How did the Free Hit work out this weekend??

I've seen various figures online suggesting that between 1 and 1.5 million FPL managers might have played their first Triple Captain chip on Erling Haaland in this Gameweek 13 just past (although I don't think FPL has released an official total yet; these are all probably just estimates; I'm rather surprised that the number isn't much higher). But a very significant number of people - probably some hundreds of thousands at the very least - opted to play their Free Hit chip instead.

Did that work out for them??

Well, of course, your mileage will vary....

But on the whole, I'd venture.... NO.

Many GW13 Free Hitters online are just comparing themselves to the disastrous Haaland Triple Captain play. Of course, anything was better than that.

But that's not how these things work. You have to compare like with like (Triple Captain option against Triple captain option, Free Hit against Free Hit): how did the GW13 Haaland Triple Captain play work out compared to other gameweeks in which you might have used (or could still use) the chip on him, or on another high-scoring player; and how well did the Free Hit work out this weekend - in terms of the points-lift it gave you over the team you had anyway - in comparison to other gameweeks in which you might play it?

Quite a few people who did well from their Free Hit this gameweek have posted scores up in the mid-60s and low 70s, which is pretty good for this (very low-scoring) week. But as I scan around my leagues, I don't find the upper reaches of this week's ranking dominated by Free Hitters. A lot of people got scores in the 70s with their regular team. (And a lot of people don't even bother to do this elementary calculation. If their Free Hit team returned a pretty respectable points total, they feel satisfied with that; and they don't go to the trouble of working out what their regular team would have got - much less factoring in the possible impact of one or two regular transfers to improve that regular team for this set of fixtures. If your Free Hit squad didn't actually give you any more points than your unchanged squad might have done, then it was a bust!)

In order to get good returns from the Free Hit (or Bench Boost) chip - at least in general terms, for the majority of people playing it in a particular gameweek, rather than for just a few execeptionally lucky managers - you need plenty of high-scoring players and plenty of good player returns and match results that were fairly readily predictable. 

And, unfortunately, this gameweek just didn't turn out like that: a lot of matches followed an unexpected course. Brentford eventually got an anticipated 'big win' against Burnley, but really had to struggle for it, and all the goals only came very late in the game; City nearly lost to Leeds, Bournemouth did lose to Sunderland, and Spurs and Palace both lost at home to less formidable opponents, while Villa and Liverpool were lucky to beat their bottom-of-the-table opponents at all, and didn't rack up the margin of victory expected. Even Newcastle weren't predicted to get a win away from home, let alone a big win, against the usually defensively strong Everton. And almost no-one managed to keep a clean sheet.

So, most teams didn't get the sort of results that were generally expected, and few players returned particularly good hauls. In fact, of the most fancied players - both among existing selections and among those transferred in on a Free Hit - almost no-one produced a good return this week; most of them blanked. Only a few members of the 'Team of the Week' have any significant ownership, and probably weren't any more popular in Free Hit selections than they are in existing squads (while the best of this week's forwards, Igor Thiago, was in a lot of squads already, without a Free Hit).

So, unfortunately, this turned out not to be a great week for the Free Hit - because it wasn't easy to anticipate who would bring in good points, not very many players did bring in really good points; and there wasn't any major difference in points returns between 'Free Hit players' and 'regular team players' in this frustrating gameweek with such exceedingly low average scores.

That does not mean it was a bad week in which to choose to play the Free Hit. The combination of fixtures did look promising for it. But the eccentric and unexpected game outcomes and the low points returns from most of the more fancied players meant that it ended up being a bad week to have played it in - for most people. (But it might still prove to be better than nothing; it might yet end up having been the least worst option in a bunch of gameweeks that will all disappoint in various ways!)

There were, however, (as there usually are!) a few player choices that worked out pretty well - if you didn't have them already, but brought them in on a Free Hit. It's the managers who lucked into these picks who enjoyed the 70+ points returns on their Free Hit play this week. 

Liverpool, Villa, and Brighton were the only teams to keep clean sheets (rather unexpectedly, and in the case of the first two, really rather luckily), so taking a keeper or defenders from any of those three teams worked out well. Aston Villa seemed to be a particularly popular choice among the Free Hitters; although Rogers and Malen didn't work out for them, while Martinez and Cash did.

Cody Gakpo and Phil Foden were also strangely popular Free Hit choices - despite having shown few indications of likely FPL points-scoring in recent games; Foden, in particular, often now being played in a slightly deeper role, had recorded a long string of blanks and often been fairly anonymous in City's games in the past couple of months. But they both came up with goals - goals their sides scarcely deserved on the balance of play, goals in added-on time. That's LUCK right there! There was no compelling rationale for including either of those two players in a Free Hit selection. Honestly, they looked obviously rather less tempting picks than teammates of theirs in the most impressive form recently - Doku, Cherki, Szoboszlai. Brentford's Dango Ouattara was also up there among the week's most successful Free Hit picks; but there was a stronger rationale for fancying him against a defensively frail team like Burnley, especially given Brentford's strong recent home form - although, again, Schade or Damsgaard might have seemed the more promising midfield options from that club (and many FPL managers will have had one of those three already).

So, people who'd gone for Villa (or Liverpool or Brighton) defensive assets and Foden and/or Gakpo and/or Ouattara with their Free Hit changes did pretty nicely for themselves with the chip in Gameweek 13. But they were a fairly small minority. And even they didn't do conspicuously any better than a large number of good non-Free Hitters.

On balance, a Free Hit play this weekend certainly wasn't the abject disaster that the Haaland Triple Captaincy was, but.... that's damning with faint praise. It really didn't work out at all well either.

A 'mini Free Hit' as well as a 'mini Wildcard'??

 

FPL's unnecessarily generous gift of extra Free Transfers in Gameweek 16 (another pointless innovation this year, supposedly meant to ease the possible impact of departures for the African Cup of Nations - although that has never been a big issue in FPL; and this year, it's a complete non-event, as no-one with any sense currently has any African players other than Bryan Mbeumo) is effectively a mini-Wildcard, enabling us to undertake a modest squad rebuild in mid-December.

However, it must be noted that this is not a gift of a fixed number of transfers (5), but only a top-up - to a maximum number of 5 Free Transfers. Hence, in order to take full advantage of it, you have to use up any existing Free Transfers you have in Gameweek 15 (e.g., if you still have 2 saved transfers going into GW16, you only get 3 new ones, to bring you up to the total of 5 all told).

I quite like the idea of trying to save up some transfers over the next few gameweeks (though that might not be possible, as injuries tend to come thick and fast at this time of year!), so that you can play 2 or 3 together in Gameweek 15 - perhaps even the full quota of 5 FTs in one fell swoop, if you're already carrying forward some saved ones. 

Since you'll have the opportunity for a similar big shake-up in the very next gameweek, with the AFCON Christmas present, this could be a one-week-only revision of your team - in effect, an extra Free Hit! 

But as this would only be a 'virtual' Free Hit, not the actual chip, you would be able to to play another chip that week. And as I said the other week, Gameweek 15 is a moderately promising prospect for a Bench Boost play, with a number of unbalanced fixtures you might want to exploit. (Although it's a bit of a risky bet for that chip, as there may be a high risk of fatigue, injury absences, or sudden rest rotations in what is the third gameweek scheduled within 7 days.)  Even for just the starting eleven, though, it's an unusual group of fixtures where you could benefit from putting out a one-off custom team. And 'optimizing' for this gameweek opportunity with saved transfers would enable you to hang on to your actual Free Hit (well, assuming you've still got it...) as insurance against a possible game-postponement emergency later in the month.  Something to think about.

