I'd actually entirely forgotten about this with the weird old season we've had, but we probably should review our woefully-inaccurate predictions for last season before the next one starts in 2 minutes time.
Premiership Winner:
Epaminondas Pules and Switchskier were the only people to correctly pick Exeter. Everyone else picked the team who got relegated, which is spectacularly poor predicting even by our standards
Table order:
No-one even got close. Not just in terms of Saracens finishing bottom, but nobody picked any of the top 4 except for Exeter. Nobody got either of Wasps or Bristol making the top 6, let alone the top 4 and the highest prediction for Bath was 5th. Likewise, only one person predicted Worcester would finish above Leicester and nobody picked London Irish to. We suck!
European predictions - how will the English teams do?
Lots of predictions of relegation-fodder Saracens winning or getting to the final, but I think EP is closest as the only one to predict Exeter would even get to the semi-final, even if they thought that was as far as they'd get.
Top try scorer:
Kudos to fivepointer for picking one of the correct answers in Ollie Thorley (11 tries). Switchskier came very close with their selection of "Earles" however they ruined it by clarifying that they meant Nathan (0), not Ben (11). A special award (and I do mean special) for Stom and Gloskarlos who decided that Goneva was going to be top try scorer, a prediction that has aged like fine wine.
Top points scorer:
No-one picked Rhys Priestland and frankly, I don't blame us on that one, so Stom redeems themselves by picking second place man Marcus Smith.
Surprise of the season:
No-one picked a global pandemic which I find disappointing, but Mikey Brown has to win it for predicting Saracens being in a relegation battle, a comment which I'm sure they'll try and claim wasn't sarcasm and was in fact an uncanny ability to predict the futu... oh, they said Quins would win the title in the same comment. Never mind then.
Biggest disappointment:
I'll give myself and 5p a pat on the back for Youngs continuing as England's 9 despite Mitchell and Randall doing well.
Player having a breakthrough season:
I picked Mitchell, but I also picked Sleightholme which has come off less well as a prediction. Shiny picked him and didn't equivocate, which was a much better prediction.
Best signing:
Hogg was name-checked a few times and was probably the right answer. However, it's far more fun to pick on the terrible selections:
Scrumhead - Sean Long (now back in league after underwhelming)
Stom - Goneva. "Will score a shed load" {Narrator - he did not, in fact, score a shed load}
Mellsblue - Lavanini (may have broken into a run a couple of times inbetween yellow cards. Experts are unsure)
Best unheralded signing:
Scrumhead and Switchskier chose well with Minozzi - I can't think of any other unheraded signings who did as well. However, just to show I can take my lumps and well as hand them out, here are my excellent predictions for this category:
Puja wrote:I can see Josh Ibuanokpe flourishing at Saracens. They don't sign people that they don't think they can make something out of and tighthead is not a locked position there.
ETA. Changed my mind on this one too (after Ibuanokpe managed to get himself banned for 5 weeks in pre-season) - Jamal Ford-Robinson for Gloucester.
It's hard to nail down the exact worst bit of that - is it claiming that tighthead wasn't a locked position at Saracens despite it being occupied by the soon to be world cup winning Vincent Koch? Picking Ibuanokpe who couldn't make it into the Saracens first team even after the salary cap and COVID break meant both Koch and Figallo left the club? Making a good decision to change my mind and then using that reprieve to select
Jamal Ford-Robinson?! There's a lot to unpack there.
The [Redacted] Award for lowest performance to hype ratio from a new signing:
Sean O'Brien was mentioned a lot of time and I don't think anyone gets any marks for that, given how screamingly obvious it was. However Scrumhead had a good pick in Owen Franks, who was far less obvious and almost as useless, and EP picked Naholo who I don't remember actually turning out for Irish.
The Jerome Schuster Award for worst signing:
Some belters in here: Nick Phipps, Paddy Jackson, Niki Goneva, but switchskier gets another ping for picking Steve Mafi, a signing of such insignificance that I had to google to see who'd actually signed him. Turns out it was Irish, which I probably could've guessed.
Overall, we were successfully awful as a collective once again, although not quite as awful as "Ibuanokpe, no - Ford-Robinson!" would suggest. It's hard looking back to such a long time ago and trying to remember what was going on back then. We thought it was hard to predict with the disruption of the RWC taking players away from the first 5 rounds of the Prem - oh we sweet summer children! We didn't know we were born!
I expect to see you all back here for the next thread in a few weeks time, where we can embarass ourselves as a group again.
Puja