Just because you CAN, it doesn't mean you SHOULD

 

This applies particularly to transfer decisions in FPL: even if you feel there's a really pressing need to use a transfer to make a change right now, there's very likely to be an even more valuable use of it a little later on. Being able to use 2 or more transfers at once can be enormously powerful in expanding the scope of your possible changes and allowing major reallocations of budget.

But this doesn't apply only when using 1 or 2 transfers; it's just as true when making multiple changes at once. You need to be really, really sure that they are all immediately essential - because they're almost certainly not! The possibility of saving some of them for a further multiple change a little later on should not be overlooked.

We are seeing a particularly striking instance of this phenomenon just at the moment, because of the FPL Gnomes' over-generous - pointless - Early Christmas Gift of extra free transfers (supposedly to help tide us over AFCON: a very minor problem for which such additional help is completely unnecessary), so that we all now have a full complement of 5 saved transfers.

Many FPL managers have immediately blown the whole lot in one fell swoop. As I have commented recently on a few of the forums: Some of these extra transfers will almost certainly be more useful at some point in the future. Unlike the first Wildcard (and the extra Free Hit we've been given for the first time this year), this AFCON 'mini-Wildcard' has no time-limit, it can be rolled forward indefinitely... into the next half of the season. 

And keeping at least 1 or 2 of these transfers short-term, to cover a possible winter injury crisis or bad weather postponement, would be more valuable than an immediate splurge of impulse shopping. The thing that saves most people from over-indulging in chasing last week's points through silly 'sheep picks' is that they only have 1 or 2 transfers to use at a time. Doling out 5 at once was an especially inventive piece of cruelty from the FPL Gnomes, a damaging temptation that will just lead a lot of people into making rash and needless changes.

Using up 2 or 3, or maybe even 4 of these windfall transfers straight away would have been fine; but not keeping at least 1 or 2 of them in hand for a rainy day (or a snowy one, or a windy one...), literal or metaphorical, is likely to end in regrets.

And of course, the problem with choosing instant gratification over the delayed alternative is that we know rationally that the delayed gratification will be better for us,... but we can't resist the emotional satisfaction of indulging ourselves right now.

This is a hazard in FPL with playing the Bonus Chips as well: it is very easy to drop them on the first vaguely promising fixture that comes along. But the further into the season you get, the surer you can feel about your players' form and prospects (whether your preferred Triple Captain candidate, or your entire team/squad for the Bench Boost), and about the likely form of all the clubs and the likely outcome of their fixtures. And the nearer you get to the end of the window of availability of use for a chip, the more confident you can be that there are unlikely now to be many - or any - better options in which to play it in the future. Picking an optimum gameweek in which to use a Bonus Chip is very, very difficult; but it's almost never going to be in the opening month or two of the season.

Try to learn the value of waiting....

A bad outcome does not mean it was a BAD DECISION

 

FPL managers have an unfortunate tendency to judge their decisions - and everyone else's - only by the points outcomes that follow from them.

But exact points outcomes are unpredictable, very largely a matter of luck: unknowable before the event.

Therefore, they offer no help to you in refining your decision-making process. And only by doing that, can you hope to improve at the game - and gain more satisfaction in it.

If you were careful, thorough, open-minded and self-aware, and above all well-informed in your deliberations about a selection decision - then it was a good decision, the best decision you could have made in the circumstances.... regardless of the outcome. THAT is all that matters.

Some 'good decisions' in FPL don't pay off; some can turn out wretchedly badly. It doesn't mean they were 'bad decisions'. Whereas many selections that are made hastily, impulsively, based on sentiment or superstition, made in disregard of contrary data or more promising alternative options,.... can produce big points returns: that does not retroactively make them 'good' decisions. They were terrible decisions.... that got undeservedly LUCKY.

It is the quality of the decision-making process, not its ultimate outcome, that is important.

Many will object, "But, oh, how can you say the outcomes are not important? The game is all about how many points you get!"  Yes, indeed. But the thing here is that we have to believe there is ultimately some justice in the game (and there is; not as much as we'd like, but some) and that good decision-making will, over the long run, be more rewarded than bad, impulsive, ill-informed decision-making.

So, you should concentrate on the process. If you become more self-aware about how you make your decisions, you start making better decisions. And better decisions, over time, mostly will produce better results.

If you just make wild bets, chase hunches, follow 'sheep' trends, back your favourite player even when their form has tanked, or succumb to believing in daft superstitions like "Haaland always scores on a Tuesday!" or whatever,.... you might do well occasionally; but you'll never get any better.

In fact, letting yourself get over-excited about poor decisions that brought improbably good results can lead you into further bad habits. That is something you need to be very wary of. All superstitions grow out of doing something dumb that worked once. And all superstitions are ultimately BAD.

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.]

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.]

Another way of looking at LUCK in FPL

 

Following on from my comments the oher day about the perils of over-confidence, I want to make a further observation about how we should view our LUCK in this game.