Free Hit opportunity?

 

I mentioned yesterday that there were some tempting opportunities to play the first Free Hit coming up over the final month-and-a-bit of this first half of the season (although you might want to 'keep your powder dry' and just hang on to it until GW19 in case of a game-postponement emergency caused by bad weather...).

The problem is that gameweeks that look promising for one bonus chip usually look good for the others too (in fact, I already covered why the sets of fixtures in some of the upcoming gameweeks are attractive for either a Bench Boost or Free Hit play).

But probably the most appealing option of the lot for a Free Hit would be the imminent Gameweek 13. There are a number of teams we wouldn't normally fancy who are this week playing what look like much weaker sides: Villa playing Wolves, Brentford playing Burnley, City playing Leeds, Liverpool playing West Ham, and Spurs playing Fulham (although the last two are perhaps rather questionable, given Liverpool's and Spurs's recent form!). Moreover, you might want to avoid having players from the top-of-the-table clash between Chelsea and Arsenal, which might end up being close and cagey, and is certainly quite hard to call. Crystal Palace v Manchester United, Everton v Newcastle, Nottingham Forest v Brighton, and Sunderland v Bournemouth are also quite tough to predict the outcomes of, and so perhaps better avoided if you have the chance to do so. That's what a prime Free Hit set of fixtures typically looks like.

Unfortunately,.... Erling Haaland against Leeds has to be the most attractive prospect in the first-half of the season for playing the Triple Captain chip. And so, that is likely to take priority this week for the majority of FPL managers. 

Nobody but Haaland is scoring points almost every week, and often producing big points - so, there really is no other sensible option for this chip. (Eze isn't likely to repeat this Sunday's performance again this season, if only because no other opponent is likely to play as badly against Arsenal as Spurs did here!) And the only alternative remaining time to play the chip on Haaland is Gameweek 17, when he's turning out against against West Ham at The Etihad. West Ham, though, are starting to show signs of improvement under Nuno, and are now probably a rather stronger opponent than Leeds (they weren't just a few weeks ago, but things change). Also, that's rather a long time to wait: the lanky Viking might have picked up an injury or lost form by then!

So,... if you still have all three of the bonus chips in hand, it looks like Gameweek 13 is the best bet for the Triple Captain; and you may then be left flipping a coin to decide how to split the Free Hit and Bench Boost between Gameweeks 15 and 17 - or maybe GW16 for the BB, when the fixtures are perhaps not quite so attractive, but you will have the advantage of an 'optimum set-up' thanks to the '5 Free Transfers' early Christmas present we're getting for the start of AFCON. [In fact, given that GW15 is the third set of league fixtures inside a week, there's a high risk you might be hit by a slew of injuries, or likely rest rotations, or players whose form is impaired by fatigue. If you know about those problems in advance, and they are numerous, you might be able to dodge around them with the Free Hit. But such issues might ambush you only after the gameweek deadline, which probably makes it rather too risky a week to play the Bench Boost in: the absolute essential for a good return from that chip is 15 fit players all starting for you. So, for me, it's looking like GW16 or 17 would be optimal for the BB;... and Free Hit any time you feel like it,... or feel that you need it!] 

BEST OF LUCK!!!

Always risky to play a chip after a break

 

Well, certainly one of the 'bonus' chips (and as I said yesterday, the Free Hit should really be regarded as one of these too). Though, in fact, even a Wildcard play is a bit of a shakey proposition directly after an international break, as you really want your new selections to return good points for you straight away.... and in these gameweeks, there is too much uncertainty about that.

WHY?  Because the disruption of the usual club routines for the better part of two weeks tends to have a negative impact on team and individual form, and makes game outcomes more unpredictable.

Certainty, of course, is impossible in a game like FPL; but if you're going to risk one of your valuable bonus chips, or implement a major rebuild with the Wildcard, you want to have a high degree of confidence that all of your players are likely to have good games. And you just can't have that level of confidence about likely performances in the gameweek straight after a break, just as you can't in the early weeks of the season, after the summer lay-off.

Even if players aren't physically fatigued by long-distance flights and heavy game-minutes, and haven't picked up some injury niggle that hasn't yet been publicly announced, they can often be emotionally depleted by a particularly high-stakes game (especially in this most recent break, where World Cup qualification was on the line for many teams). But more importantly, their usual routines have been broken: they've been playing with different teammates, working with different coaches, implementing different game tactics and set-piece routines to what they're used to with their clubs. And when they return, they have limited time to get back in the swing of things, with only a day or two of training before their next league match; detailed tactical preparation, in particular, can be very difficult on such a tight schedule. And even the players who stayed at their clubs, while they should be feeling fresh and well-rested, will also have missed out on full training with their regular teammates for 10 days or so.

This is why we get so many wild fluctuations in form, so many 'unexpected' results straight after a break - and thus, why it's such a big, and probably unwise, gamble to play one of your FPL chips in such a gameweek.

[I'm here trying to kick off a new series, where I aim to sum up a key idea about FPL rather more pithily than usual (though I don't have the knack of brevity, I know!), with the main point being stated in the post title. I realise at least some of the entries in my other attempt at a more concise series of posts, 'In a nutshell', may also qualify for this new category. I may have to ponder on whether there's any value in having two labels.]

How to use the Free Hit (and what it could be worth!)

 

The Free Hit is a 'novelty' that has stuck with us, first introduced into FPL in the 2017-18 season and a regular feature since. It is a 'disposable' rebuild chip, allowing you unlimited transfers in the gameweek you play it in, but with your squad automatically reverting back to its pre-Free Hit state for the following gameweek: you are 'rebuilding' for one gameweek only. (Also, note that the 'unlimited changes' are still subject to the usual constraints of overall budget and club quota. In Fantasy games for the international tournaments, there is sometimes a 'Limtless' chip that gives you a completely free rein to construct your 'perfect' squad; the Free Hit is not that. Alhough you might choose to take the risk of having a very weak bench for one week, and thus rustle up just a little bit more money than usual to spend on the starting eleven when using the chip.)

There are two main ways in which this chip can be used in FPL:

1)  As a 'rebuild' chip - in emergencies, to get around the challenge of a Blank Gameweek.

If a few teams you have high representation from are missing a match in the coming gameweek, that can leave a gaping hole in your squad. Sometimes, even a single missing match can have a big impact: last year, when the first Merseyside derby was called off at short notice because of the threat of extreme weather, many FPL managers found themselves without 4, 5, 6 Liverpool and Everton players! In circumstances like this, you might want to use the Free Hit in order to put out a strong team - where otherwise you might be having to spend 'hits' on extra transfers and/or to field a short team. And, of course, there's always a possibility - particularly in the grim midwinter months - of suddenly finding yourself with a raft of short-term injury doubts (and/or suspensions), and needing to use the Free Hit to get around that transient catastrophe.

2)  As a 'bonus' chip - to try to take advantage of an unusual set of fixtures.

