SCEFL's Super Six prediction game returns for new season

Non-league football followers in West Kent have another small ritual to add to their Saturday routine, with the Southern Counties East Football League bringing back its Super Six prediction game for the new season. The format is familiar to anyone who followed it last time round: six selected fixtures each week, a Google Form to submit your scorelines, and a points system rewarding sharp judgement over blind guesswork.

For West Kent readers, the local interest is obvious. Tunbridge Wells feature in the very first set of fixtures, away at Kennington, in a league that draws together clubs from across Kent and south-east London at step 5 and 6 of the non-league pyramid. It's the kind of competition that rarely makes national headlines but matters a great deal to the players, volunteers and small but loyal followings behind clubs like these.

The scoring itself hasn't changed: five points for nailing the exact score, three for getting the correct result with the wrong scoreline, and nothing at all if you call the wrong outcome. It rewards knowledge of current form as much as gut instinct, which is presumably the point of a competition built to showcase "great SCEFL knowledge", as the league puts it.

What has changed is the administration behind the scenes, and it's a sensible fix for a fairly common problem with informal season-long leaderboards. Previously, entrants who varied their displayed name slightly from week to week risked having their points scattered across multiple "different" entries. Now the league is asking for an email address alongside a public leaderboard name, so that scores stay attached to the right person even if their entered name changes. The email itself won't be published; it's there purely to tally results consistently across the season, and organisers note it also lets them send entrants a copy of their own predictions.

There's also a small but practical change allowing repeat entries before the weekly deadline closes, with only the latest submission per email counting. That should reduce the temptation to sit on a locked-in guess if team news or weather changes the picture on a Saturday morning.

The competition carries over a bit of history too. Last season's final leaderboard was topped by Luke S, with Ruby and Lee Acre rounding out the top three, and the league is already framing this season as a chance for them to defend their standing. Whether any of the sharper predictors have their eye on the West Kent fixtures involving Tunbridge Wells remains to be seen, but for a competition that runs the length of a whole season, week one results are due to be posted on Sunday lunchtime — an early marker for what promises to be a long campaign of second-guessing scorelines up and down the SCEFL.