Look on the bright side!

 

Things can always be worse.

At least you didn't play your Triple Captain on Palmer this week!

Well, that's about the only comfort I've got to cling to, after one of the most wretched gameweeks in FPL history! 

[At the end of my regular 'Luck-o-Meter' commentary on the gameweek action yesterday, I catalogued how of the 15 highest-owned players, only Haaland, Raya, and [thus far, somewhat disappointing] Gabriel had produced anything; and only Calvert-Lewin and Verbruggen, down at the bottom end of that 'popularity list', had managed even 2 points. Two players hadn't even played, two more had returned nul points despite playing, and five contributed only a single point; while Palmer, of course, returned -1 point! It was very possible - in fact, relatively common - to have a net zero points return from your entire midfield this week!!]

Well, that - and the perennial schadenfreude consolation that an awful lot of people managed to do even worse than me.

Heck, it seems that something in excess of 2,000 people may have made Palmer their Triple Captain this week (at least, if Google is to be believed; these days, alas, it usually isn't...). Around 29% of managers owned him going into this gameweek, and against recent whipping-boys Tottenham, surely everyone will have played him. Probably around a third of his owners had the captaincy on him; and a good many more of them (possibly nearly all - again, according to Google's somewhat unconvincing roundup of the gameweek stats) may have had him inherit the armband as vice-captain after Joao Pedro failed to appear. Nearly 300,000 FPL managers had transferred him in expressly for this fixture.

So, if your FPL weekend suffered from Palmer's uncharacteristic rush-of-blood on Saturday (as did mine), there were a lot of people in the same boat - some of them in an even leakier boat. 

And even if you suffered the worst-case scenario of having made Palmer vice-captain while playing your Triple Captain on Joao Pedro, well - although, yes, you wasted your triple-points chip, at least you only wound up with a -3; it has been known for heavily captained players to produce much bigger negative scores.

And at least Palmer didn't get a straight red card, and a three-match suspension. I think he certainly should have for the first foul, that petulant barge into Matheus Fernandes, which was pure retaliation for his wild challenge on Caicedo moments earlier. 

And arguably the second one - stepping on Gallagher's ankle late in the game - should have been a red card too: if it was a culpable action by Palmer, deserving of the yellow card Chris Kavanagh awarded (to produce the double-yellow sending-off), then the nature of the contact was serious enough to have possibly caused injury and must have been flying close to the threshold for a straight red. I don't think it was culpable: Gallagher slid in dangerously on Palmer, inserting his leg under Palmer's foot as he was about to put it down: the contact was brief, not heavy (Palmer actually pulled out of the step and picked his foot up again very quickly), and looked entirely accidental - he could not avoid treading on Gallagher in that moment, and it was Gallagher's fault. So, some Palmer owners will no doubt be wallowing in the injustice of that decision and claiming he shouldn't have been sent off at all - but he clearly should have been for the earlier foul.

Anyhow, he's only picked up a one-game ban for the double yellow card; and, thanks to the quirk that Premier League bans can be served in the League Cup, Palmer will be suspended for the Round of 16 tie at Anfield this Wednesday, and he won't miss any EPL/FPL time at all!  So, things could have been very much worse.

Of course, there is the slight problem that a lot of ignorant Premier League managers don't realise Palmer isn't banned next weekend (or they suddenly think he's become 'no good',... or they're vengeful because he 'let them down' so badly this past week...), and there's a big sell-off under way - which may force his price down. Alas, we just have to accept that with so many people in the game now, and so many of them being so dumb and so impulsive, the transfer market is extremely volatile - and we are occasionally going to suffer a loss of value in one of our key players for no good reason.

Another 'Triple Captain' temptation

 

This week's major talking-point in FPL-land seems to be whether to punt the first Triple Captain chip on Erling Haaland this weekend.

Well, I say 'talking-point'; but in fact, there's been next-to-zero actual discussion or rumination on the issue. Most people on the forums are just exultantly announcing that they're going to do it.

Of course, there's a strong case for it. Promoted sides are almost always among the League's most vulnerable, especially early in the season; and Ipswich have looked pretty porous at the back so far. And Haaland is obviously a prime candidate for the Triple Captain chip - one of the few players who reliably returns multiple double-digit hauls each season, and can usually be depended on to come up with at least something against weaker opponents.

