BAD PICKS - Addendum

 

Following on from yesterday's review of my pre-season nominations of some of the most common Bad Picks in FPL this year, I'll offer one more.... that I've noticed in an awful lot of squads so far.

Harry Winks - Now, I like Harry as a player; I think Spurs were mad to let him go. And a few years ago, he was looking like he could be a decent back-up holding midfielder for England. But his career just didn't quite catch fire, and instead took a detour into the second or third-tier of porfessional accomplishment. Still a very decent central defensive midfielder, though: a good scrapper, and sometimes a decent passer of the ball too.

Just.... NOT for Fantasy.. While he is a fairly reliable starter (though he has missed a couple of games already, for some reason), and almost invariably plays the full 90 minutes, that's about it: he offers very little prospect of any other points. So far, a couple of assists (rather surprising: a strike-rate unlikely to be maintained across the season), 0 goals, and 0 bonus points. He is pretty much just giving you the bare minimum appearance points every week (most weeks...).

A lot of people went for Winks at the start of the season as a lazy squad-filler choice: they werre running out of budget, and he was the only likely starting midfielder available at 4.5-million pounds. But his ownership actually went up even further over the next few weeks!! (Perhaps some people hadn't initially noticed that there was a starting player this cheap?) And it still hasn't fallen off very much even now: it's still over 12.5% - which puts him among the Top 10 midfield picks! For someone metronomically returning only 2 points per game, that is just INSANE.

While there might be some excuse - not much, but some - for going for a player like Winks in your initial squad, while you're struggling for budget, there is absolutely NONE for hanging on to him this long. In FPL terms, he is an essentially worthless player; he may only cost 4.5 million; but that is 4.5 million being pissed away on NOTHING.

I think there are FOUR IMPORTANT LESSONS here:

1)  You can't afford to go light on your midfield. You can almost always get more points from a 5th midfielder than from a 3rd forward (or a 4th defender), and so in most weeks you want to be starting all 5 midfielders - and expecting good points from every one of them.  Really, you want to be looking for at least 5 points-per-game on average from all your midfielders (ideally, 6 points or over from at least two or three of them). Someone who can't give you a chance of that isn't worth your time

2)  Therefore, you CANNOT afford to carry midfielders on your bench.

3)  Even Bench players need to be offering a prospect of at least a little more than just appearance points. (I like to maintain an average of 3.5 to 4 points per game from everyone on my bench.)

4)  If you do find yourself with someone like this in your squad, you can't afford to be complacent about it. It is just as important - often even more imporant - to replace a completely inadequate fringe player (YES, even a completely inadequate bench player - but Winks should never have been accepted as just a bench player) than it is to swap out a star attacking player who seems to have hit a bit of a dip in form, etc. Selecting Harry Winks in pre-season I can, just about, forgive; still having him going into GW11 is absurd and self-harming.