I Got My Mum To Try And Beat The BBC's Expert At Predicting Football Scores

I am so proud of Sue.

My mum, Sue Beech, is not a football fan. The only football match she has been to was a pre-season friendly between Bristol Rovers and Leicester City about 10 years ago.

Richard Beech

Me and my dad told her it'd be a fun day out, but she hasn't gone to a football match since...

(That's my mum at my graduation, by the way. My haircut was "of the time").

Despite my mum's lack of interest in football, I asked her if she'd have a shot at beating the BBC's official "football expert" Mark Lawrenson in a game of Premier League predictions, for matchweek 20 of the season.

BBC

Premier League predictions, in case you don't know, involves trying to predict the score of every match in the Premier League on a given weekend. Each week, Mark Lawrenson takes on a famous celebrity or sports star in attempting to predict the football scores.

While visiting my parents over the holidays, I asked Sue Beech if she'd be up for the task of taking on Mark Lawrenson, and she was more than happy to oblige.

Lawro, as he is known in the football world (because men can only show affection to each other by putting vowels on the end of their names) was unaware that Sue "Beechie" Beech would be going head-to-head with him in matchweek 20.

Here's what Sue predicted for last weekend's matches, along with Lawro's predictions:

Richard Beech @BeechardRich

I wanted to see if my mum could beat BBC's Mark Lawrenson in predicting football scores. She's doing better so far.

01:06 PM - 02 Jan 2016

I tweeted out my mum's predictions at lunchtime on Saturday to prove that she made her predictions before the weekend's action.

So, now to tot up the scores. I decided to use the same scoring system as used by the BBC each week in their Premier League predictions game.

So if my mum was correct in predicting that Liverpool would beat West Ham, she would score 10 points, but if she was also right in predicting the score would be 2-1 to Liverpool, this would leap up to 40 points.

Here are the weekend's football results, along with Sue and Lawro's predictions, and their total points scores.

BuzzFeed

So there you have it, my mum is the punditry equal of the BBC's football expert, Mark Lawrenson.

The eagle-eyed among you will have noticed that some of Lawro's predictions were different in the graph I tweeted on Saturday to in the graph above. I muddled them up a bit in the original tweet because there was a lot of leftover whisky to drink at my parents' house before I returned to London, but in the graph above they are correct.

You can double-check Lawro's predictions for yourself on the BBC website.

Not only is mum as good at predicting football scores as Mark Lawrenson, but she also beat a whole raft of sports starts and celebrities at predicting football scores.

bbc.co.uk

This is the BBC's guest leaderboard for their Premier League predictions game. As you can see, my mum's 70 points last weekend puts her equal with BBC football commentator Guy Mowbray, ahead of England cricketer star Stuart Broad, and well ahead of the combined knowledge of each four members of Mumford and Sons.

There is some bad news to report, though. I placed a £1 bet on the outcome that every single one of my mum's results predictions would be right. This would have returned £1,301.96.

Bet365

I did not win any money.