In Tuesday's post, I pointed out that if our self-confidence in regard to our FPL decisions were what cognitive psychologists call 'well-calibrated', it would correspond exactly to the probability of the outcomes we were betting on with those choices. But there are so many variables at play in a game like football that no one game event ever has anything like a 100% probability; in fact, with there usually being multiple potential outcomes to any situation, very few of them can properly be said to have anything near even a 50/50 chance of happening. [Even an absolutely 'ever-present' player can.... catch a cold, break his toe in the shower on match-day morning, wrap his sports car around a lamp-post, have a row with his manager or his girlfriend.... No-one, absolutely NO-ONE has a 100% probability of even starting a game, let alone of achieving any particular points-outcome in it.]

We should never presume to know what a player is going to do in a game. The best we can hope for is to formulate a fairly reasonable projection of his range of likeliest points-outcomes.

And then we have to try to judge what the median likelihood return is on that spectrum of expected possible returns.

Now, it is always more likely that a player will only perform at the lower-end of that scale - or perhaps even have an unexpectedly disastrous week and return well below even his lowest predicted outcome. A disappointing - or, sometimes, outright terrible - return is almost invariably a far more likely outcome than some kind of very big points haul. Thus, the median point of a player's projected most likely returns for the gameweek will not be in the middle, but skewed quite significantly towards the lower end of the range.

Now, of course, as I observed in that post on Tuesday, if a player does really, really well for us, we always like to convince outselves that we absolutely foresaw this - with perfect confidence - and are thus absolutely deserving of all the points we receive. But in fact, even a middling points return is usually at least a little bit above what would have been a reasonable median outcome, and you should be very happy with any such returns. Every really big haul you get is well above what you could reasonably have expected as a return on this basis; every really big haul is, to a significant degree, 'LUCKY'.

Our results in this game are not earned 100% by merit. We should be more ready to acknowledge our debts to good fortune and the caprices of Fate, to cultivate an attitude of humility and gratitude when we enjoy really big points returns - rather than constantly trying to deceive ourselves into believing that such a result was entirely deserved.

The vice of OVER-CONFIDENCE

 

I've referrred to Derek Muller's consistently thought-provoking science channel, Verittasium, on the blog before - here and here.

His latest post last week was on the unfortunate human predilection towards being massively - and inappropriately - confident about our beliefs all the time. 

He starts by touching on the notorious Dunning-Kruger Effect (which identifies the tendency for less 'knowledgeable' or 'competent' people to most drastically over-estimate their abilities in self-evaluations), but goes on to discuss how EVERYONE tends to be massively over-confident - even when making a guess about a problem that we really don't know the answer to - and explains the concept of 'calibration', meaning the correlation between the confidence we have in our beliefs or predictions and their accuracy.

Playing FPL, of course, is a classic case of having to constantly make intelligent predictions of events in the football world that we can't actually know the outcomes of in advance; we are just making guesses about problems we don't know the answer to.

And such events in football all come with a high degree of uncertainty: even the great Erling Haaland, even when he's on such a great run of form as he has been so far this season, cannot be relied upon to always get a big haul against a 'weaker' opponent, nor indeed can he be relied upon to score at all in every single game.

'Calibration', in this sense, means that our confidence in a particular outcome should correlate exactly to its probability. 

Therefore, if our guessing was 'well calibrated', we wouldn't ever feel much more than 60% or 70% confident that Haaland, even in the form of his life, was going to score in any given game, and should never really be more than about 50% confident - or anywhere near that! - of him notching a brace; and confidence in him returning a hattrick cannot ever be more than a very, very low percentage - it is just too rare and unpredictable an event, even for a player like him (especially when Pep so often subs him off early!). 

And yet, somehow, we always seem to end up professing near-100% confidence in such predictions. That is a dangerous INSANITY.

It probably arises from our desire to feel good about ourselves all the time, and to look good in front of others. Anxiety about future outcomes, and doubt about the accuracy of our decisions are uncomfortable feelings, something we seek to suppress. And we imagine that other people will be more impressed by us, and be more likely to be swayed by our opinions if we express them with absolute assurance. Hence, once we've made a decision, we immediately reassure ourselves that it must - absolutely definitely - be correct, and that we can place near-100% confidence in it. But that just ain't so - EVER.

There are, I think, FOUR supplementary vices which follow on from this tendency to be over-confident in our choices.  1) It hurts harder, makes our disappointment and dissatisfaction all the sharper when we happen to be 'wrong'.  2) It makes us more stubborn: the disproof of an idea we had become so confident of, and so emotionally invested in, undermines our sense of self, and we struggle to accept that; the powerful impulse of denial drives us into thoughts such as, "I might have been wrong this week, but I'm bound to be right next time!" and into sticking by bad picks longer than we should.  3) It makes us less self-reflective, more resistant to the possibility of change in the short-term as well. (Many FPL decisions, such as the captaincy choice, playing a chip, the starting lineup and bench order, can be changed without cost within the gameweek, right up until the deadline. And late-breaking news might often give good cause to do so. But once we've made our choices for the week, we tend to be very reluctant to revisit them - for any reason.)  And 4) It makes us less grateful for our good fortune: when we get a great haul from a player, we always like to think, "I predicted that, I knew that was going to happen: I completely deserve every single point of that improbably huge return!"  Hmm, NO, you don't; you got LUCKY.

We would be much better off - certainly happier in our playing of the game, and probably more successful too (though these two things should not be inextricably correlated) - if we could break away from this habit of always wanting to be believe that we are absolutely correct in our decisions, that we know what the best FPL picks for the week are going to be. We don't; we're just guessing.

