Guess the Starting XI & Final Score 2018 Roundup

The Vancouver Whitecaps closed their 2018 MLS season out on Sunday with a (surprising) 2-1 victory over the Portland Timbers. The match saw the club and fans say goodbye to Alphonso Davies, while Davies decided to go out in style scoring both Caps goals.

The victory led to some exciting conclusions to our yearly contest. But first, let’s look more closely at that final match. Despite all the changes since Craig Dalrymple took over, it seems that those of you that saw the contest through until the end (many didn’t) had a good idea of what the lineup would be. Three correctly predicted all 11 starters, while Isabelt predicted 10/11, knowing that they would be wrong on the Shea guess (and a Portland win!).

With Davies playing his last match, many wanted him to go out in style, scoring the club’s first goal of the match. Davies delivered and that meant that SIX of 11 received the three bonus points. We also had a perfect match prediction, including the bonus, from edmondk. Congrats on the 25 points! They were closely followed by The Squirrel (predicted 3-1 instead of 2-1; SO CLOSE!) and Island Life. Arjon wasn’t off by Mutch either (HA!), having Techera start instead of Mutch.

Finally, sorry tecate, no bonus points for getting close on the substitution time.

Congratulations go out to GreyHouseEffect who was able to hold off the competition and win the September/October contest. We had 22 people make predictions for the two months, and strangely there was not a single tie in scores by the end. Nicely spaced out!

However, it is now time for us to go on to the BIG contest. The Second Half standings! It was certainly exciting right to the end and gave us quite a surprise finish. And the winner of the Second Half Guess the Starting XI and Final Score is.......THE SQUIRREL!!!

The Squirrel’s 20 points in the final match had them leapfrog the chuckbiscuits -the leader for the majority of the second half-, GreyHouseEffect -the September/October winner-, and CascadiaCrunchFC. GreyHouseEffect and CascadiaCrunchFC took a risk, predicting a Portland victory, and it didn’t pay off for either of them. SO CLOSE at the top.

For the rest of us ‘also-ran’, here are the statistics from the Second Half, along with everyone’s total points scored. I have made it sortable, so you can see where you ranked in each scoring category. Congrats to CascadiaCrunchFC who had the best lineup average (9.12); The Squirrel who had three perfect lineup predictions; arjon and rtomsheck who each correctly predicted the winner 10 times (out of 17 matches); chuckbiscuits who did the best on predicting the final score (of any of our regular predictors); and chuckbiscuits, GreyHouseEffect, edmondk, rtomsheck, and arjon who each correctly predicted our monthly bonus category a high four times. Where did you finish?

Here is a list of all of our previous winners

2016

• First Half Winner: Arjon (176 Points)
• Second Half Winner: AtlantisB (208 Points)
• Non-MLS Winner: Arjon (88 Points)

2017

• First Half Winner: Arjon (221 Points)
• Second Half Winner: dfree646 (194 Points)
• Non-MLS Winner: AtlantisB (80 Points)
• Monthly Winners
• April: Arjon (87 Points)
• May: jacinto (99 Points)
• June: AtlantisB (69 Points)
• August: chuckbiscuits (71 Points)
• September: dfree646 (93 Points)

2018

• First Half Winner: dfree646 (199 Points)
• Second Half Winner: The Squirrel (206 Points)
• Non-MLS Winner: rtomsheck (57 Points)
• Monthly Winners
• March: dfree646 (70 Points)
• April: GreyHouseEffect (46 Points)
• May: dfree646 (58 Points)
• July: Arjon (93 Points)
• August: AtlantisB & CascadiaCrunchFC (81 Points)
• September/October: GreyHouseEffect (123 Points)

A big thanks to all of you that participated. We had a great turnout this year, and continue to get bigger. I hope you have enjoyed the contest. Also, if you have any feedback on how to make the contest better, please let me know in the comments. We have made some tweaks along the way and they seem to have paid off and made the contest much more exciting.