If a lot of clubs that you don't usually want many - or any - players from all have 'easy'-looking fixtures in the coming gameweek, and/or many of your existing top players face unusually tough fixtures and/or are drawn against each other*, you might fancy completely revising your squad for that one week to take maximum advantage of the untypical points opportunities from this set of match-ups. 

In the past, when we only had ONE of this chip, it was always sensible to hang on to it until the latter part of the season, when we knew that we would face 2 or 3 Blank Gameweeks (at least one of them a pretty big one) because of league games being postponed to accommodate ties in the later rounds of the domestic cup competitions. 

Now that we have TWO Free Hits to use, one in each half of the season, there is more freedom in how to make use of the first one. 

As I pointed out a couple of weeks ago, opportunities for a 'bonus' use of the Free Hit largely overlap with the tempting Bench Boost gameweeks: sets of fixtures where thare a lot of unbalanced match-ups, promising big wins and/or clean sheets, give you the best chance of getting good points from all 15 players in your squad. But it is rare to have a gameweek of fixtures where even your starting 11 are all facing such good fixtures, so using a Free Hit to fully optimize your line-up for such an inviting gameweek is also potentially very beneficial.

There is, however, still a strong case for hanging on to it, in case of possible emergencies. The winter weather in the UK seems to get fouler year by year. Last season, we saw one game get called off becaue of high winds; and several others came very close to postponement because of thick fogs or heavy snowfalls. Even though pitches are much better protected against extreme weather these days, we have seen instances where dozens of volunteers were scrambling to clear a pitch of snow only hours before a scheduled kick-off. And there is also a possibility, particularly with extremely cold, icy conditions, that simply getting to the ground - or even going out of doors, at least for more elderly people - might be thought so hazardous that a game will be called off (that seemed to be the issue with the threatened gale-force winds around Anfield last year: not the playability of the game, but general concerns about public safety). There is a very serious danger of unexpected Blank Gameweeks occurring during the coming month or two, because of extreme weather. 

And there are, of course, other types of event that might disrupt the league schedule: public transport strikes, terrorist threats, the death of the monarch. You need to feel that the possible benefits of playing the Free Hit for pure 'bonus' value are looking very strong before you sacrifice that safety net.

So, what can the Free Hit be worth? 

After the event, you can identify a fairly specific points-lift value that it gave you, though it is a bit laborious to calculate: you have to compare your Free Hit team's haul with what your regular team would have produced (bearing in mind that, wtihout the Free Hit, you might have had to spend points on transfers in order to put out a full team, or a nearer-to-full team). 

Bear in mind, though, that this might not always capture the full 'value' of the Free Hit, since the ability to use it may have ongoing benefits beyond that particular gameweek, if you're using it as an emergency rebuild. If you'd opted to get by without the chip, you might have used up transfers you didn't really want to - transfers that might have been more valuable to you later for other changes. And you might have brought in some players who didn't have much value beyond that particular gameweek when you were caught short, and thus you might have committed yourself to using further transfers to get rid of them again as soon as possible; and if you had to carry them in the team for a bit longer than you wanted to, they might have been non-optimal points-returners for you. This kind of thing also has an effective points cost which may add to the apparent points-lift you got from the chip in the gameweek in which you played it. 

I find that the Free Hit typically yields a lift of about 15-20 points (though it can be a lot more, if a Blank Gameweek has wiped out most of your starting eleven!!) - which actually makes it the most valuable of all the FPL chips.

However, since we almost never have an 'ideal' team that's fully optimized for the current set of fixtures, the Free Hit can potentially bring a substantial points-lift in almost any gameweek; the additional benefit of playing it in a gameweek with a particularly freakish set of fixtures might be little or nothing. Therefore, there's probably no harm in hanging on to the chip 'for safety's sake' until the last possible moment. At the end of the season, it can make a great 'smart bomb' to help you win one of your mini-league cups!!  But even for this first-half-of-the-season one, you could just have a bit of fun with it in Gameweek 19....

Having said that.... there are in fact some pretty tempting openings to use it as a tactical 'bonus' opportunity in the next month. I shall have a little more to say about that soon.

[* NB: Having players in your FPL team drawn against each other sometimes is unavoidable; and it's not neccesarily a terrible thing. Attacking players may still be able to pick up attacking contributions even in a game they lose. And two good defensive teams may play out a goalless draw - or at least both avoid conceding too many, and perhaps still have their defenders and keepers pick up some additional points for saves, 'defensive contributions', and bonus points. It's only where you have attackers drawn against defenders in a fixture that there's a problem, because that's a zero-sum situation: an attacker and a defender playing against each other can't both have a good game, they're taking FPL points off each other.]

[Apologies to any early visitors to this post who spotted a sentence or two of absolute nonsense in the middle of this piece. I have been sleeping badly this week, and sometimes get a little brainfogged! Hence, I had somehow interpolated a couple of observations about Wildcard rather than Free Hit use...  Now EDITED out. Sorry about that.]

Upcoming prospects for Bench Boost (and Free Hit!)

 

Now, of course, the best time to play the Bench Boost chip will vary for each manager - probably more so than just about any other aspect of FPL 'strategy', as it depends on all 15 members of your squad (whereas, for the Triple Captain, the options are pretty much the same for everyone - especially at the moment this year!). However, as I pointed out the other day, the Bench Boost is a chip whose value derives from the collective return of the full squad: you not only need to have all 15 players starting their matches, you want to have as many of them as possible playing weak opponents. 

And sure, you will focus mainly on the fixture-difficulty for your 'usual' bench players. But the fixtures for the starting eleven can be very relevant also: if some of them are facing especially tough fixtures, you might not really want to start them that week (you probably don't want to bet on your Arsenal and Liverpool players, for instance - or not all of them, anyway - when they're playing each other). And there may be opportunities to tweak your squad - with a splurge of saved Free Transfers, or perhaps even a Wildcard rebuild a week or two beforehand; or, this year, with the over-generous award of additional Free Transfers for the start of AFCON in Gameweek 16 - to take maximum advantage of an unusually appealing set of fixtures in a particular gameweek.

This year, for the first (and, hopefully, last!) time, we are getting an additional Bench Boost chip, which has to be played in the first half of the season - before the end of December. Some people were so befuddled by this surprising and unnecessary rule change that they spent the chip very early (many even in the very first week of the season - which was completely NUTS!)

It has always looked to me as if the most promising gameweeks for this first Bench Boost would come in the latter part of its eligible window, over the coming month or so.

In fact, this coming Gameweek 12 might look especially appealing - with Villa playing Leeds, Bournemouth playing West Ham, Chelsea playing Burnley. Palace playing Wolves, Liverpool playing Forest, and Manchester United facing a recently out-of-sorts Everton. That is one of the most 'lopsided' sets of fixtures we'll see all season. But I am a little wary of it, because it comes straight after an international break, when there are increased uncertainties about players' form and fitness: travel fatigue as much as game weariness can take the edge off players' performances (South American internationals, in particular, are often rested for the first game back, just because they've had to endure such long return flights), and minor injury problems may not have been disclosed. Also, the disruption of usual club routines, and especially the shortage of time to conduct tactical preparation, means that almost all teams will be something below their best this coming weekend - and some match outcomes (more than usual!) may therefore be surprises.

