Luck-o-Meter 25-26 - Gameweek 11

Arsenal's long run of clean sheets coming to an end hit FPL hard - as many managers are now doubled or even trebled up on their defence; almost everyone seemingly now owns Gabriel and/or Raya plus one other,.... and that did not work out well this week. It's also a pretty rare event to see 2 failed penalty conversions - even over one weekend, let alone on the same day,... let alone from two of the most popular players in the game!

Spurs v Manchester United was very much the 'game of two halves'. It was frankly embarrassing how easily the visitors were allowed to dominate proceedings in the opening 45 minutes - looking comfortably on top, and really more like the home side, but - as usual - struggling to create many clearcut chances. Thomas Frank must have deployed the 'hairdryer' at the interval, because Spurs came back out with a greatly increased sense of urgency and soon got back on top of things - though they likewise struggled to create chances, and it was really quite a drab match until the late flurry of goals from both sides led to a bizarre - but probably fair - draw. Those late goals were a harsh blow for Bryan Mbeumo, and his FPL owners, though; he was - once again - by far United's best player, but thanks to the perversity of the BPS, that burst of scoring at the death robbed him of any bonus points, as well as wiping out his clean-sheet bonus; he'd been on course for an 11-point game, and it was whittled down to just 7 points in a matter of minutes! This week's bizarre curveball from Ruben Amorim was to give Amad Diallo another try-out as one of his '10's, which necessitated playing Bryan Mbeumo out of position in the left-half space rather than his preferred right side (while again trying to get Cunha to operate as a centre-forward, which he is not cut out for at all; he had a face like thunder on the bench, after being pulled off in the 70th minute, and one must suspect that there is some serious dressing-room disharmony brewing at the club). It increasingly feels as though this constant tinkering with the lineup is not considered tactical innovation, but simply a desperate case of throwing everything at the wall to see if anything will stick.

Everton cruised to an ultimately fairly comfortable win against a toothless Fulham, who, alas, are increasingly looking like strong favourites for relegation. The major FPL luck-blip here was probably yet another late, late goal, from a defender - and it being somewhat of a fluke, ballooning into the net off Michael Keane's shoulder-blade after he'd completely missed his near-post header. Sasa Lukic was a little fortunate to escape a dismissal for cynically bundling over Dewsbury-Hall just before half-ttime, after having already picked up an early card.

Everton fans. and FPL owners of certain of their players (Tarkowski particularly!), may feel aggrieved that they had a remarkable 3 goals chalked off for - fairly non-obvious - 'offsides'. For the first and third of these incidents, you can accept that Ndiaye and Barry were slightly offside and close to the keeper, in a position to maybe get something on the ball being played into the danger area; but for the Tarkowski goal, WTF??  Yes, he had strayed in behind the back line when the first cross was hit; but at that point, he was having no immediate impact on the play; he immediately ran back onside, and surely a new 'phase' of play had been initiated before he struck his shot - the ball went all the way out to the far side, was played back to Ndiaye who put in another cross, which was half-cleared before falling to Tarkowski to smash home a half-volley; 3, 4, 5 other players had touched the ball and secconds had passed since the brief instant when he was - irrelevantly - 'offisde' in the preceding passage of play. That was an absolutely absurd, disgraceful decision. (And this week, we seem to be getting no SAOT graphics shared - nor any reference made to the system, either in commentary or post-match discussions. Has the syttem's use been surreptitiously suspended?? The Offside Law and its implementation are a complete mess at the moment; and this unconvincing new technology is not helping the situation.)

West Ham v Burnley was mostly a competition of terrible defending, rather than of any more positive footballing qualities. The visitors looked comfortably in control for the first half hour or so, but then unaccountably let their focus slip, and allowed West Ham to get on top. But 1-1 would probably have been a 'fair' outcome; and the only reason the scoreline didn't end like that was a string of uncharacteristic goalkeeping howlers, two from Dubravka and one from Areola, right at the death. Owners of Jarrod Bowen (there are some) will feel piqued that his teammate Kyle Walker-Peters stole the ball off his toe to claim the final goal.