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.

Unlucky Alf revisited

Last week, I noticed one of my regular antagonists had been having a hard time of it in FPL lately, and had suffered a particularly abysmal Gameweek 10. I commented that there didn't actually seem to be anything amiss with his squad, and I hoped that he would have the fortitude to stick by his selections and not rush into a lot of panicky changes.

And look at this - he put out the same team in Gameweek 11, and enjoyed markedly different fortune. That's the way this game goes: some weeks, you're lucky, some weeks, you're not.

 

This time out, despite having again picked the 'wrong' captain, and getting disappointing returns from Calafiori and Szoboszlai (with perfect foresight, he could have had a few more points off his bench),.... he managed nearly twice the global average; that lifted him into the top 22,000 for the week, and probably put him top of most of his mini-leagues. 

That was nearly 11.5 million places higher than his miserable GW10 ranking - surely one of the biggest week-to-week swings ever recorded.

This example is a powerful illustration of the point I always try to stress about Fantasy Football: you have to avoid being too reactive, to resist being swayed by your emotions. When you have a bad week, you have to try to calmly analyse why it's gone badly for you - before you decide to make any changes. Often, there's nothing wrong with your selections at all; you just had a week where everything broke against you.

Even in a pretty good week, you usually have at least 3 or 4 of your starting eleven who will 'blank'; quite often, there may be 5 or 6 who fail to bring you a return. And - Statistics being the Cruel Mistress that she is - that means that you're occasionally going to have a week where almost everyone fails to produce any worthwhile points. It doesn't mean they're bad selections; you just had an unlucky week. Hang tough - and next week will probably be better; maybe a lot better!

Treble-up Arsenal defence??

 

Well, a lot of people are talking about that idea now.

And we do seem to be facing a unique situation where - at least for now - Arsenal are really looking like they might keep a clean sheet almost every week (and could perhaps shatter Chelsea's long-standing record for the most in a season?!), while all the other leading contenders have been showing worrying defensive vulnerabilities.

And not only are Arsenal's defenders looking likely to do far better from clean sheets than any other team, they're also looking amongst the strongest prospects for attacking contributions too (particularly Gabriel, who is currently wreaking havoc as the main target man in the opposition box at corners and free-kicks). They might not often do so well on the new 'defensive points', as they're usually dominating possession too well to need to win the ball back and break up opposition attacks very often (though, again, Gabriel in particular has often posted some very good numbers for 'defensive contributions').

So, if Arsenal's defenders really do look likely to produce much better FPL points than any other defenders (at the moment), why not have THREE of them?

Well, there are a number of reasons:

1)  Failure to spread risk.  It's generally a bad idea to take too many players from one team, and especially in the same position on the field. While Arsenal, at the moment, are generally the most likely team to preserve a clean sheet, they are never going to be the only team that does so in any gameweek. And certain defenders in other teams might occasionally offer better points returns in other categories. While having 2 or 3 Arsenal defenders will serve you very well whenever they do keep a clean sheet, it might not always be the optimal FPL lineup even when that happens; and when they don't, you could be very hard hit. Remember a couple of years ago - Virgil Van Dijk got himself sent off for 'a denial of a goalscoring opportunity' foul in the opening minutes, and Liverpool ended up losing a game they had been expected to win comfortably. Shit happens. If shit like that happens to Arsenal, being trebled-up on their defence would be very bad news. And an unexpected postponement, due to bad weather or whatever (as happened last year with the first Merseyside derby at Anfield), could also be devastating. The one thing you can generally rely on with FPL is that if you leave yourself exposed to the cruelties of Fate, Fate will be cruel to you!

2)  It's dangerous to bet on clean sheets. They can evaporate so easily. And no-one - not even the best defence in the league (and I'm not going to argue that Arsenal aren't that) - keeps a clean sheet every week. In fact, even the best defences don't usually manage a clean sheet more than once every two games across the season. Arsenal have just enjoyed a somewhat freakish run of success - helped by a very easy run of fixtures - and it is very likely that their defensive returns will falter slightly before long.

3)  Lack of rotation options.  Arsenal might face a Blank Gameweek at some point. And there will be some fixtures in which you don't want to play all - or any - of their defensive players in your starting lineup. Away to City or Liverpool, or any other good team that's hit a run of hot goalscoring form,... you don't want to be betting on clean sheets. You can very easily find yourself short of defenders if you rely so heavily on one team.

4)  Lack of flexibility.  As I said in my post last week about David Raya being a bad pick, you really want as often as possible to leave yourself the option of bringing in a third player from any high-performing side at an opportune moment; limiting yourself to only 2 players per club most of the time makes it easy for you to bring in a third whenever someone starts hitting a really hot streak of form.

5)  Ignoring the attacking options.  Especially with a title-chasing side, it is very likely that some of their forwards or midfielders will also have a strong claim to inclusion in your squad - at least for certain phases of the season. Is a third Arsenal defender often - regularly, always - going to give you a better points-lift over another defender than, for example, Saka or Trossard or Eze might over another midfielder?