Gameweek 13 is also promising, with Villa playing Wolves, Brentford playing Burnley, Liverpool playing West Ham, City playing Leeds, and Spurs playing Fulham - although Arsenal being drawn against Chelsea may give pause to managers with a lot of representation from those two teams (surely everyone now has 3 Arsenal players; but it's quite easy, at the moment, to get by with 1 or 0 picks from Chelsea!). And City against Leeds is probably a prime opportunity to chance the Triple Captain on Haaland, so that's a tricky dilemma.

Gameweek 14 doesn't look so hot, with a lot of quite finely balanced match-ups, and only United against West Ham, City against Fulham, and Palace against Burnley looking likely to be really one-sided.

Gameweek 15, though, might be another fairly good prospect: Brighton playing West Ham, Newcastle playing Burnley, Liverpool playing Leeds, City playing Sunderland (certainly not a gimme, but Haaland will probably fancy it...), and United playing Wolves. However, Arsenal away to Villa, Chelsea away to Bournemouth, and Brentford away to Spurs might perhaps go either way, and if you have a lot of players from from those teams, the Bench Boost might look a bit too risky. But if you've managed to save up a few transfers over the preceding weeks, you mightt have the opportunity to optimize your squad this week with a 'virtual Free Hit' (being able to immediately undo any changes that you want to, with the 5 Free Transfers being made available in the following Gameweek 16).

Gameweek 16 is a bit less enticing: although Arsenal, Villa, and Brentford have soft opponents, a lot of matches in this batch - United/Bournemouth, Liverpool/Brighton, Burnley/Fulham, Palace/City, and the Sunderland/Newcastle derby - might all be very tight, 

The fixtures in Gameweeks 18 and 19 include a lot of top-of-the-table clashes, where most FPL managers will have too many players pitted against each other to be able to expect a really good overall haul. And I'd tend to avoid those gameweeks anyway, because the matches are crowded together in the Christmas holiday week: family distractions, more limited preparation, and usually abysmal weather tend to hamper performance in these games, and you rarely see the best of anyone; and a lot of players may be getting rationed minutes, or be rested altogether for one of the games.

Moreover, that's a bit far away to plan for - so much might have changed with form and injuries by then. And, especially with something like the Bench Boost, which requires all 15 players to be fit, and starting, and at their best, it is too much of a risk to leave the chip until the very end of the available window for use: if a rash of late injuries suddenly renders the ploy invalid, you might have only one more week in which to play it, or..... no remaining alternative at all.

That last point also argues against leaving the BB until Gameweek 17, but bold managers might be tempted to give it a try, if they fancy Arsenal against Everton, Bournemouth against Burnley, Brentford against Wolves, and City against West Ham (although that could be possibly the strongest opportunity of the season for a Haaland Triple Cap!). However, Villa/United, Brighton/Sunderland, Newcastle/Chelsea, and Spurs/Liverpool will be rather harder to call.

And of course, all of these gameweeks with an unusually large number of one-sided fixtures - and/or some close match-ups where you might want to avoid having several of your best players facing each other - are also prime candidates for playing the Free Hit chip.

You don't want to be playing any chips early in the season, if you can possibly help it, because tactics and selections, team and individual form take a month or two to settle down - after the dust of the summer transfer window has settled. And this year, the pattern of the fixtures definitely creates a heavy bias towards using them at the very end of the available window. Heck, some lucky people haven't even used their Wildcard yet; and most people with any sense will still have all the others. Hence, we're faced with the challenge of how to make the best use of 3 or 4 chips within the space of just 7 or 8 weeks. This kind of 'overcrowding' is not an enhancement to the game. The introduction of the additional chips this year was yet another stupid idea from our FPL overlords.

NB:  You can't rely on FPL's 'Fixture Difficulty Rating' (as in the screencap at the top of this piece) as an indicator of likely outcomes. It is only, at best, a very crude guide to the relative status of clubs. It seems to take no account of factors like the form or fitness of key players, only 'expected performance' based - initially - on last year's results. It is ludicrously slow to update its assessments, doesn't appear to have much, if any, weighting towards recent results (as it ought to), and maintains an entrenched prejudice against promoted teams, even if they're doing well (4th-placed Sunderland are still considered an 'easy' opponent for almost everyone?!). The FDR grid is a handy reminder of what the fixtures are; but you have to use your own knowledge and judgement to decide which games are actually likely to be very one-sided or very tight, and which team will be the more probable winner.

Dilemmas of the Week - Gameweek 4 (25/26)

  

Gameweek 3 (seems a long time ago now, doesn't it?) saw quite a few irksome new injuries, to add to all the other early-season uncertainties of flakey form, less-than-100% fitness, and erratic team selection that so plague us early in the season. Now, we've got to face the further imponderables of possibly disrupted line-ups and evolving tactics because of the flood of new transfers this year. Many players returning from international duty may be a little fatigued, or carrying slight knocks - yet will still turn out for their club this weekend, despite being far below their best. And, of course, there's the perennial hazard in these fixtures that many of the South American players will be rested simply because they've had such a long flight back only a couple of days before the next fixture. Plus, of course, the usual pattern of regular team training and tactical preparation has been interrupted by the two-week international break, so any form we may have thought we'd seen emerging in the opening weeks is now out of the window - and we're effectively starting the season again from scratch. And yet.... some people (rather a lot, by the look of it!) are still playing their Wildcard this week!!!  (Others, even more daft, are tossing away their Free Hit - in what is probably one of the most flakey, topsy-turvy, unpredictable weekends of the whole season - when we just don't have any confidence in exactly who's going to start, let alone who's going to play well.)

I'm trying to streamline these weekly round-ups a bit from last year, restricting myself for the most part to just the injuries etc. affecting players that are likely to have a major significance in FPL; and also, of course, only to new injuries - I figure everyone should be aware of players who've already been ruled out for some time!  

[For some years, I have found the 'Injuries & Bans' summary on Fantasy Football Scout the most reliable resource for this kind of information; although this site, Premier League Injuries, is a very good alternative (often a little quicker to update, I think - though it did go through a bit of a glitchy period for a while last year).  Go check these out for more comprehensive coverage. 

I see the Fantasy Premier League site has added an improved 'Player Availability' page this year (though hidden under 'The Scout' tab?!). That also seems to be reasonably comprehensive and up-to-date, but god knows how it's supposed to be 'organised' - maybe by 'date of injury'? Obviously, arranging it by club and alphabetical order would be more sensible; but the denizens of FPL Towers seem to have a deep aversion to the sensible.]

So, what are the conundrums we face ahead of Gameweek 4 of the new season?

Does anybody need to be moved out because of injury?

William Saliba, who had appeared to pick up a hamstring problem early in the last league game against Liverpool, was apparently just feeling too much discomfort in the ankle he'd sprained slightly in the warm-up (is deliberate misdirection on injuries via play-acting also part of Arteta's policy now?); he has done some training since, and might be straight back in this week. Martin Odegaard should definitely be back, after good performances with Norway this week. Ben White also appears to be fit again; although Jurrien Timber has done so well in his absence that he might not immediately get the start back.

Adam Smith, who'd been looking so good at right-back for Bournemouth so far this season, did pick up a hamstring problem in the last game and will be out for some weeks. That is starting to leave Bournemouth stretched a bit thin at the back, and probably undermines the team's prospects in the next few fixtures.

