Lol, the old good strategy! I am waiting for the injury report, at the moment is updated to 10th of May only. I hope it will be out soon, anyway I'm going to make my predictions in a few hours.
My late prediction, after giving a look to injury report: SEA 2 NJ 1 WAS 1 POR 0 NC 1 UTA 0 HOU 0 CHI 3 (I guess Chicago advantage in still having the Kerr-Nagasato duo, while most of the other teams are depleted by NT duties, is huge this week; I don't think honey-badger Daly can't be enough for Dash, now that they lose all of the Canadians: Agnew, Champman, Prince and Schmidt)
And, Daly is out for this game due to red card in last game -- and also has had that extended for her first game back after international duty.
Uh, ok! I was as much accurate as to wait for the injury report, and at the same time I was as much lazy as to forget Daly's RC (and not to check the disciplinary report)!!! Actually I think that it would be more useful if the injury report mentioned all of the missing players, including the ones that are on the disciplinary report; after all, they already list all of the players on international duty, that are not actually "injured": so, why not having the disciplinary report in the same place also? This way, it would be more difficult to forget about it. Well, anyway, my prediction stands even more without Daly: I could even make it worse for Dash, but I guess 0-3 is punishing enough for them.
Weekend Predictions Tacoma 1, Sky Blue 2: New Jersey gets the elusive first win against a Reign team whose best players have left for World Cup training camp Washington 1, Portland 1: this youthful Spirit team has made a surprisingly decent start to the season, can they keep it going? North Carolina 2, Utah 0: Royals stingy defense will break down without Sauerbrunn and Corsie to anchor it and Scott in front of them; I'm sure Riley spent the week motivating his squad after a rare loss last time out Houston 1, Chicago 2: Daly's boneheaded red card will cost Houston here; her natural replacement at center forward Latsko has a SEI; Chicago has a more complete team and Kerr is still present
CoachJon for the weekend 5/18-19 Reign 1 v Sky Blue 1 Spirit 1 v Thorns 2 Courage 2 v Royals 1 Dash 0 v Red Stars 3
I too forgot that Daly was out -- and made a ridiculous prediction of Hou1 - Chi1. Well, I won't change it now -- on the off chance that Kerr and Nagasoto will catch pneumonia between now and game time. Daly is probably second only to Kerr as my favorite player to watch. Daly is the honey badger who does the most with the least.
Injury Reports, Disciplinary Reports, ACLs, Red Cards… !! OMG !! I guess I’m a total amateur here. By the way, who’s Daly?.
Rachel Daly, England's international, main offensive weapon for Houston Dash, often referred to as "the honey badger" on these boards (to understand this one, you'll have to retrieve a video in the 2019 NWSL Week 5 Discussion thread ).
Well, not bad so far: perfect record for the SEA-NJ match and I caught WAS's win (although the score was way off). With 4 out of 6 possible points I am currently ahead of anyone, robot included (the closest one is @holden with 3 points, the other "surprise-predictor", but he went too far with Sky Blue's win ). Let's see how the other half of the games will go.
Thanks for the info bro, buuuuut it was only a joooooke. I know quite well Rachel Daly. As a SpainWNT fan I have suffered her plays many times. P.S. Congratulations. I see you have surpassed the robot and me. Good job
For this week's games, we have four tied at the top with 6 points each: Tapas&Futbol, Blissett, holden, and SiberianThunderT. Lots behind them with 5 and 4 points. Smallchief, however, continues in the lead. Altogether, except for Smallchief's 2-point lead, the scores to date are packed closely. And, don't take anything for granted, at the end of the season last year, for the weekly prediction part of the contest, the robot, BlueCrimson, and CoachJon were 1st, 2nd, and 4th respectively. But also, by the 6th week the robot was in first, so I'm thinking this may be a year for a human victory. (If anyone can't read the table, let me know.)
For a moment, when Sam Kerr made it 2-0 vs Houston at about 25', it looked like my HOU-CHI prediction could have been brilliant, but in the end it only made me one point, despite correctly calling Chicago's win. Look, just food for thought at the moment, but it somehow bugs me that correctly guessing the number of goals of one team in a game just gives you the same points as correctly guessing the win/loss/draw result. I mean, they look like so uncomparable data: apparently, you would say that someone that predicted WAS-POR 1-0 was much more brilliant than the one who predicted 0-1 for the same game, but in the end they score the same. Of course, there were weeks when I took advantage myself of this rule, reaping points where I wasn't absolutely supposed to do, but I keep thinking there's something off in our pointing system. Not sure how exactly you could correct it, though, so, as I was saying, this is just food for thought with a view to next season. Look, you tried to persuade me multiple times that the stats basically take everything into account, but don't you think that this year something very relevant changed with the fact that many teams lose their best players on international duty? And I don't buy that this is affecting each team in the exact same way so basically nothing changes: you should know this is simply not true. You want to admit that this somehow affects the robot's perfectly oiled mechanism?
I think this is right, so I'm expecting that some humans will have an advantage over the robot some of the time. On the other hand, the robot uses the equivalent of a full season's games (combining the latter part of last year with what's been played so far this year), which includes periods where players were gone on international breaks, so that slightly mitigates for the robot's disadvantage. But, counter to that, the robot uses averages over that period whereas there actually were ups and downs when the national team players were and weren't present, and the averages can't take that into account. No doubt, in any event though, that the robot is a crude statistical predictor. The robot definitely is down from last year -- it was at 36 after the current number of games, but now is only at 31. But then, a few of the humans are down, too -- CoachJon and BlueCrimson. 59Amerinorsk is at exactly the same number as last year. All our others who participated last year are up from last year (although some of them may not have made predictions for some games so automatically scored 0 for those games). And, we have some newbies. It will be most interesting to me to see how it all ends up.
Add to that the fact that not all teams lose their internationals with the same timing: for instance, this week Houston Dash suddenly lost all of their 4 Canadians (an event that drastically changed the team from previous weeks), while Chicago Red Stars could keep Kerr (who, as we've seen once again, is a difference-maker) because Australia din't have any preparation-match scheduled and didn't call their players for any WWC-related camp yet. This completly passes over the head of a "crude statistical predictor" as the robot is: any other event (ambience, coaching habits, injury history, market campaign, and so on) could, in a way or another, leave some kind of a "trace" in the historical data, but the WWC-related leaves are the big outliar that make the historical series inconsistent with the current situation of the teams. And the different timings, of course, make it even worse.
The robot's predictions for this weekend's games: 5/25 Sky Blue 1 v Thorns 2 5/25 Royals 1 v Pride 0 5/26 Red Stars 2 v Spirit 1 5/27 Reign 1 v Courage 1