So,.... there is a very strong case at the moment for taking 2 Arsenal defenders: though even that is a bold, risky strategy that is only justified in rare circumstances. But going for 3 is unnecessary,... completely bloody crazy.

And, although goalkeepers should not be 'confused' with defenders (a sadly common vice in FPL-land), since the scoring system for them is notably different, and the competitive landscape of comparison with rival picks is very different too,... well, here it is legitimate to include David Raya in the equation as well. It is undesirable to take more than 2 players from the Arsenal defence (whether that is Raya + another defender, or Gabriel + another defender). In fact, as I argued in that earlier post, it is undesirable to take Raya at all, as he won't get nearly so much benefit as his defenders from a large number of clean sheets, and probably won't outscore the other top keepers by much, if anything.

But yes, just at the moment, it is looking.... not quite 'essential', but very, very appealing to have 2 Arsenal defenders.

Sheep Picks (16)

I quite often snipe at 'The Sheep' element among Fantasy Premier League managers - by which I mean the substantial numbers (possibly, alas, an overall majority) who don't really understand FPL that well, or even follow the EPL that closely, and so make most of their decisions based on an impulsive reaction to last week's results... and/or at the promptings of FPL's own vapid pundit 'The Scout' or the many similarly unimaginative 'influencers' out here on the Internet.... or indeed just following whatever seems to be a popular pick being mentioned a lot in online discussion forums. This often coalesces into a kind of collective hysteria - where the HUGE numbers of managers rushing in to buy a certain player bears no relation to his true worth, his likely points potential over the next handful of games. The player in question might not be at all bad (though often he is); but he is not the irresistible bargain, the must-have asset that so many people seem to think

Hence, I created this occasional series of posts highlighting players I think are dangerously over-owned, are the subject of a sudden and misguided enthusiasm.

Yep,  in Gameweek 10, I find myself going for another goalkeeper (after nominating Nick Pope as a weird pick in this series a couple of weeks back). And many of the arguments against Pope are the same as those against Raya, or indeed against any keeper from a top club; and I already went through them in that earlier post.

Raya was already by far the most popular goalkeeper pick this year (well, apart from Martin Dubravka - who, as the only 4-million-pound starter in the position, is almost everyone's favourite back-up option); but he's continuing to gain new owners - with another 150,000 coming on board for him this week. And that really makes no sense.

1)  Raya might be 'the best goalkeeper in the league' - but that doesn't necessarily mean anything for FPL.  Great players don't always earn huge FPL points. (I think Pickford and Alisson still have a little bit of an edge over him in their consistency and all-around impact. But he's certainly 'in the conversation' as one of the best few, an absolutely outstanding keeper - who might help Arsenal to the title this year. But thoughts like that can lead to sentimentality and clouded thinking: it doesn't matter how 'good' he is, or how well his team is doing, unless that translates directly into Fantasy points - and with goalkeepers, it very rarely does.)

2)  Raya is not going to be the year's leading FPL goalkeeper. I am usually very wary of making hard-and-fast predictions; but I feel fairly confident in making that one. Despite an exceptionally strong run of results so far, and even a good number of saves in the early games (and that's another issue: we have almost certainly seen 'peak Raya' already, and his average returns-per-game will decline from here on), he's trailing Robin Roefs, tied with Nick Pope, not far ahead of Petrovic and Vicario, and being rapidly caught up in recent weeks by Donnarumma, Lammens, and Emi Martinez. Over the season, you'd probably fancy Pickford and Henderson to overhaul him as well, and possibly a few others too - the likes of Kelleher, Sanchez, Sels, and Leno.

3)  Goalkeepers tend not to give you much of a 'differential advantage' over their position rivals. Even if Raya does end up as the top-returning FPL keeper this season, it probably won't be by very much of a margin over his closest competitors. You'll almost certainly get more of a points advantage by taking a second (and maybe, some people currently feel, even a third...!) Arsenal defender rather than the goalkeeper.

4)  It is 'saves' points, and the Bonus Points that come with them (keepers rarely get in Bonus Point contention for a clean sheet alone), that differentiate goalkeeper performance - rather than the number of clean sheets. Despite an unusually strong start to the season in this respect, with 7 saves credited to him in the opening game at Old Trafford, Raya has only managed 9 more saves in the 8 games since, and has crashed out of the Top 12 for the number of saves; Roefs, Dubravka and Sels have recorded twice as many. His Bonus Points total is likewise a very modest 3 points so far; almost all the top keepers have now managed 2 or 3 Bonus Points - but Robin Roefs is way out in front with 6 points. Arsenal are so good defensively at the moment that David Raya doesn't look likely to earn points for anything except clean sheets - and that is not enough to make him a top FPL keeper pick.