Liam Delap also pulled a hamstring last time out against Fulham (muscle injuries are especially common early in the season, when players are pushing themselves a bit too hard when not quite fully fit), and is expected to be out for at least 10-12 weeks. Tyrique George or Marc Guiu (hastily recalled from loan at Sunderland) might deputise for him - providing the opportunity of a very cheap starting option for the third forward slot. In brighter news, Cole Palmer rejoined training with Chelsea on Thursday on Friday, and Maresa will make a last-minute decision whether he can be used for the game against Brentford; I'd guess he'll at least get some minutes off the bench.

Adam Wharton (apparently a recurrence of the earlier problem he'd only just recovered from) and Ismaila Sarr also had to withdraw with muscle injuries in the match against Villa - though neither are apparently too serious, and it is hoped they might be back before the end of the month.

Vitaliy Mykolenko, only just back from a lengthy absence, picked up a knock while training with Ukraine and is now a doubt again. So too is talismanic attacker Iliman Ndiaye, who suffered a knock while away with Senegal and will now face a late fitness test.

Leeds's Brazilian goalkeeper, Lucas Perri, has pulled a thigh muscle, and is expected to miss the next two weeks. Karl Darlow will deputise: another 4.0-million starter in that position - although those who've gone for the option of a cheap-but-largely-worthless second keeper are probably more than happy with Martin Dubravka. Forward Joel Piroe is doubtful with a slight calf strain - although it seemed his start might be at risk from Dominic Calvert-Lewin anyway.

Curtis Jones is out for this week, at least, having picked up some sort of knock in the match against Arsenal.

Omar Marmoush injured his knee playing for Egypt this week; it doesn't seem too bad, but no definite word on a recovery timeline yet. John Stones also pulled out of the England squad with a knock - though this might have been just one of those 'avoiding international duty' scams. And Rayan Ait-Nouri has an ankle injury from the Brighton game, is likely to be out for 5 or 6 weeks. With Kovacic and Cherki out fairly long-term, and Gvardiol, Foden, and Savinho only just returning to fitness, City are looking stretched a bit thin: there is even talk of Gundogan getting a start in midfield again - which would, I think, be potentially disastrous, even against such a floundering side as Manchester United.

Matheus Cunha had to come off in the first-half against Burnley with a pulled hamstring that looked quite serious. And Mason Mount withdrew at half-time, apparently with a recurrence of his previous long-term injury - so he might also be out for quite a while. Diogo Dalot pulled a muscle in training with Portugal, so will also be missing for a week or two, Paradoxically, I think the combined effect of these absences might actually be positive. Sesko (who has been a doubt for match-fitness, but just managed two full games for Slovenia, so ought to be OK to at least start) could finally slot into the No. 9 role (which neither Cunha nor Mbeumo like or thrive in), Bruno Fernandes will presumably have to take over the 'joint 10' role from Mount, where he'll be much more effective, Amad Diallo might now get at least a short run of starts at right wing-back, where he can be transformative for the team's attacking options (although the more defensively-minded Mazraoui might be preferred against City), and Ugarte or Mainoo will have to come into central midfield to support the canny but ponderously slow Casemiro - all good. (This is what you get when you make a bunch of glamorous signings who don't really fit your needs: you try to crowbar them in, and unbalance the whole team....)

Yoane Wissa is yet another who picked up an injury while with his national team (I'm surprised he was considered fit for call-up, after keeping himself out of team training this season). Jacob Ramsey, newly signed from Villa, also picked up an injury immediately on arriving at Newcastle. On the plus side, Joelinton might be just about ready to play again, after a few weeks out with a muscle strain; and Eddie Howe has said that their other new forward signing, Nick Woltemade, could be ready to go straight away.

Ola Aina pulled his hamstring playing for Nigeria; unclear yet how serious that is.

Niclas Fullkrug is a doubt for West Ham with a slight calf strain, and Graham Potter has expressed doubts about how many minutes Callum Wilson can handle.

Jorgen Strand Larsen is suffering with a sore Achilles, and could be out for some time.

Do we have any players who are dropped, or not looking likely to get the starts we hoped for?

Oleks Zinchenko is only on loan with Forest, and so ineligible to play against Arsenal this week.

Anthony Gordon is serving the second instalment of a three-match ban.

Several players could be sidelined, or see their minutes considerably reduced, by some of the new transfer window arrivals - most notably Hugo Ekitike and/or Cody Gakpo at Liverpool (and knock-on effects through the rest of the line-up might see increased rotation between Szoboslai, Macallister, and Wirtz too). However, that shouldn't become an issue for a while: Alexander Isak clearly isn't anywhere near match-fit yet, after absenting himself from training all season; and Arne Slot has said that he can't be expected to play 90 minutes for a few weeks yet, at least. I'd be surprised if he even makes the bench this week against Burnley.

Altay Bayindir seems very likely to be replaced in goal at Manchester United by new Belgian signing, Senne Lammens, but perhaps not straight away. (And the much reviled Andre Onana has, of course, left on loan to Trabzonspor in Turkey.) 

With many of the new signings, even where their fitness is not an issue, having arrived close to - or after the start of - the international break, they've had hardly any opportunity yet to train with their new teams, and so probably aren't going to be tactically up-to-speed enough for an immediate start. 

Did anyone give other cause to consider dropping them?

Manchester City have looked so flakey thus far (even the 'comfortable' win against Wolves wasn't as comfortable as all that; the game might have swung the other way if Wolves had been able to make some of their breakaways count), and are getting so stretched by injuries that I really wouldn't fancy any of their players at the moment.

And with Crystal Palace, you have to worry how they will adapt to the loss of Ebere Eze - particularly with their two next best creative players, Wharton and Sarr, also missing at the moment. If their attacking threat evaporates, their defence is likely to come under much more pressure too - and maybe it won't hold up.

A lot of FPL managers are also panicking about how the ousting of Nuno Espiritu Santo may unsettle Nottingham Forest; and especially about the possibility that his replacement, Ange Postecoglou, will undermine their previous defensive solidity (he did rather get himself the reputation at Spurs of obstinately chasing 4-3 wins....!). The more immediate worries for me are Nikola Milenkovic, who lacks the pace to cope well with maintaining a very high defensive line, as Ange usually likes, and could either get dropped completely, or find himself often having to commit professional fouls to thwart breakaways, and risk yellow or red cards; and also Chris Wood, who's probably too old and slow to lead the vigorous high press that is also a hallmark of Ange's style. Don't say you weren't warned. However, I thnk it's ridiculously over-hasty to be dropping anyone straight away (particularly with Burnley and Sunderland up next as opponents after this week's visit to The Emirates): and players like Sels, Murillo, Aina, and Ndoye might still prove to be decent long-term holds.

And I'm a bit wary of Arsenal at the moment: they've really been pretty unimpressive so far - and with Saka and Havertz out for a while, Odegaard only just back from a short absence with a shoulder injury, White and Saliba slight doubts at the back, Gyokeres still finding his feet, and newly-arrived Eze presumably set to be replacing Martinelli (probably an overall improvement, but nevertheless disruptive in the short term), and three more tricky fixtures up next.... I wouldn't be in a rush to have any of their players for FPL.

West Ham's rather lucky win against an out-of-sorts Forest last time didn't really suggest any major turnaround in form or self-belief; and they'd still be my favourites among the established Premier League clubs to make room for one of the promoted teams to survive this time - and also favourite for an early change of manager.

