The end-of-year MADNESS is here!

 Wynter is icumen in,

Lhude sing, 'Buger!'

Yep, it's that time of year again. The weather in England has turned shitty: savagely cold, relentlessly wet. And the fixture schedule - squeezed on one side by an expanded programme of European competition, World Cup qualifiers, and the minor domestic annoyance of the early League Cup ties, and on the other by the magnanimous but probably misguided desire to shoehorn a 'mini-break' of sorts into the League programme in early January - is entering the inevitable December logjam. 

Most of the other major European football leagues enjoy a full 3 or 4 weeks off from just before Christmas - when the weather is at its worst, and players want to be able to spend a little time off with their families. In England, we only ge a scant 9 days in January, and only by virtue of playing twice in a week straight after the New Year. Starting this weekend, there are 9 Premer League gameweeks in just under 6 calendar weeks.

The rate of injuries, unfortunately, will inevitably soar. Performance levels will plummet. 'Rest rotations' will abound. Most teams experience a bit of a wobble in their results; some regularly seem to crash during this period (ahem, Arsenal - let's hope they're over that now!).

Now, more than ever, you will need your bench. All through December (and possibly on through much of January and February too if we have a really bad winter) you'll be very, very lucky if you don't need at least 1 auto-sub - sometimes, perhaps, 2 or 3 - to replace last-minute omissions in almost every gameweek. And even if all your regular starters are going to play, there will probably be occasions when you wish they weren't, because you can tell they're getting knackered and are not likely to have a good game next time out; you want to have the flexibility to be able to rotate players in and out of your starting lineup. 

If you don't have a full bench now, and a strong bench, you're likely to suffer through a brutal winter.

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.)

You NEED your Bench!

Many FPL managers seem to take the view that the Bench doesn't matter, and - especially early in the season, when they're struggling to make their budget stretch - they may fill it up with super-cheap players who are virtually worthless, Indeed, they may even omit to transfer out players who are dropped or pick up long-term injuries, leaving a bench seat completely empty.

That is a very foolhardy approach to the game.

Here's why your Bench is so important:

1)  It's useful to be able to rotate your back-up goalkeeper with your primary pick, to avoid his tougher fixtures. (And it's useful to have guaranteed back-up, if your primary keeper unexpectaedly doesn't start one week!)

2)  It's also useful to be able to rotate your defenders away from tougher opponents. (Since you're usually only starting 3 defenders, you can get away with having only 1 good back-up on the bench; but it's risky. More choice is more value, more points potential.)

3)  It's useful to be able to drop any player to the bench for a week - and replace him with an at least half-decent altnerative - if they're facing a particularly unpromising fixture; or if they're likely to be rested after a tough European game, or are facing a short-term absence for a minor injury or a ban. Sometimes, indeed, you might want to try to 'carry' a top player on your bench for a slightly longer period (an expected injury absence of a few weeks, or participation in a mid-season international tournament); you're often kind of locked-in to your best players, because they've increased in value so much while you've owned them that you might take a heavy hit from 'transfer tax' if you tried a short-term sell-and-buy-back.

4)  You never know when you may need an 'automatic substitution' to get you out of trouble. Very, very often a top player will go missing right on the eve of the Gameweek, or even during the Gameweek, because of a training injury, illness, family crisis, car crash, spat with his manager, or whatever - and you have no time to adjust. That can happen at any stage of the season, even in the very first gameweek! You need to have decent players on your bench to fill in for any unexpected absences like that. Most seasons, I find I'm drawing on at least one auto-sub every 2 or 3 gameweeks; and needing 2 or 3 in one week is far from unknown! During the winter months, when injuries and rest rotations become even more common, you often need auto-subs every single week.

5)  A strong Bench gives you much more flexibility to negotiate the occasional fixture speed-bump of a Blank Gameweek without needing to resort to paid transfers. (For example, if 5 of your players are involved in the FA Cup Semi-Finals, but you have 3 good back-ups on the bench you can replace some of them with, you only need to use 2 transfers to assemble a full starting 11. If you have any 'holes' on your Bench, your problem in that gameweek is much worse.)

6)  It's good to be continuously 'set up' for the possibility of an opportunistic Bench Boost. It's difficult to get the most out of that chip, and really quite fatuous to try to plan for it too far in advance. Yes, it's nice to have everybody (all 15 squad members!) facing a really favourable fixture, but it's even more important to have all 15 of them fully fit and looking certain to start - that's not something that happens very often, and not something you can plan for more than a few hours ahead of the weekly deadline! Also, relative fixture difficulty can shift very suddenly and unexpectedly, as the form a leading team may crash while a struggling club rediscovers a dangerous bite; and hence a gameweek of fixtures that looked promising early the season may cease to be so, but while another gameweek comes to look much more attractive - at short notice.  

Moreover, if you're hoping to coast by with a shit Bench for most of the season, you have to go to a lot of extra trouble to assemble a quartet of decent starters when you do want to play your Bench Boost.

It takes only a little bit of extra thought and care, and perhaps a paltry extra 1 or 2 million pounds of your budget to recruit a solid Bench - rather than a pants one.

It is always absolutely WORTH IT - even for Gameweek 1!