It's NEVER a binary

 

Well, almost never.

Any time you think a selection decision comes down to a straight EITHER/OR choice - you're almost certainly being naive, superficial, way oversimplifying things.

You're probably missing something important - and perhaps relatively obvious; but you've somehow developed a blind spot for it!

Even if you think you've narrowed down the final decision to a choice between two alternatives, starting from a larger pool of options, there's a danger that you've dismissed some of those other options too easily, without giving them full consideration. And you've very likely to have overlooked some possibilities altogether.

We see this most commonly with the captaincy pick: people very often ask on online forums, "Should I give the armband to x or y this week?" And it should never be that simple. Even over the past few years, when Salah and Haaland have been so dominant, and mostly so consistent, that they have offered a strong captaincy option in almost every gameweek,.... they've actually fairly seldom been the best one. If you have a decent squad, there should almost always be at least 4 or 5 possibilities for your captaincy, often more; don't narrow your focus down to the 'big names' too quickly!

The field is usually even broader with transfers: there are almost always several members of your squad you might consider swapping out, and several new players you might consider to replace any of them. By all means, winnow these options down to a more manageable number; but don't be in a mad rush to do so. Keep your mind as open as possible, for as long as possible.

[Now, at the start of this season, we did seem to be faced with one clear binary choice: Haaland and Salah were the only two super-premium players in the game this year, but priced way too high for us to reasonably afford both of them (at least, at the very start of the season, when budget is a bit tight - and we all thought we'd want Saka, Palmer, Cunha as well,... and maybe even Watkins or Gyokeres,... and perhaps Isak too, before long....). But, given their propensity to both start the season really hot, we probably did regard having one of them as essential; and we had to choose between them.

That was a very rare example of a selection decision being a genuine binary. But..... even there, perhaps there were other possibilities we should have given some more thought to: maybe we could have tried to do without either of them??  maybe we should have done without Saka, Palmer etc. instead, and beggared the squad to squeeze in both of them??  I thought not; but I did give it careful consideration.]

A helpful trick for picking your Captain

A further, playful follow-up to this morning's post about the dreaded Captaincy conundrum...

As I noted there, you should usually have at least 5 or 6 decent Captaincy candidates to choose from (if your squad's any good!), and - Fate and Luck being what they are - you'll probably quite rarely land on the best one. And you can wear a lot of years off your life fretting about a choice that is essentially impossible.

So, I quite often say to people online that if you're really finding it hard to choose, you should try writing the names of your candidates on Post-It notes, sticking them on a dartboard, and then throwing darts with your eyes closed until you hit one of them. It works as well as anything else.

Now, true, I usually say this somewhat flippantly. But there is a certain magic in this technique. And it is this: it puts you in touch with your intuition, it reveals to you a decision, a preference that had already formed in your subconscious mind, but which you hadn't been aware of (or were fearful to acknowledge).

Much as with a coin-flip, where if the coin lands on the choice you don't really want, you suddenly find yourself saying, "Well, I should do best-of-three on this....!", so too with this expanded 'random decision-making process', you'll immediately recognise if you don't fancy the selection your wayward dart has made for you.... and that will lead you towards recognising the choice that your 'gut' wants you to make.

And for things like this, the 'intuition' is usually much better at evaluating the mutliple variables and making a shrewd selection than the conscious mind is - at least if your intuition is well trained by a lifetime of close watching of football. (See Malcolm Gladwell's book 'Blink' for some interesting case studies on the power of 'spontaneous decision-making'.)

But one final WARNING:  If you ever think your Captaincy Conundrum is down to a binary choice (as many, many folks on the forums often seem to do) - you're almost certainly wrong. (Or you have a very, very poor team!)

Can ANYONE be Captain?

 

Well, in theory, yes.... But in practice, usually NOT.

A little postscript to my post this morning on the trials of selecting your weekly Captain in Fantasy Premier League....

Now, in general, FPL doesn't give regular rewards for anything other than goals. And forwards, of course, tend to score most of the goals. So, you're likely to be better off choosing a forward to be your Captain, right?

Well, yes,..... except that many of the best forwards are in fact classified by the game as 'midfielders'. And many players, even if you might properly consider them as 'midfielders' rather than 'forwards', nevertheless, at least when they're in hot form, may score nearly as often, or even slightly more often, than the best forwards. And midfielders are privileged in the game's scoring system - getting more points than a forward for a goal, often picking up a free additional point for a team clean sheet, and generally being a bit more likely to pick up asssists and bonus points too (and also the newly introduced 'defensive points').

So, most of the time, it makes the most sense to give the Captain's armband to a goalscoring 'midfielder'.

Of course, some 'forwards' (especially the freakish Erling Haaland), when they're in form, do offer a particularly strong prospect of a goal almost every week; and may have a significantly elevated chance of registering a brace or even a hattrick against a favourable opponent. So, they can often be worth considering for the armband, ahead of your best midfielder. (However, it's a bit of a risk. Even Haaland doesn't score in every game; and he sometimes fails to score in games where he's expected to enjoy a landslide. And a midfielder who registers a goal and an assist will usually out-point a forward who notches a brace of goals, so.... midfielders are generally the better way to go. Even when Haaland does score a brace, he's very rarely the 'Player of the Week'!!)

And it also sometimes happens that none of your attacking players, 'midfielders' or 'forwards', have a particularly inviting fixture in a given gameweek, while a few of your defenders are facing teams who are really struggling to score any goals; so, you might occasionally take a chance on a defender getting a clean sheet. Although,... clean sheets are a very precarious thing to trust in for points, they can evaporate so easily (one tired mistake late in the game, one wondergoal out of nowhere, one dubious penalty award....). So, this is only really something you want to gamble on in that rare circumstance where none of your forwards or midfielders looks like a strong prospect for the gameweek. 