Manchester United - although I fancy their prospects a little better with the likely changes of lineup forced on them by injuries this week - have looked an absolute mess so far: they have no functional central midfield, can't decide who they want to use as their wing-backs, and their expensive new forward-line just hasn't been clicking at all. I really think Amorim needs to go as soon as possible, to save them from another season of floundering in lower mid-table. Nuno's available!

And although the three promoted sides have all got off to a fairly lively start, and picked up more points than they could have anticipated, none of them have yet done enough to persuade that they're likely to be able to stay up. So, I would avoid-like-the-plague any players from Sunderland, Burnley, or Leeds.... at least for a while longer.

That really narrows the player pool down A LOT. And with so many likely favourite picks - Saka, Palmer, Cunha - out injured, we have to cast the net wide through the more 'fringe' players we might not usually consider.

In gameweeks like this, there is also aways a grave risk that South American international players will be rested, or get only short minutes, because they've had to endure such a very long flight back across the Atlantic - usually only getting back, stiff and jet-lagged, a couple of days before their next Premier League game.

Moreover, the main phase of the Champions League kicks off this week with games over Tuesday, Wednesday, and Thursday evenings, and it is likely that teams may seek to protect their most important players with limited minutes or a complete rest ahead of those. That's particularly likely for Liverpool (facing Atletico Madrid), Chelsea (v. Bayern Munich), Manchester City (v. Napoli),... and Newcastle (v. Barcelona!!).

We just don't know who's going to start, who's going to get pulled off early, or who's going to play well this week. We'll all be lucky if we have 11 starting players in our squad. It is an utterly, utterly MAD week to be playing a chip in.

Did anyone play so well, you have to consider bringing them in immediately?

Well, an awful lot of players were banging in the goals for fun in the internationals over this past week or so; but most of those fixtures were so unbalanced that that doesn't really count for much.

And Gameweek 3 is a bit too distant now - especially with hardly any club training happening since - to use as a reliable guide. Everton have been looking very good so far, particularly Ndiaye, Grealish, and Dewsbury-Hall. And Dominik Szoboszlai has been outstanding at right-back for Liverpool (he would have been my pick for 'Player of the Month' - though it actually went to Grealish), but might now perhaps be rested (with the likely return to availability of Conor Bradley and Jeremie Frimpong), or be moved back into central midfield, where he might have a more constrained role.

For the rest, we'll just have to wait and see. The week after an international break is impossible to predict, full of surprises (most of them unpleasant!).

BEST OF LUCK, EVERYONE!

The great CHIP Dilemma

This conundrum presents itself every year - In what order should we play our Free Hit and 2nd Wildcard chips?

In general, the Free Hit would seem better suited to helping you dance around the problem of a big Blank Gameweek - when many top teams, and hence many of your best players, may be missing from the action for one week only.

And the Wildcard is traditionally preserved for use just ahead of the big Double Gameweek, which usually follows close after it,... but this year, oddly, is going to precede it. (You might, of course, use your Wildcard in the Double Gameweek; but a big Double is usually a good opportunity to get the most out of the Bench Boost chip - and, since you can only use one chip per gameweek, people tend to use their Wildcard to 'set up' their squad to optimise all 15 players with the best fixtures the week before the Double so that they can use Bench Boost the following week.)

However, there's no hard-and-fast rule: you always need to stay flexible in your approach to chip play.

The optimum use of the chips in any given year will depend on how the fixtures break on those crucial weekends (do the blanks/doubles involve a lot of your players, or not?), and on the subsequent run of fixtures (do you actually want to keep most of your doublers for more than that one gameweek?).

For Gameweeks 33/34 this year, with only a small number of teams involved, and mostly not the most popular ones in FPL at the moment - it was really looking as though, for most FPL managers, you'd probably only want additional players from the doubling teams in GW33, but not thereafter (indeed, you might even want to reduce or eliminate your exposure to those teams by removing some of your long-term holds from them, because their form was stuttering or ther run-ins looked a little shakey). In contrast, many of the players you were loading up on in the subsequent Blank Gameweek 34 were not just one-week makeweights, but players coming into form and/or facing a promising final month of fixtures, players you would want to keep for the remainder of the season.

And thus.... playing the Free Hit for the double in GW33 and the Wildcard for the blank in GW34 was probably the more sensible option this time around.

It can work out either way. But it's usually very much better one way than the other - and that can be a tricky choice to make.... And the answer could be different in each year. [At least, that's how it is now - since we no longer have any truly big Blank/Double Gameweeks to worry about, as the FA Cup Quarter-Final weekend has been removed from the League programme from this year. In the past, with a really huge Blank and Double resulting from up to 8 rearranged fixtures, the case for using Free Hit to survive the BIG Blank was pretty overwhelming...]

To Free Hit, or not to....?

 

A lot of people seem to be pondering resorting to their Free Hit chip this week. Is that a good idea?

NO.

1)  You keep your Free Hit (and the second WildCard) in reserve for as long as possible, in case you might need it to deal with an unexpected emergency like a sudden multiple injury/suspension crisis (can happen at any time, but becomes more likely as the season wears on) or a last-minute postponement (of more than one game - because there are other ways of dealing with a loss of only 4, 5, 6 players...).

2)  If you're lucky enough to escape any such unexpected crises, the best use for the Free Hit - which most people plan for - is to deal with the expected crisis of a 'big' Blank Gameweek. (However, this year there is no longer a really big blank, since the FA Cup Quarter-Finals - which could potentially wipe out up to 8 EPL fixtures - no longer clash with the EPL schedule. And the newly introduced facility to store up to 5 Free Transfers also gives you much more flexibility in addressing occasional fixture speed-bumps. Hence, for many people, it might be possible to get around even Gameweek 34 - the FA Semi-Final weekend, when 3 or 4 EPL matches could be missing, and hence the occasion when most FPL managers have provisionally planned to use their FH chip - without needing the Free Hit.)

3)  If you find you don't need the Free Hit for a Blank Gameweek, or any less expected emergency, there can also be a case for using it to 'optimise' a squad for a Double Gameweek. (Indeed, many managers in the past have asserted that this is a preferable approach to using it on a Blank Gameweek; but that is a perverse delusion.)  However, as with the Blank Gameweeks, there are no longer any really 'big' Double Gameweeks in the calendar; and any Double that is 'big' enough to be worth optimising the entire squad with doubling players is more worth playing the Bench Boost on - so, the better strategy is to optimise the week before with the 2nd WildCard (if you can't do it adequately just with regular free and paid transfers). But NOTE that a Double Gameweek is really only valuable for good players/teams with good fixtures; there's no point loading up the squad with weaker players who are likely to lose twice (just because they'll get double 'appearance points'....?!).

4)  If you don't hit any unexpected crises and are able to negotiate the only two Blank Gameweeks left in the regular schedule simply with transfers... it can be quite useful to hang on to the Free Hit (and the 2nd Wildcard) to 'optimise' a team for one of the last few weeks of the season (particularly if that might help you progress in one or more of your Cup competitions).

