidy enough set of home favourites and ended with a reminder that one late equaliser can make a prediction look much fussier than it felt at kick-off. Fipster got four of the six calls right, but the real story was not the tally. It was that the best hit came from reading a derby correctly, while the miss came from trusting a home win that never really found its footing.

The derby call held because the gap was real

Hibernian against Heart Of Midlothian was the one prediction that deserved a proper nod. Fipster backed an away win and got exactly that, but more importantly the shape of it matched the pre-match read: Heart Of Midlothian’s scoring threat arrived through multiple names rather than one isolated burst, and they were ahead early enough to control the terms. James Wilson opened it, L. Mendy added another before half-time, and Joshua McPake finished it off after the break. That is what a good call looks like here — not just picking the winner, but identifying that the away side had enough different routes to goal to make life awkward for Hibernian.

Dundee was where the model leaned too hard on comfort

The miss at Dundee was less about being slightly off and more about overvaluing a straightforward home win. Fipster saw Dundee as a 2-0 side; instead, ST Johnstone nicked a point with J. Fowlers equaliser in the 90th minute after Charlie Reilly had put Dundee ahead late on. That is exactly the sort of ending that punishes tidy assumptions. The model had treated Dundee’s edge as if it would be enough on its own. It wasn’t. The late leveller mattered because it exposed how thin that edge actually was once the game drifted into stoppage time.

The round belonged to players Fipster never named pre-match

This was also a round for uncalled scorers doing their work in plain sight. Lawrence Shankland scored twice for Rangers and was comfortably one of the round’s defining figures; he was not among Fipster’s pre-match scorer calls, which makes his impact doubly awkward for anyone trying to explain Falkirk-Rangers as merely a narrow away win gone right. Elsewhere, Erik Nygren scored and assisted for Celtic, Camilo Durán Marquez did both in support of him, Yang Hyun-Jun added another, and none of them had been flagged beforehand either. Motherwell then supplied another trio of surprises through Sebastian Palmer-Houlden, Alexander Lowry and Dylan Levitt. The model got the result there, but not the names doing the damage — which is often where these rounds are won or lost.

That matters because it shows what this round rewarded: not broad confidence in home advantage, but sharper reading of who actually carries end product when matches tilt late or open up unexpectedly. Fraser Taylor’s early strike for ST Mirren also fit that pattern neatly; he was another scorer Fipster did not call out before kick-off, yet his goal decided Kilmarnock-ST Mirren before anyone could get comfortable.

Next week needs fewer polite assumptions

So this round leaves Fipster in decent shape overall, but with one clear warning attached: when several fixtures hinge on late goals or on scorers outside the obvious frame, broad scoreline confidence is not enough on its own. The better lesson is to trust specific attacking profiles more than neat-looking margins. Do that next time and there will be fewer awkward 90th minutes waiting around like unpaid bills.