Strangely, there seems to be a common superstition against ever giving the armband to a goalkeeper. But in fact, in one of these weeks where the prospects look better for you in defence than attack, a keeper facing a weak opponent is usually a better prospect than a defender, because they can earn additional points for saves as well as the clean-sheet bonus. (In the past, some FPL managers might have been tempted to chase the higher 'points ceiling' from a defender, who might also pick up an attacking return of some sort; but attacking returns for defenders are vanishingly rare, and have been becoming more so in recent years with shifts in the tactics of the game against using full-backs as advanced wide players. Defenders might theoretically be able to earn more points in a match their team is likely to win comfortably; but in practice, the keeper usually does. However, this season the new 'defensive points' will probably even the balance up, giving defenders a much stronger chance of earning 2 extra points in a game; although that doesn't decisively rule keepers out of consideration, because they can often earn 2 or more points for their 'saves' in a game - and, if they make a lot of saves, they tend to be more likely to claim the maximum bonus points as well.)

You have to weigh up a nexus of factors - the regular points potential of your candidate players, their current individual and team form, and the likely difficulty of their fixture - to try to determine the best points prospect for the week. [And use your own judgement on this; don't try to rely on one of those ludicrously bad 'points predictor' apps.]

And YES, it can be anyone, from any position - even (though rarely) the goalkeeper. But 3 or 4 times out of every 5, it should usually be a midfielder.

The Captaincy lottery

 

The question of who to trust with the captain's armband, and the siren prospect of double points, is a weekly torture for the FPL enthusiast, and one that tends to dominate the online forums in the last days before the gameweek deadline.

I actually dislike the 'double points for the Captain' rule - because it is just a further randomizing element in the game, which is something I believe we can do without.

There are a few important things to remember about selecting your Captain for the gameweek: 

a)  No-one KNOWS who's going to get the highest score in any given gameweek. So, it's fruitless to ask other people for suggestions. And the various online 'predictor' services that purport to tell you the 'expected points' for leading players are just guesswork; all the ones I've ever checked out have been laughably haphazard and inaccurate - far less reliable than even my own fallible intuitions.

And....

b)  You're going to be 'WRONG' in your pick more often than you're going to be 'right' - you just have to live with that.  If you have a decently strong team, there are almost always going to be at least 5 ot 6 players in any gameweek who should have a good chance of picking up high points for you. And it is impossible to know for sure which one of those will come up with the highest return. (Also, in many weeks, you'll be surprised by someone else in your squad, outside that core group of most promising picks, - perhaps even someone you left on the Bench! - coming up with a huge return, contrary to all reasonable expectations. Fate is cruel and mischievous, and loves to scoff at our puny efforts to prosper!)

And....

c)  Even if you are fortunate enough to give that armband to the player who comes up with the highest score in your team for the gameweek, he's still quite unlikely to be the 'Player of the Week'.  We so often see the 'Team of the Week' chock-full of randoms: in many, many gameweeks, a bunch of completely unexpected players - that almost no-one would own for FPL - produce higher scores than almost all of the more fancied players. So, that's a further cup of gall you have to sup from, even if you've done 'well' in your armband choice. (For the first half or so of last season, Mo Salah was producing high scores so frequently that he was returning on the captaincy nearly every other game on average - and was the highest scoring player overall in around two-thirds of those. But that is yet another measure of what an utterly freakish season he enjoyed last year; I don't think anyone else in FPL history has ever come close to that! And note, that run didn't quite last all season. And even during the super-hot spell, he was usually outscored by far more by the top player of the week when he had a poor return than he outscored the next best by in his good weeks; so, it was theoretically still possible - though very difficult [this really was the one-in-a-million instance where choosing the same captain every week for a long run of games might have been justified] - to get more captaincy points by consistently betting shrewdly against Salah than by always betting with him.)

Of course, the range of sensible choices for the captaincy each week is somewhat constrained. There are those few exceptional players like Haaland and Salah who produce very high scores more often than any other player - and, when they're playing well, 'blank' much less often than most others. And there are other outstanding players who may get close to those levels of return for shorter spells, when they hit really good form - and/or have particularly favourable-looking fixtures.

Form and fixtures, alas, are not entirely reliable guides to performance. And, as I just noted above, you almost always have at least 5 or 6 good players, who are hopefully in good form.... and facing fairly good fixtures.

But even your Haalands and your Salahs don't always produce a big haul against a 'soft' opponent. And 'form' can evaporate in the blink of an eye. There is really no way to tell who's going to do well or not so well in the coming round of matches. Even the Haalands and the Salahs 'blank' at least 1 game in 3, often more like 1 in 2; the majority of top players blank more like twice in every 3, or sometimes maybe even nearer 3 times in every 4 games.

So.... your captain pick will probably fail to return anything nearly half the time, even if you're doing really well in your selections. And he's only likely to be your best pick about once in every 4-6 games,.... and the top points-returner for the gameweek even more rarely than that.

These are the harsh realities you have to learn to accept. If you allow yourself to expect - or even hope for - a massive haul from your captain every week, you are going to be bitterly disappointed more often than not.

You should be grateful for any kind of return from your captain, even a modest 5 or 6 points (points earned from the gameweek action, before the doubling). If he scores 8-10 points, you should be very, very happy. And a high double-digit score is something that's only going too happen a handful of times a season at best - perhaps only once or twice, perhaps never.

Be realistic about this: selecting your Captain is a cruel lottery - and most of the time, you're going to wind up with a losing ticket!

[I followed this post up with a couple of afterthoughts on how to choose your Captain - here and here.]