5)  If Arsenal rack up a huge clean sheet total, that will be more of an advantage to their defenders. The remarkable record of 24 clean sheets set in Mourinho's first season at Chelsea has stood for 20 years now, and will probably stand for a lot longer. In recent years, it has been rare for many teams even to approach achieving 1 clean sheet in every 2 games across the season: 12-15 clean sheets is usually a very good total for the top defensive sides. However, Arsenal are currently at least looking favourites to be well out in front for keeping the most clean sheets this year, and they might have a chance of getting above 20 for the season. If they manage that, all of their defenders might have as many as 5 or 6 more clean sheets than any other defender. (Of course, Raya will also have that advantage over every other keeper, and that's presumably what all his FPL owners are getting so excited about. But for him, it is of less significance, because he is likely to do so poorly from saves and Bonus Points.)  All of their defenders are likely to pick up more Bonus Points than Raya (because they rack up consistent BPS credit from being on the ball so much during build-up play), they will sometimes get an extra lift from the new 'defensive points' (in games like the Manchester United one, where they find themselves under the cosh for long periods; it probably won't happen to them all that often, but, when it does, it will still give their defenders more extra points than Raya is likely to be earning from saves), and all of the Arsenal defenders currently look quite likely to chip in a good number of attacking contributions too - because one or both of the full-backs frequenly push forward to support the attacking line, and the centre-backs are the main target men at their highly productive set-piece routines. Any Arsenal defender who starts regularly looks likely at the moment to significantly outscore almost any other defender at any other club; Raya does not look likely to outscore all the other goalkeepers.

6)  With a top side, you must weigh the 'opportunity cost' of going without one of their outfield players. This is the ultimate reason why it is almost never a good idea to take a keeper from one of the title-chasing clubs. In addition to the superior claims of any/all of Arsenal's defenders over Raya, you also have to consider whether you might want Bukayo Saka at some point in the season (almost certainly!). or Declan Rice, who is looking like he might be the most consistent provider in the 'cheap 5th seat' midfield slot. And they have a number of other players who might be worth considering if they hit a patch of hot form: Trossard, Martinelli, Eze, Havertz, Gyokeres. You might indeed want to keep one of your 'Arsenal slots' open for such an eventuality, limit yourself to taking just 2 of their players most of the time, so that you can always easily bring in a third pick whenever you choose to. That flexibility, in itself, could be worth going without Raya.

7)  There's also a price/value-for-money issue with Raya, or any top-price keeper. There's not only an 'opportunity cost' measured against other players you might pick instead within the Arsenal club quota, there's one with other players you might pick within the overall budget allocation. You almost always (no - always) get a bigger points-lift per 100k spent from the outfield positions, especially goalscoring midfielders. Therefore, it never makes sense to go for one of the premium-priced goalkeepers when any of the alternatives half a million or a million cheaper have a decent chance of at least getting somewhere near their points total.

I really do not have anything against David Raya. I think he's an absolutely superb keeper (he was a mainstay of my squad when he started out with Brentford a few years ago). And he is assuredly odds-on to win the Golden Glove this year. But for FPL, he really is quite a terrible choice of goalkeeper.

It might not be readily apparent just how bad a pick he is; particularly if he manages to stay up near the top of the goalkeeper points rankings. But however well he may do, it is absolutely certain that other Arsenal defenders - and perhaps also Saka or another of their attacking players, when in peak form - would have done even better for you if you'd chosen them instead.

'Ideal' time to use a Wildcard?

 

Well, of course, a lot of people already blew their first Wildcard early in the season (which can be a legitimate choice - but only if you've got off to a really, really bad start; and most FPL managers have no idea of what truly constitutes such a really, really bad start). And an awful lot more have chosen to use it over the current international break (which is also a stratagem with something to recommend it - and I should probably do a little post just on that at some point).

However, in an ideal world, you would:

a)  Save it as long as possible - because the longer you wait, the more sure you are that you need to use it. (And also, of course, you are running out of later - possibly better - opportunities to use it as you approach its expiry date!)

b)  Save it for a real emergency - such as being hit with 5 or 6 injuries or suspensions in the same week. (It can happen!)

c)  Save it for a gameweek when it is likely to have the most impact for you, because - regardless of the form of particular teams or players - it is quite likely that you might want to make a lot of changes to your squad because of a 'turn' in the fixtures: a significant shift in fixture-difficulty from 'mostly bad' to 'mostly good' (or vice versa!) for a number of teams, all happening at around the same time. Such a 'turn' usually occurs at least once or twice in each half of the season. But, of course, your interpretation of how dramatic such a 'turn' may be - or whether it properly counts as one at all - will be affected by relative swings in form between teams. So, you can't predict with absolute confidence at the start of the season when the most important 'turns' in fixture-difficulty will occur (although a lot of people try to).

Now, in the first half of the season this year, we see that there's potentially quite a major 'turn' around Gameweeks 10 and 11.

Bournemouth, after challenging assignments in their next two away games, face a little run of much softer opponents, starting with Aston Villa in GW11. Chelsea are already in a pretty good run (nothing much to fear apart from that game against Arsenal at the end of November - and at least that's at home), but things get even easier after their away game at Spurs in.... GW11. Crystal Palace have a great run almost all the way through to the end of the year from GW10 onwards, after they've got their visit to Arsenal out of the way. Everton could take a battering in their next two against City and Spurs, but then have 6 much more inviting fixtures, starting in GW11. Liverpool are already in a dream of a sequence, with away games against City and Spurs their only likely speed-bumps between now and the end of the year. Manchester United are away to Liverpool this weekend, but might fancy their chances of starting a revival with the fairly kind run of fixtures they have starting from GW9 (and, given how bad they've been so far this season, most FPL managers are probably going to want to wait a week or two to see such a turnaround clearly starting to happen, before they move in for any United players).