It shouldn't really have been any surprise that Arsenal's remarkable clean-sheet streak was due to end, or that 4th-placed Sunderland, on their home turf, might have been the team to do it - but probably no-one was expecting quite such a thrilling and finely-balanced game on Wearside. Zubimendi thundered one effort against the crossbar, and both teams really might easily have had 3 or 4 goals each. Mystifyingly, David Raya was not credited with any saves in this game - although he clearly made at least 3 important stops in the BBC highlights I've seen: what's up with that? (It is, alas, becoming increasingly apparent that we just can't trust any of the statistics on which the game of FPL is based; it is particularly vexing in the case of this year's novelty, the 'defensive points' - but it can make itself felt in all aspects of the scoring system.) Dan Ballard was perhaps a little lucky to escape giving away a penalty - and possibly suffering a red card - when he elbowed Mikel Merino in the face early on; but it did look like a natural 'footballing incident', devoid of any malicious intent. This game also saw one of the most egregious BPS injustices of all time: Ballard scored a superb opening goal, provided fhe assist for the late equaliser, and put in a heroic goal-mouth block right at the death which probably saved the point for his team - the obvious and undoubted 'Man of the Match', by a mile; but the BPS only ranked him 5th in the game???

Chelsea had to huff-and-puff a bit to secure their expected home win against a clueless Wolves. It wasn't a particularly convincing performance from them, but they ultimately came through comfortably enough, with Joao Pedro perhaps restoring confidence in many of his (remaining) owners with another smart finish; and a lively performance from Garnacho has probably now put him on the FPL radar.

Villa continued their impressive run of results with a big win at home against Bournemouth, but the final scoreline flattered them considerably, with all the goals being somewhat freakish: a chipped free-kick over the wall from Buendia that Petrovic probably should have been able to deal with, a firm scudding effort from 23 yards out by Onana that just sneaked in at the foot of the near-post, a looping back-header from substitute Ross Barkley, and another long-range effort that took a huge and decisive deflection off the heel of an oblivious Donyell Malen. The home side's best action in the game was really Emi Martinez's excellent penalty save from Semenyo rather than any of their attacking efforts. But Bournemouth were somehow just not at the races for this one - surely their worst performance of the season.

At Selhurst Park, the VAR team were actually doing their job properly (for possibly the only time this weekend) when they invited Tim Robinson to reconsider his decision to award a penalty for Rutter's rather blatant dive. (The big worry about this incident was that VAR appeared to be repeatedly showing only a juddery picture composed of a sequence of freeze-frames taken a 10th of a second or so apart, rather than either a normal-speed or slow-motion replay. This was very confusing, and actually failed to show the exact moment of contact at all - so the ref was rather left guessing what had happened from the players' body-language, rather than having been able to see it clearly.) Apart from that brief moment of excitement, there was little of note in a drab game, apart from Minteh and Kamada squandering one good chance for each side. Palace were short of energy after their Europa Conference League outing on Thursday evening; and they were also without captain Marc Guehi (now owned by a staggering 36% of Fantasy managers), a late omssion because he'd been struggling with a severe bruise on his foot after that game against Alkmaar. Brighton looked more like the home side here - dominating most of the possession and playing the better football, but failing to create many good chances. It was probably a little bit of a surprise that this fixture would produce the weekend's only goalless draw, and 2 of only 6 clean sheets from this batch of matches; but Brighton are starting to look much more secure in defence, and Verbruggen, in particular, had an impressive game here - pulling off a superb stop at the foot of his near post from Pino's stinging low shot in the closing seconds of the game.

Well, I had thought that the disallowal of Tarkowski's goal on Saturday would surely have to be the worst decision of the week. But Stuart Attwell's decision to book Dango Ouattara for 'simulation' rather than book (and send off) Dan Burn and award a penalty, when the big defender had clearly trodden on the forward's foot. was utterly mystifying; even stranger was VAR's unwillingness to say anything about it. As it happened, this had no real impact on the game. Burn would pick up a second yellow for a penalty foul on the same player shortly afterwards, and Brentford would go on to win fairly comfortably against a Newcastle who were looking jaded after midweek exertions in the Champsions League. Nick Pope's withdrawal with a possible shoulder or collarbone injury, after a heavy landing, will be a concern to the 12% of FPL managers who (unwisely!) include him in their teams.

