Paul Reynolds’ sojourn to the Scottish Highlands has not prevented him from providing previews of this weekend’s games for the Match Centre. His absence and distance from internet connections, however, provides the opportunity to review his predictions so far this season.
Although often couched in terms that allow of future deniability Paul has made predictions in no less than 31 league matches this season [even he could not split the teams in another 11 cases]. He has managed just over the 50% success rate [16 wins]. Another way of putting it of course is that Paul has made the right predictions in all 31 cases but that he has been let down fifteen times by the teams concerned. The worst offenders in this regard are Railway, who have failed to live up to expectations on no less than five occasions. Such is the fate of pundits and experts.
With more matches taking place each week no doubt the prediction success rate will rise. Early season form can be a poor gauge of performance and with many teams yet to start their season there is not much to go on. What we know so far is that Lucan 1st XI is currently the most successful team in the Open Competitions, with three wins out of three, and is the clear leader in Division 11. With 57 matches across all leagues scheduled over the next three days we may start to get an idea of who are the contenders for honours this season after the weekend.
In order to get results up as quickly as possible could I ask every team to try to at least get the final score into the Match Centre by the end of the day.
There is also a great interest from the cricket public in keeping abreast of what is happening across the province. There were over 2000 separate visitors to the Cricket Leister website last weekend [a 37% increase on the equivalent weekend last year] with most of the traffic coming in the afternoon and evening as people check up on scores and results. So please keep sending in the updates – scores and comments – there is an audience out there that wants to know how teams and players are doing.