As 'turns' go, it's not perhaps especially dramatic; but it's definitely there - and it's really the only one we've got to look forward to in this first half of the 2025-26 season. So, if you fancy pivoting towards more players from these teams with suddenly improving fixtures,.... it might be nice to make a whole raft of changes all at once, round about Gameweek 10. If you still have your Wildcard, that is.

These are the kinds of things you have to watch out for in choosing when to play a Wildcard - rather than just reaching for it as a comfort blanket the first time your team has a bad weekend.

When to use the 'Triple Captain' (2)

FPL Legends 

Yesterday, I found myself writing a long and thorough debunking of the dangerous myth that the Triple Captain chip always works best in a Double Gameweek. (It can do, it does sometimes; but historically, Single Gameweeks far more often produce the season-best returns for the handful of top players you'd consider playing the TC chip on.)

The key general takeaway from that post was that you usually only want to consider one of a few really exceptional players for your Triple Captain pick: someone who quite often scores more than just one goal (especially against weaker opponents!), someone who may reach double-digits multiple times a season, someone who usually reaches high double-digits at least a few times a season. Only Salah and Haaland regularly fall into this category; although Palmer, Foden, and Saka have often shown the potential to start rivalling them; and a few others - Bruno Fernandes, Mbeumo, Cunha (pity they all play for still-dreadful Manchester United; but even there, they may hit a run of form at some point...), or Isak - may occasionally be worth considering, if they're on a hot streak. (Really, no-one is sensibly going to take a bet on something like Madueke profiting from a trio of Palmer assists, or Kluivert converting three penalties in the same game - as we saw for two of the best hauls of last season!)

So, the choices for who you can use the chip on are very limited. Often, there might be only one or two really obvious candidates; in your squad, there might be only one.

At the moment, of course, Haaland is the standout possibility. But his early season form has been exceptionally strong - while just about no-one else's has been. That's bound to change sooner or later.

And as I observed in this post the other week, it is generally better to go for a suitable midfielder in preference to a forward - because they get more points for the same level of game contribution: it's easier for them to reach double-digits, and they have a much stronger possibility of gaining a really high score.

So long as they do in fact have a top game, of course. A forward in great form and with a great fixture can still be a good bet. But a top goalscoring midfielder in great form with a great fixture is even better. (This year, so far, it's looking ominously as if we might not have any midfielders hit that sort of points form. But I remain, for now, optimistic that we will see some emerge eventually.)

Double Gameweeks can still be appealing: they sometimes come up at short notice, and relatively early in the season - as happened with Liverpool and Mo Salah getting their first match against Everton postponed because of high winds last year, giving them a unique additional Double Gameweek at the start of February. If you know your Triple Captain choice is in superb form, and you know what the double-fixture is going to be, and they're both opponents he should be able to score against,... and we're not yet in the end-of-season weeds with big European or domestic cup games cluttering the schedule and unacceptably increasing the risk of fatigue/injury/rotation or just wobbles in form for our top players - then, a Triple Captain play on that Double Gameweek is probably a good move.

But the regular Double Gameweeks - now only two, involving only a small number of teams, and coming at the very back-end of the season, amid a crowded schedule of make-or-break games - are not a good prospect for the Triple Captaincy.

I invited the scorn and derision of the masses by querying whether it was a good idea to play the Triple Captain chip on Haaland this past weekend against Burnley. Big Erling got a huge haul in the game; but it was highly fortuitous (two uncharacteristic 'errors leading to goals' in added-on time at the end of the game gifting him a brace - when he hadn't really done that much in the rest of the game!!).

Although I wasn't lucky in anticipating the outcome there (and I didn't say he wouldn't have a good game; merely that I thought both he and some other players might have better ones later in the season - and they still might), my basic points were still sound.

1) Form (both the team's and the individual's) and fitness are key.

(Haaland appeared a slightly risky pick for this weekend because he'd been complaining of a back problem at the start of the week. And back problems, although often 'trivial' and quick to resolve, can be particularly dangerous because they so inhibit and distort your usual range of movement - making it more likely that you can pick up other injuries if you play or train again before you've fully shaken them off. Moreover, City haven't yet really found their groove, they're still often looking vulnerable, even against quite weak teams like Wolves; and Burnley themselves were well in the game for the first hour or so, nearly took the lead shortly after half-time. In a few more weeks, City as a whole might be looking much more formidable - and might be creating a lot more chances for Erling, rather than relying on the opponents to create them for him.)

2)  As far as possible, you want to target the weakest possible opponent for playing the TC chip.

(Again, I didn't think that was Burnley. They have their weaknesses, sure, and will probably struggle to stay up. But their defence - and their keeper - are actually pretty good. City are facing Leeds and West Ham quite soon; I thought they would probably offer more tempting opportunities for Haaland to enjoy a big day. )

3)  Goalscoring midfielders have a higher points-potential than forwards.

(Yes, even the goal-freak Haaland. He's rarely FPL's 'Player of the Week' even when he does produce a really big haul.)

4)  It's still a bit early to be playing any of the chips, since nobody's form has settled down yet - and we're still gettting a lot unpredictable results.

