Free Hit? Just say 'NO'!!

 

Damn, an awful lot of folks seem to be playing their Free Hit for this Gameweek. An awful lot!

I mentioned yesterday, as one of my 'Signs that an FPL manager isn't much good', that doing so was suggestive of simply having not thought ahead. We've known that the League Cup finalists were going to have a Blank Gameweek in the league programme this week since before the start of the season; we've known who those finalists were going to be for just over six weeks now; and we could have made a pretty good guess as to who they were going to be at least a month before that. This blip in the schedule should not be taking anyone by surprise.

What's more, the other two clubs blanking this weekend, their scheduled league opponents, Crystal Palace and Wolves, are not really clubs that anyone should have any FPL players from at the moment. There's not even that much reason to be trebled-up on either Arsenal or City right now. Arsenal's attacking players haven't been scoring enough goals, or even getting regular enough starts, to be in serious contention this season; even the great Bukayo Saka has faded into FPL irrelevance. For most of the season, Gabriel, Timber, and Rice have been incontestably the three Arsenal players to have; but Timber just picked up an injury, and Rice has had a bit of a lull in productivity recently - so, you could easily drop either of them, if you hadn't already. Even from City, there's been no overshwhelming case for a third pick for a while, after Haaland and Semenyo. And Haaland's returns have sputtered since the turn of the year; a lot of managers have already started deserting him. Nico O'Reilly has recently been about the most popular third pick from the club, but he too has just picked up an injury.

So, really, most smart FPL managers should not have found themselves with more than 4 or 5 players blanking this week; and it should be pretty easy to move a couple of them on to the bench for the week, and offload any others - even if it might cost one or two 'hits'.

If you did have exceptionally high exposure to this Blank Gameweek, you should have started offloading a few surplus players a few weeks back - and/or started trying to save up a few extra transfers even further back - to deal with this problem.

Yes, if you are still trebled-up on both Arsenal and City, and you somehow have one or two or three Palace and Wolves players too, and have maybe picked up one or two additional injury worries as well,.... then you could be in Free Hit territory.

But that was a situation you should have been able to anticipate the approach of, and taken earlier action to avoid. And even if that is where you find yourself,.... you might still be better off spending as many 'hits' as you need to in order to fill all the holes in your starting eleven; or compromising a little and accepting that you may just have to field a side one or two men short this week.

Because.... in Gameweek 34, the FA Cup Semi-Finals are going to wipe out four games from the league programme that weekend, not just two. The line-up probably wasn't quite as easy to predict as it was with the League Cup finalists. And the qualifiers were confirmed with only a little more advance warning; in fact, quite a lot less effective warning, very little time to save up any extra free transfers - because there are now no further Premier League gameweeks for the next three weeks. On that weekend at the end of April, we'll be missing City and Arsenal again, but also Chelsea and Liverpool, and West Ham and Leeds. Now, as it happens, probably no-one in FPL owns any West Ham or Leeds players at the moment, and not very many from Chelsea or Liverpool. But still, it's likely to be a significantly worse disruption than this week - and it might have been even worse.

Moreover, so close to the end of the season, and with the likelihood of Double Gameweeks in close proximity - probably, hopefully shortly afterwards - you really don't want to be messing your squad up with a lot of short-term changes at that point. You might be able to avoid the catastrophic impact of so  many missing players in that Gameweek with saved transfers and 'hits', but.... you're probably going to want most or all of those players back in immediately - which is going to cost even more transfers.

However difficult this looming Blank Gameweek may be to survive without the Free Hit, you should try to do so,... because Gameweek 34 is assuredly gong to be way worse, for at least 95% of us.