Don't worry about points left on the Bench!

 

People on the FPL forums are often found fretting extravagantly about the number of points they've had unused on the Bench in this past gameweek. And many - even among the supposedly more experienced and shrewder managers in the game - often seem to fetishise the idea of minimizing your Bench points (as if it's somehow wasteful of resources, and an indicator of bad play).

Now, OK, it is bad play if you are frequently leaving a player on the Bench who returns a very good haul - in preference to a player you started whose prospects clearly weren't quite as good in that week's fixtures. 

A really good haul on the Bench is, of course, frustrating. But that's going to happen to everyone occasionally: it's a game of luck, and you can't reliably predict who's going to come up with the big points in any given week; occasionally you'll be taken by surprise. But if you find you're quite regularly having one of your best returns from a player on the Bench, then you might be having a few problems with your decision-making.

However, the Bench is also part of your team - and you will occasionally (quite often!) have to draw on your Bench through auto-substitutions to fill out your starting lineup. So, consistently getting pretty decent points out of your Bench collectively, and out of each of its individual members, is actually a very good thing - a sign of a well-balanced squad.

Moreover, you should look to have a pretty competent back-up goalkeeper, and at least one strong back-up defender - to enable you to rotate those positions around difficult fixtures. And so, sometimes, you're actually going to have a first-choice keeper or defender on your bench - who might surprise you with a good return, despite having been in a very unpromising fixture.

There are also going to be occasions when you might choose to omit one of your top players, in any position, either because of a tough fixture, or because they're a doubtful starter due to a yellow-flagged injury problem or a likely rest before or after a big European game, or on returning from international duty (South American players are typically omitted in the first weekend after an international break because they've had to fly such a long way only a couple of days before the game). And then those players may play anyway, and have a big game. 

You shouldn't blame yourself for occasional misfortunes like that - only if you made a choice purely on form and/or fixtures to leave one player on the bench in favour of starting others, and you were wrong, and that is happening a lot.  Learn to distinguish cases where you made a sensible and justifiable decision to omit someone and got unlucky with it, from cases where you just badly misjudged your players' relative points prospects based on form and fixture-difficulty.

You should generally be hoping for an average of 5-6 points per game from all of your starters; but your average return from your Bench back-up players shouldn't be too far short of that, certainly not much below 4.5 points per game.

If you're often getting 16-20 points on your Bench, that's not a bad thing at all; it's a sign of good squad strength. (If you're regularly getting a lot less than that [when everyone is starting], you have a problem - and you're going to pay for it sooner or later.)