Pundits disagree on West Ham v Leicester City prediction

TV pundits disagree on the outcome of the West Ham’s game against Leicester City at the London Stadium on Saturday.

BBC Pundit Mark Lawrenson has predicted a 2-1 win telling his BBC website readers “I was surprised to see Leicester lose against Newcastle last week, and the Foxes did not really create many good chances either. West Ham will be far more open, which will suit Leicester, but if the Hammers play like they did against Manchester United last time out, I think they will come out on top. The Hammers suffered their third straight defeat at Old Trafford on Saturday, but I think they were a bit unlucky.

Their manager Manuel Pellegrini will just be hoping his team can finally find some consistency, because we know what quality they have.”

Sky Pundit Paul Merson predicts the opposite with a 3-1 loss for the Hammers telling his Sky Sports website readers “It is very tight up there competing for seventh. If Leicester are serious about snatching seventh spot they really have to win this game. They have a lot of difficult games coming up. West Ham will have to come out and have a go at Leicester and that is not what you really want to be doing. You look at Leicester’s results, when teams come out and have a go at them, they can then hurt their opponents on the counter with [Jamie] Vardy, [James] Maddison, [Demarai] Gray. If teams come and sit back like Newcastle did, they just find it too difficult to break teams down. West Ham, though, will have a go.”

A super-computer – called ‘RED’ – which has been programmed to predict this weekend’s fixtures predicts a 1-0 win for the Hammers.

The complex model has been developed by University of Reading experts and uses a sophisticated metric that factors in historic results, managerial changes and even travel distances for each team to calculate the most probable results.