Sean Dyche seems to be shoring up Nottingham Forest, and they look like they should soon be able to climb out of the relegation places. Leeds can perhaps take some comfort from a well-taken goal from their new forward, the German Lukas Nmecha, but are otherwise looking increasingly relegation-worthy. The only major incident of note was the award of a penalty to substitute Omari Hutchinson - who was under pressure from behind, but appeared to simply trip over his own feet; and this rather odd decision from the ref was apparently not reconsidered by VAR at all, or only very briefly. It was also perhaps a bit of a surprise that Elliot Anderson has taken over on penalties for Forest, after Morgan Gibbs-White had muffed one against Sturm Graz a few days ago. (He dispatched it calmly, emphatically. And since he tends to do very well on 'defensive contributions' as well, this lift to his points potential might possibly bring him into FPL consideration for the '5th seat' slot in midfield.)

The Liverpool 'revival' does indeed look fragile: after their dominating display against Real Madrid in midweek, they were suddenly back to misfiring at The Etihad. Luck was most definitely not on their side, though: Haaland's opener was a happy fluke, the ball fortuitously bouncing off his head into the goal rather than being purposefully headed in that direction - after Konate's attempt to head the ball to safety merely gave it a glancing deflection on to the big Viking rather than a decisive redirect away from him; Nico Gonzalez's firm drive from the edge of the box needed two deflections off defenders' legs to find its way past Mamardashvili, and then Doku conjured an unstoppable curler from just outside the area to put the result beyond question. Liverpool got at the home side more effectively in the second half, and had their chances: Gakpo blazing over at the far post, Salah's clever dink past Donnarumma drifting agonisingly just wide of the far post, and then a fierce drive from Szoboszlai requiring a good one-handed save from the keeper. The one big point of contention in the match was the strange VAR decision to overturn (on their own authority, without directing a review by the ref?) Chris Kavanagh's initial allowing of Virgil Van Dijk's headed goal from a corner, which would have put Liverpool level at 1-1; Andy Robertson was offside, and had to duck under the flight of the ball - but he made no attempt to play it, and he was not in any way interfering with Donnarumma or any of the City defenders. The penalty award early on was a bit of a dubious incident too: while Mamardashvili had just touched Doku with his knee, it was a very, very slight contact, perhaps not really enough to bring the attacker down - and his eventual collapse a few steps later looked very much like 'a dive'; it was perhaps technically a 'foul', but a very soft one, and the kind of incident that I would prefer to see not given as a penalty. Kavanagh's initial response was to signal 'no foul', and I don't see that that was an egregious enough 'error' to warrant VAR insisting that he look at it again. As it happened, this didn't affect the result, as Haaland hit a weak penalty that Mamardashvili was able to save - though that unlikely occurrence, of course, had a huge FPL impact. And Uncle Arne was at it again with the early substitutions, withdrawing Robertson and Ekitike after just 55 minutes.

The absurd denial of Tarkowski's goal at Everton was one of the worst decisions of the season so far. There were 2 rather dubious VAR interventions in the week's biggest game, at The Etihad, as well as a dreadful non-award of a penalty to Brentford and a rather dubious granting of one to Nottingham Forest And we have, yet again, seen a lot of goals from defenders, and a lot of goals in the dying minues of games. There's been that curious case of FPL/Opta somehow not recognising Raya as making any saves aagainst Sunderland (which rather calls into question the reliability of all the stats on which this game relies!), and a couple of mildly contentious potential red card incidents. Then on Sunday, we had two of the game's highest-owned players, Haaland and Semenyo, both fail to convert penalties! The FPL 'Team of the Week' is usually one of the strongest indicators of the fluctuating 'luck factor': and it is once more a pretty oddball collection: Pickford, Saka, and Joao Pedro were the only inclusions with any significant ownership after Saturday's games; and after Sunday, only Saka was left, The 'global average' this week was a remarkably low 38 points; though, curiously, while in most previous weeks this season the distribution curve seems to have been heavily skewed towards the low side, with the majority of FPL managers actually getting slightly less than the average, here the largest concentration of scores seemed to be in the 40s and 50s.  With quite a bit of dodgy officiating, and so many of the most fancied players failing to produce anything, I think this week gets up to an 8 out of 10 on the 'Luck-o-Meter'.