Joseph Westley was the one clean hit in a Premiership round that otherwise slipped away

Joseph Westley landed the punch; the round did not

The week began with Dundee doing exactly what Fipster had sketched: a home win, a 2-1 scoreline, and Joseph Westley on the sheet. That was the one call that held its nerve. Everything else around it drifted. The model spent too much of the round trusting familiar scorers and familiar scorelines, and Premiership football promptly took that as an invitation to be awkward.

That is why this was not just a bad scorecard but a useful one. The miss pattern was not random. It kept landing on the same weak spot: Fipster liked established attacking names, but several matches were decided by players outside that frame, or by late moments that changed the shape of the result without changing much else about how the game had looked for long stretches.

Why Dundee was read correctly

The best call was not just the result. It was the logic behind it. Fipster backed Joseph Westley because he had been Dundee’s clearest scoring threat, and he justified that trust with the opening goal from the spot. The model also leaned on Dundee’s attacking midfield support, which mattered because Bradley Fink then added the second before Motherwell could settle into anything like control. In other words, this was not luck dressed up as insight; it was a call built around one striker’s form and a side expected to create enough to let him matter.

The miss at Kilmarnock told a harsher story than the scoreline did

If there was one fixture where Fipster over-weighted reputation, it was Kilmarnock against Heart Of Midlothian. The model loaded up on Hearts scorers and expected them to turn pressure into goals. Instead, Jamie McCart’s own goal put Kilmarnock ahead in a match that stayed stubbornly level until Stephen Kingsley rescued Hearts very late on. That is exactly the sort of game where a prediction can look sensible on paper and still be wrong in practice: the right team may have had more of the ball in theory, but football does not award points for being theoretically persuasive.

+players who actually decided things were often not the ones Fipster had circled. Ryan Naderi scored for Rangers after being called pre-match, so that part at least matched up with expectation even if Celtic’s defeat to Rangers broke the home-win forecast entirely. Jesse Randall also scored after being named beforehand for Dundee Utd, and his goal set off a 3-0 away win that no one would have mistaken for polite company. Then came Lyall Cameron and Kevin Ciubotaru, both unforeseen scorers for Dundee Utd, which is where this round really exposed how quickly a match can move beyond your shortlist.