Thus, the Free Hit is almost certainly likely to be more needful and useful in the much larger Blank Gameweek of GW34.... or the Double Gameweek(s) that spin off of that, GWs 36 and/or 33. Even those might very well be able to be navigated without needing to use a chip; in which case, it's still useful to hang on to the Free Hit for a possible emergency that may come up in the last 9 gameweeks of the season... or simply to have some fun with as a late-season 'smart bomb'.  There is NO WAY anybody should be considering using the Free Hit this early in the season, for a Blank Gameweek that involves only 4 teams.

 

Moreover, these aren't even 4 very good teams for FPL. Even Liverpool, with too much rotation in midfield, too many injuries in attack, and an overpriced defence, don't have any obvious picks apart from Mo Salah; few people have had more than two of their players at a time, and most were struggling to think of a third to bring in for their recent successive Double Gameweeks (most went for Cody Gakpo, who'd suddenly hit form; but he got injured again, so could have been relinquished before this blank weekend). Newcastle have had alarmingly yo-yo form all season, and again Isak is looking like their only must-have at the moment; Gordon's returns have been slightly disappointing this season, especially over the last few months (when he's been struggling with a few knocks, and has often looked rather tired; and now he's picked up an extended suspension....); Hall has done surprisingly well at full-back, and became a popular FPL pick... but got a season-ending injury a couple of weeks ahead of the Blank Gameweek. Palace have only recently started to come good, and still don't look strong enough to be trebled up on. And Aston Villa have struggled in the league this season, look a pretty unconvincing mid-table side (doing much better in the Champions League!): there are really none of their players that have been worth having - even for that recent Double Gameweek!

So, there was really no excuse to have ever had more than 6 or 7 players from the affected clubs; and a number of the likeliest picks have already been eliminated by injury or suspension in the last weeks before the Blank. You can carry 2 or 3 players (even 4, if one of them's a keeper) on the bench for a week (well, assuming you haven't got a terrible bench: this is why you need to keep a good bench, to give you the easy option to switch out players who are going to miss a week or two - or just face one tough fixture - without needing to burn through transfers, and possibly lose a lot of squad value on 'transfer tax' with short-term sell-and-buy-backs): and of course you'd like to hang on to players like Salah and Isak, because you'd probably lose A LOT of money on them if you sold them and immediately bought them back. Any remaining essential changes, you should be able to comfortably deal with using saved Free Transfers. 

If poor forward planning leaves you in a situation where you still have more blanking players (and other absentees through injury/suspension) than you can carry on the bench or replace with stored Free Transfers, then you have to bite the bullet and take 'hits' - pay points for extra transfers - to get around the problem. You might compromise, and consider putting out a team of only 9 or 10 players, to keep your transfer points-spend down, (It can be difficult for defenders to earn you more than 4 points.... unless you're really, really confident in their clean-sheet prospects - and that's a very precarious hope to bank on. In all other positions. however, good picks should be capable of earning you at least 4 points, hopefully 5 or 6 or more - so, taking a 'hit' to replace a non-playing first-team member, except perhaps in defence, should always be worth it.)

If, somehow, you find yourself in a really deep hole this week, you might consider instead using the 2nd Wildcard to get out of it. This chip is a bit of a luxury, something that can be held on to for emergencies, but doesn't have any compelling 'tactical' use in the way that the Free Hit does. So, although it would be preferable to be able to save it longer, there's not as much risk with using it early as there is with the Free Hit.

When to use the 2nd Wildcard?

 

Good grief - the FPL forums at the moment seem to be full of people proposing to play their 2nd Wildcard this week! Which, of course, prompts me to ask, "WHY?"

'Truisms' often irritate, because they are used over-frequently and often unthinkingly... But there are two truisms about the Wildcards that are in fact usefully TRUE.

1)  A Wildcard tends to become more valuable the longer you can hang on to it. (That's not to say the best time to use it is in the last possible week; but it certainly is worth resisting the impulse to use it early during its period of availability.)

2)  How early you use your Wildcards is usually a precise indicator how how badly you're doing in the game. (Again, that's not saying that it's always a bad decision in itself to use a Wildcard early; certainly, for the 1st one - as I've discussed before - there can be good reasons for using it early; but that does indicate that you've had a dreadful start to the season, and are needing to take drastic action to recover the situation. If you're using a Wildcard early because you absolutely have to, that's bad; if you don't absolutely have to, but you're using it early anyway, that's very, very bad.)

Using the 2nd Wildcard the instant it becomes available smacks of impatience, impulsivity, and just making changes out of boredom rather than any pressing need. Even if you don't accept the arguments in favour of keeping it for the last stages of the season (which I'll get to in a moment), there are rarely any good reasons for using it NOW. In fact, if the first half of the season has gone well for you, you might have been able to hold on to your 1st Wildcard until quite recently. I know some people who've only finally used it in GW18 or GW19. (I have much admiration and envy for them!!)

And even if you haven't Wildcarded just recently, you have had half a season to get your squad in shape. If you feel the need to make a bunch of changes now - and you really do need to - then you must have been making some terrible choices up until now.

At the beginning of the season, we're all just making blind guesses about which players and teams are going to be in the best form, and even perhaps about what team selections and tactics are going to be. It's almost inevitable that many of those guesses will turn out to be wrong, perhaps some of them disastrously wrong, and - if we avoided resorting to the remedial surgery of an early Wildcard - it may take some time to sort our squads out. But by GW19, that really should have happened. Unless we've had a lot of bad luck with injuries, we should really have had a fairly stable lineup for a month or so now (and have been giving our attention to hoarding up some spare Free Transfers!).

Occasionally, there may be a couple of factors that may prompt us to consider a very early 2nd Wildcard. These are: a rash of injuries to key players at the end of December; and/or a major 'turn' of fixtures (upcoming matches looking suddenly much harder) for a number of the big teams. Neither of those is the case this year. Saka and Bowen are the only big names to be ruled out in the last month. And only West Ham and Wolves (and, to a rather lesser extent, Bournemouth and Brentford) are facing an imminent bad fixture run; and they're not exactly major clubs.

So, what are the advantages of hanging on to the Wildcard for a later date?

i)  We're in a transfer window. Some exciting new players may enter the league; others may suddenly leave. (It's unlikely to be a particularly busy window, I think; although, you never know! Manchester City and Arsenal, and perhaps also Manchester United will probably be looking for one or two big purchases. And I really can't see the logic of getting Trent Alexander-Arnold in on a Wildcard now, when he might be leaving for Spain in a week or two...)  There really is not much point in using the Wildcard before or during this phase of transfer activity, when there are going to be a number of new options to consider in a month's time, and the possibility you might then want to make multiple changes at once. Transfer speculation also adds greatly to the uncertainty of match results in this period: players involved in negotiations may be removed from squads. Team dynamics and individuals' morale may be adversely affected by the introduction of new stars, or the loss of old ones - or merely the mooted possibility of such changes. Blowing the Wildcard now is like spending your life savings on a 'Mystery Box': you have no idea what you're getting - you just don't know how the EPL is going to play out this month, or what it's going to look like going into February.

ii)  We're still in the depths of 'the bleak midwinter'. Cold weather and insane fixture congestion at this time of year mean that there continues to be a greatly increased risk of injury over the coming month or more. And you don't really want to blow your Wildcard on bringing in a bunch of players who might become unavailable almost immediately. Of course, there is some risk of such ill fortune whenever you play it; but the risk is much higher from December through February.

iii)  The 2nd Wildcard can be very valuable in negotiating the selection challenges of the Blank Gameweeks (gameweeks with less than the full number of fixtures; some clubs not playing in that week) and Double Gameweeks (where clubs that missed out in a previous Blank Gameweek make up their postponed fixture by playing two games within one gameweek, offering you a chance of higher points from their players). Now, these are likely to be much less of a problem than they have been in the past, because we've lost two of the four regularly occurring occasions for them (the Club World Cup has been moved from December to June/July, and the FA Cup quarter-finals are now to be played on a weekend emptied of EPL fixtures); thus, we are left with only the League Cup Final (GW29; affected teams probably getting a DGW in GW33) and the FA Semis (GW34; follow-up DGW probably in GW36 or 37). Also, the new rule allowing us to hoard up to 5 Free Transfers - effectively a 'mini-Wildcard' (if we could ever manage to save that many transfers....) - could make it a lot easier to get through these bothersome chicanes this year.