(If we do live in a multiverse, there's a significant percentage of the other realities where Burnley actually won that game, or at least toughed out a draw. And possibly a majority of them where Haaland blanked, or only nabbed a solitary goal. 

There was an unusually large amount of transfer activity adding to the usual early-season chaos this year. That, combined with a lot of early injury issues to top players, and the interruption of an early international break, meant that the season effectively didn't 'start' until Gameweek 4. And it probably won't be until about GW8 or 9 that we really start to form confident and stable impressions of what's going on in the Premier League this year.)

These simple principles lead to the conclusion that the Triple Captain chip (like the Bench Boost) is best played opportunistically - whenever a prime candidate for the captaincy is fit and in tip-top form, and so are his team, and are facing what looks like a vulnerable opponent.

The form and fitness of teams ebbs and flows through the seeason. Just automaically betting against the promoted sides won't necessarily work: all three of them are looking much tougher propositions this year than any of their recent predecessors. And even the weakest of relegated sides in the last few seasons have usually managed at least a short run of games somewhere where they managed to play quite well. Likewise, even the top sides almost always suffer a bit of a stutter in form somewhere along the line. And, of course, your Triple Captain candidate may pick up an injury, or suffer a dip in form, just as his 'most favourable' fixture approaches. Shit happens.

You can highlight at the start of the season what you think are likely to be the most promising opponents that Haaland or Salah - or Foden or Saka or whoever - may face. But you shouldn't let yourself get too rigidly set on those early ideas. You need to stay flexible: your man's easiest game of the season can quite often crop up as a complete surprise.

And you need to be cautious about succumbing to the impulse to play the Triple Captain chip at the first tempting opportunity that presents itself, because there are almost sure to be other, better ones a bit later on. 

This year, a GW6 punt on Haaland happened to work out very nicely. But most years, it won't. And it might still prove not to have been the optimal Triple Captain play for this half of the season.

When to use the 'Triple Captain'? (1)

 

One of the most trenchantly beloved myths in FPL is that you can only play your Triple Captain bonus chip in a Double Gameweek.

Now that we have been given two of this chip this year, with the first only available for use until the end of December, that factor is immediately removed from consideration for that first chip - because we're (almost certainly) not getting any Double Gameweeks in the first half of the season.

However, even for the second one, which we now must use in the second half of the season, when the Double Gameweeks traditionally occur (though we'll probably only get two of them this year, and rather small ones...), that policy can be dangerously misguided. It certainly involves quite a big risk.

The myth seems to be founded on the logic that a player must inevitably score more points if he's playing twice. But that is obviously not a necessary truth. Furthermore, I suspect that for most people it is founded on the greedy delusion that a top player can - and will, at least with a beguilingly high degree of probability - secure a double-digit haul in both legs of the DGW, thereby securing a haul for the Triple Captain chip of 20+ points!

In fact, for a long time, Wayne Rooney - in his youthful prime, over a decade-and-a-half ago - was the only player ever to have pulled off that trick of securing double-digits in both games of a double-fixture week. Admittedly, Jean-Philippe Mateta also managed it (out-of-the-blue - completely unexpected by just about everybody) a couple of seasons ago. But this feat has, in the long history of FPL, looked like a once-in-a-decade (at most!) aberration. And that was during a period when we had more and bigger double gameweeks than we do now. So, if that's what you're hoping for in waiting to punt your Triple Captain chip on a Double Gameweek - think again.

But perhaps, the myth-worshippers will object, even if a player can't return a big score in two successive games, he might at least be more likely to produce one really big score if he has two chances to do so?

Well, there might be something in that... Not much, but something. If you look at a list of the biggest gameweek hauls in the game's history, that lad Rooney is indeed at the top of it with 32 points for that double double-digit performance. And most of the following handful of top performers also benefitted from Double Gameweeks - but not all of them: in fact only 6 out of the top 10 gameweek hauls were produced with the help of a double-fixture. And that's because it's very, very difficult to get above 20 points in a Single Gameweek, and just about impossible to get above 25 points. But as soon as you get down to 25 or 26-point weekly totals (and a couple of players have done better than that from a Single Gameweek), the Single Gameweek returners immediately become the great majority. We have in recent seasons seen players like Mo Salah and Cole Palmer (and even Noni Madueke last year - with some Palmer assists!) get some very big scores from Single Gameweeks.

Moreover, a lot of those players who did tremendously well from a Double Gameweek were real randoms: defenders, or midfielders who'd been out injured for a while, or forwards at less fashionable clubs - the kind of players that no-one would have been likely to play their prized TC chip on. 

Realistically, most FPL managers - with good reason (I shall have a little more to say on this tomorrow) - are only likely to play the TC chip on an exceptional player like Salah or Haaland (or maybe Son or DeBruyne or Kane, in the past; and in recent years, Palmer and perhaps, at least occasionally, Saka and Foden have also come into the reckoning): players who, when they're really in form, seem capable of getting a double-digit haul quite regularly, and who can be usually be relied on to produce at least a few really big hauls each season.

And if you look at the record of players like these, their best returns of the season (and, very often, their second and third and fourth best too!) have almost always come in Single Gameweeks, not Doubles.

The things that make a haul more likely are form and ease of opposition, not the mere fact that a player has two games in the gameweek. 

