Saturday's action starts at St James' Park, 12:30pm UK, and it is a meeting of two teams whose early seasons look better than their headlines. Newcastle followed a 2-2 draw with Liverpool by winning 2-0 at Tottenham, and squeezed a 3-2 Carabao Cup win over West Brom in between. Bournemouth have drawn 1-1 with Everton and lost by a single goal at Manchester City, and the model makes it close: 1.8 projected goals for Newcastle, 1.53 for Bournemouth.
Everything below comes from the live Statz match centre, which keeps updating through to kickoff. Two league games in, every rate stat carries a small-sample warning - but some of the patterns here were visible from the first whistle of the season.
These are expected line-ups, not confirmed team sheets, so read them as the model's current best guess.
Newcastle are expected to go 4-2-3-1 with Lukas Hornicek in goal, Amar Dedić and Lewis Hall the full-backs either side of Malick Thiaw and Sven Botman, and Nico González alongside Lewis Miley in midfield. Anthony Elanga, Joe Willock and Harvey Barnes are pencilled in behind Yoane Wissa.
Bournemouth's expected XI has Djordje Petrovic in goal, Adrien Truffert and Adam Smith at full-back around António Silva and James Hill, with Lewis Cook and Alex Scott in the middle. Marcus Tavernier, Justin Kluivert and Rayan support Evanilson up front.
Newcastle United expected XI (4-2-3-1): Hornicek; Dedić, Thiaw, Botman, Hall; González, Miley; Elanga, Willock, Barnes; Wissa.
AFC Bournemouth expected XI (4-2-3-1): Petrovic; Truffert, Hill, Silva, Smith; Cook, Scott; Rayan, Kluivert, Tavernier; Evanilson.
Newcastle's last five, newest first, runs W-W-D-L-W: the 2-0 win at Tottenham, the 3-2 cup win over West Brom, the 2-2 draw with Liverpool, and back into last season for a 2-0 defeat at Fulham and a 3-1 win over West Ham. Two league games this season have brought four goals scored and two conceded, with a clean sheet rate of 50% that ranks third in the division.
Bournemouth are harder to beat than to read: D-L-D-D-W newest first. They drew 1-1 with Everton last weekend, lost 2-1 at Manchester City, and finished last season drawing 1-1 with Nottingham Forest, drawing 1-1 with Manchester City and winning 1-0 at Fulham. Both teams have scored in 100% of their league games this season, rank 1 of 20, and they are winning 6.5 corners per game, rank 3.
See the live Statz numbers for this fixture.
The model projects 1.8 goals for Newcastle against 1.53 for Bournemouth, with the shot counts close too: 15.52 attempts to 13.13. That is a much narrower gap than a home game against Bournemouth usually implies, and it is why the win market holds little appeal here.
The livelier numbers are in the fouls column. Bournemouth are projected for 12.81 fouls and 2.81 yellow cards in this game, comfortably ahead of Newcastle's 10.24 and 1.84 - although it is the hosts who are averaging 3.5 cards per league game so far, rank 1 of 20, alongside 12.5 fouls per game. Referee Robert Jones has overseen one league game this season and it produced 29 fouls with three yellow cards, so his whistle has been busy, on an admittedly tiny sample.
Bournemouth's projected 16.07 tackles also lead Newcastle's 14.80, which fits the shape of a 12:30pm away performance: sit in, compete, frustrate.
See the live Statz numbers for this fixture.
Player prop odds coverage for this fixture was still thin at the time of writing - it usually fills out closer to kickoff, and the bet builder block above refreshes automatically - but the value the model has flagged so far clusters almost entirely around fouls.
On the Bournemouth side, it rates Adam Smith to commit 1+ foul the second-likeliest outcome on its board while the market prices him 19th, at 1.40 at the time of writing. Evanilson carries the same second-ranked likelihood on 1+ foul at 1.30, and Rayan was 1.50 for 1+ and 3.25 for 2+. For Newcastle, Malick Thiaw at 1.62 for 1+ foul is the pick, fifth-likeliest by the model against a market price ranked 18th.
Given a referee whose one game this season contained 29 fouls, and two teams projected for more than 23 fouls between them (12.81 plus 10.24), the card and foul markets look like the place this game pays attention. The round's full numbers are on the Statz projections page.
Newcastle's win at Tottenham was the more eye-catching result, but the model sees just 0.27 of a goal between these teams (1.8 against 1.53) and Bournemouth have not been beaten by more than one goal all season. A tight, niggly lunchtime game is the projection, with both teams having scored in every league match either has played so far. The foul lines, led by Adam Smith and Malick Thiaw at the prices quoted above, are where the model finds the market most generous at the time of writing.