However, even the relatively small interruption of the League Cup Final can be pretty devastating - if you happen to have 2 or 3 players from each of the 4 affected teams (not just the finalists themselves, but whoever they were drawn against in the League that weekend); so devastating that even if you have got 3, 4, or 5 Free Transfers in the bank, you might still not be able to get to a full eleven without taking a lot of 'hits' as well. And even if you can address this problem with Free Transfers and/or paid 'hits', you might want to use a 'makeover chip' to rebuild your squad to its regular shape immediately in the following gameweek. Alternatively, there may be circumstances where it seems better to use the Wildcard to create an 'ideal' squad for this eccentric gameweek, but structure it in such a way that you can quickly restore it to is more normal shape with transfers over the next two or three gameweeks.

The Free Hit is, naturally, the best chip to use for sorting out a one-off problem like this. But you only have one of those, and this challenge is going to present itself at least twice in the second half of our season. (Just be grateful that it's no longer four or more times in a season! The FA Quarter-Finals used to be a colossal clusterfuck....)  It might yet arise more than twice; we've already seen one fixture postponed because of high winds, and more recently several others came close to being called off because of severe fog. As I pointed out in this post on the main hazard of The New Chip, there are all kinds of things that might lead to multiple postponements on one weekend. If that should happen, it's nice - very, very, very comforting! - to have the option of using either the Wildcard or the Free Hit to deal with the gaping holes it could leave in your squad.  

The common expectation of 'chip strategy' this year is that it will probably be best to hold on to your Free Hit to get around the FA Semis in Gameweek 34. But it would be very valuable to hang on to your Wildcard at least until Gameweek 29 as a back-up option for coping with this kind of last-minute emergency.

And it is also possible - though a much rarer eventuality - that teams with a Double Gameweek also have favourable fixtures following, and thus (especially if you're also developing a high level of dissatisfaction with some members of your current squad...) it may be appropriate to drop the Wildcard in that Double Gameweek to load up on more players from these teams that are playing twice, and that you're happy to keep on afterwards.

iv)  The other prime candidate for an especially valuable use of the Wildcard late in the season has traditionally been to 'set up' optimally to exploit your Bench Boost chip in a Double Gameweek. If you play your Wildcard the week before the DGW, you can be reasonably confident of having every member of your squad being a starter, and as many of them as possible having double-fixtures (and good fixtures). It is difficult to do this just with transfers, because you don't know until a few weeks ahead who the teams involved will be. (And even if you could do it that way, it tends to be non-ideal, because you're probably moving some players out of your team much earlier than you'd like to, just to optimise for the coming double-fixture week. Again, this might be more possible this year to do in one go, through having saved up 5 Free Transfers; but it would be very tricky to pull that off.) There were only two scheduled Double Gameweeks this year (we now have a third one, thanks to the Everton v Liverpool postponement a few weeks back), rather than four, which was the common minimum until now (we'd also grown rather used to having even more additional ones occur in recent years due to things like Covid outbreaks and the death of the Queen); and only one 'big' one, the rearranged fixtures from the FA Semi-Final weekend being crammed in right before the end of the season. While I always counsel that it is very risky - for all sorts of reasons - to wait until then to play a chip,.... most experienced FPL managers will probably be planning to play their Bench Boost in that last Double Gameweek.... and their 2nd Wildcard in the week before (judging that the potentially substantial benefits of this strategy outweigh the risks).

v)  While there are very strong arguments for saving the Wildcard as a contingency for addressing possible Blank Gameweeks, or for setting up for a Bench Boost attempt in a 'big' Double Gameweek,... as I've said in regard to the 1st Wildcard, there can be no hard-and-fast rules: we always need to stay flexible in deciding how we can best use our chips. It can occasionally happen that we're clobbered with multiple injuries, suspensions, and sudden and catastrophic dips in form for key teams or players in quick succession - perhaps even in the space of just one week. And if we've also been taking a chance on carrying one or two people on the bench who we thought might be short-term injuries but turn out to be rather longer-term, and perhaps we haven't been paying enough attention to a looming turn in fixtures for two or three of the sides that we've taken the most players from... then we are indeed most royally screwed. If you suddenly find yourself with 6, 7, 8 gaps in your line-up you urgently need to fill - and you don't have many saved Free Transfers to help you out - that's when you need to consider playing your Wildcard.

vi)  So, I've outlined two reasons why it's just A BAD IDEA to play the Wildcard at the start of January, and given three more why there are likely going to be occasions later in the season when it will be far more valuable. But I'd also suggest simply considering THE ODDS: there are 19 occasions during the rest of the season when you could play this chip. You need to be really, really sure that the week you choose to play it is almost certainly going to be the best possible one. It's really hard to be that confident when there are 18 other opportunities to play it still ahead of you. It becomes a little easier, a little less stressful and uncertain with each passing week; once you get to GW28 or GW29, and there are almost as many gameweeks in which to use the chip behind you as there are still to come, it becomes more possible to make a confident determination - rather than just a wild guess. I think it is very likely that almost all of the remaining weeks of the season will offer a better opportunity to get the best out of the 2nd Wildcard than Gameweek 20 - for absolutely everyone. I am also quite certain that probably about half of them will be much better; and at least 3 or 4 of them will be much, much, much better.

vii)  And finally.... if you have - by some great good fortune - managed to sail through the second half of the season without encountering any huge injury crises or unexpected mass postponements, and if you've been able to safely navigate the expected Blank and Double Gameweeks, and even get the best out of your Bench Boost, just by using regular transfers (and perhaps the occasional 'hit').... well, good for you, you are truly blessed. Such things are very possible, from time to time; but you won't know until the end of the season.

And let me assure you, on the rare, blessed occasions when this may happen, there is no greater pleasure in Fantasy Premier League than being able to drop an unexpected, unused Wildcard - or Free Hit! - as a late-season 'smart-bomb' to get you through a tricky final (or perhaps even the semi-, or quarter- ) against a bitter rival in the 'Cup' competition of one of your mini-leagues. Honestly, that possibility alone always makes it worth thinking twice - and thrice, and four times! - about using the 2nd Wildcard for anything else earlier on!

So, in summary, if you are thinking of playing your 2nd Wildcard in Gameweek 20 - What is wrong with you, are you completely BATSHIT INSANE??  PLEASE, DON'T DO IT!!!

And DON'T FORGET The Boycott:

#QuitFPLinGW23         #DownWithTheNewChip