All those players who did manage a really big return from a Double Gameweek had at least one, often two really soft opponents in their pair of fixtures. If a Double Gameweek is against two difficult opponents, or even two average opponents (or indeed it's against two really poor opponents, but your favoured Triple Captain bet is out-of-sorts at the moment....), there is no point playing the chip. The double-fixture is not 'magic' in itself: it's the quality of the fixture ('easy opponent'), not the number of games that matters.

Well, there is still the argument from fear, I suppose. Even appearance points from a second game would be a nice lift to your points total; and if your man should somehow pick up something - anything, no matter how slight - from both the games, despite somewhat unpromising fixtures,.... surely that would be a decent return for the Triple Captain chip??

Alas, NO - not really. The lower-end for your points expectation may be very slightly raised; but you should be thinking about the overall points-range, and the likeliest mid-point you could reasonably expect to achieve. That is almost certainly going to be better in a single fixture where you're absolutely confident of your captain's form, and of the poor quality of the opposition.

[You should never let fear - of your own possible misfortune, or of what your rivals might be plotting - guide your decisions in FPL. You should always focus on what you believe are the best ways to optimise your own points returns. And you should be ambitious for the Triple Captain chip; it can be very valuable - you should be looking to maximise your return from it, not simply securing an OK, least-worst outcome on it.]

And there's a further, VERY BIG problem with waiting for a Double Gameweek to play this chip. The Double Gameweeks happen in the latter part of the season: that is a long time to wait. 

Your favoured captaincy pick for the chip might have picked up a knock or suffered a dip in form by that point. (A lot of people were planning to play the chip on Mo Salah a couple of seasons ago; but he had never fully shaken off a hamstring tweak he suffered while playing for Egypt in AFCON, and had a very muted end to that season.)  Heck, he might even have suffered a season-ending injury, or been poached by the Saudis in the January transfer window.... Shit happens.

Also, in that closing phase of the season, the final stages of the FA Cup and the European competitions are getting pretty intense, and clubs still involved in those will quite often rest some of their players, particularly their top players - in matches that follow closely on one another, and/or are against weaker opponents that the back-up players ought to be able to deal with. Hence, you can't be absolutely confident that your Salahs and your Haalands will even play in both fxitures of a Double Gameweek! 

If they do play in both games, they're very likely to get restricted minutes. And they're almost certainly going to be well below their best because of mounting fatigue.  [This is why I think it's increasingly unlikely that we'll see Rooney's and Mateta's achievement replicated again; or not more than once every two or three decades, anyway! With the insane physical demands of the current game - which have escalated enormously over the last 15 years - you just can't expect players to produce peak performances twice within a few days of each other,... especially at the back end of the season, when mental and physical tiredness and persistent injury niggles are accumulating.]

And dammit, because the Double Gameweeks are determined by progress to the last rounds of the domestic cups, you can never be sure that your favoured Triple Captain pick - one of that gilded handful of players, perhaps just one or two, who do seem to offer you a significant chance of a brace of goals or better, if you give them a soft opponent - will even get a Double Gameweek. And it's impossible to predict exactly when the postponed league games from the weekend of the relevant cup tie (these days, it's only the Final of the League Cup and the Semi-Finals of the FA Cup) will be rearranged to; so, even if you're willing to gamble on your chosen Triple Captain's club getting through to those rounds, you don't know which two fixtures are going to be combined into one gameweek for him - and it might sometimes be a couple of really tough ones rather than a pair of gimmes.

Even if you get a reasonably promising Double Gameweek for your chosen Triple Captain at the tail-end of the season, it's actually fairly unlikely that he'll make more points from it than he did from a few of his best single-fixture weeks earlier in the season. And there is no guarantee that he'll get any sort of Double Gameweek at all!

Hence, it's almost never worth hanging on for a Double Gameweek to play the Triple Captain chip. (It never was, even when rearranged games from the FA Quarter-Finals weekend ususually used to give us a really big Double Gameweek slightly further ahead of the end of the season. [These BIG Double Gameweeks of old gave you an enhanced chance that Salah, Haaland, etc. would actually get a Double Gameweek; but that Double Gameweek was almost always a much more tempting opportunity for the Bench Boost chip rather than the Triple Captain!])

Ah, but never say 'never'. Didn't good 'ol Mo get a huge score in a Double Gameweek just last season??  Why, yes, he did. But that was not a regular Double Gameweek; it was a one-off rearrangement of a bad weather postponement. It happened earlier in the season than the usual Double Gameweeks. And the rescheduled date was only confirmed at fairly short notice. We knew that Salah was on fire at that point in the season. And he did indeed have two fairly middling opponents to face; so, of course, this double-fixture became a favourite opportunity to play the chip on him as soon as it was announced. Indeed, back in early December when the Merseyside derby was originally postponed, we knew Salah - who was having the best season in FPL history - would get a double-fixture against Everton + another at some point in late January or early February; and that was worth hanging on for. The utterly uncertain prospect of a Double Gameweek resulting from FA Cup success, to be scheduled in the closing weeks of the seaason, is NOT worth hanging on for.

I shall have a follow-up post soon, focusing more on when it is a good idea to play the Triple Captain chip, rather than when it isn't.

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!)