But the case against: Ipswich have shown signs of improvement over the last few games (in particular, Christian Walton looks a lot more formidable in goal than the error-prone Kjell Scherpen, who he's replaced in the last two games - in which they've conceded only a single goal each time [although, admittedly, against rather poor opponents]); they also offer quite a lot of attacking threat through players like Enciso, Fatawu, and Davis (I'd still fancy City for the win; but it might not necessarily be all that comfortable for them...). Haaland might be a bit tired after the gruelling game against PSG in midweek; and you'd imagine he'll certainly be taken off quite early, if City can get the game safely in the bag. So, this fixture really doesn't look like an absolute gimme for a big haul, either for City or for Haaland.

But, as always, the major concern with a decision like this should be opportunity cost - are you missing out on stronger options for the chip later by committing to using it now?

Although Haaland is just about unique among our current crop of players in the number of big hauls he produces each season,... at the moment, Joao Pedro is also in extraordinary form for Chelsea (and is actually looking like he could wrest the Golden Boot from the Norwegian this season). And Chelsea under Xabi Alonso have looked so free-scoring so far that you fancy them to be able to net multiple times against just about anyone; whereas City, still getting used to Enzo Maresca, are often misfiring a bit in their attack.

Moreover, midfielders get more points than forwards for the same attacking contribution; and there are a fair few of them who - at least occasionally - also bag multiple goals in a game. Bruno Fernandes, of course, has already done so this season (in what might well prove to be the season's highest gameweek total), and Cole Palmer and Bukayo Saka have proven that they are capable of it as well; we might now add Jeremy Doku, Rayan Cherki, Antoine Semenyo, and Morgan Rogers to that list. So.... Haaland isn't the only candidate to use the chip on.

And Ipswich probably aren't the weakest opponent to target. Forest and Palace have so far looked at least as bad, if not a bit worse in the last few games; Spurs have looked much, much worse (though you feel they must have the potential for a massive improvement sooner or later); and Fulham have looked pretty dreadful too.

So, Haaland against Forest in GW10 or Fulham in GW11 (the other side of the second international break, alas; so, there are elevated doubts about form and fitness after that interruption) are credible alternatives to Ipswich this week.

And Joao Pedro (or Palmer or Rogers) against Spurs next week or against Palace at the start of December might be even more tempting.

Those who love the thrill of a wild gamble might even try their luck on Saka against Forest this weekend! [Ha! Well, I think Saka will produce a few big hauls at some point; but Arsenal are strangely flat at the moment; starting Rice and Guimaraes in central midfield always seems to leave them lacking bite.]

Haaland is a good solution, but not the only one. You shouldn't make a decision like this without carefully weighing all the possible alternatives first. (And most FPL managers just don't seem to do that!)  

[Of course, this ultimately worked out very well for those - over 664,000 (one might have expected it to be far more; a lot of people were probably dissuaded at the last moment by Maresca's remarks in midweek about Haaland 'needing a rest' soon...) - who did plump for the Triple Captaincy on Haaland this week. But there's still a chance some of those other options I mentioned might work out even better - so, the smugness of this week's TC brigade might be premature!]

Be content with 'good enough'

It's impossible not to indulge in a little thrill of schadenfreude, not to gloat just a little bit over the (slightly more than) 1.6 million FPL managers who hazarded their Triple Captain chip on Erling Haaland against Coventry this weekend.

They were, no doubt, hoping for a high double-digit return; and he yielded only a solitary goal (though, in a low-scoring match, that was sufficient to net him all 3 bonus points as well: we must take our consolations where we may). It was particularly frustrating that City had such an off game all around, and that Coventry were suddenly so much better than they'd looked in their two previous outings; and that Haaland actually had some more decent chances, but failed to convert them - he was twice played in by immaculate through-balls from Cherki, but both times slammed his shot too close to the keeper, Carl Rushworth.

It's important to try to keep a sense of perspective in situations like this.

Almost no-one ever manages to average 5.5-6.0 points-per-game over the whole season, and very few players ever exceed a 7.5-8.0 ppg average over any extended run of games, even when they're in blistering form. Even Haaland gets a lot less than 9 points in at least two games out of every three. 

So, that haul was really pretty respectable, well above average. And it was a 'good' return for the Triple Captain chip (75% of the time, it returns little or nothing!!).

People are only disappointed, dissatisfied with this outcome because Bruno Fernandes just got a once-in-a-blue-moon 23-point haul in the previous gameweek (and a lot of people had been fortunate enough to play their Triple Captain on that). Their hopes and expectations were unreasonably inflated by that reminder of what is - very occasionally - possible with the chip; and they felt under pressure to try to make up that ground lost to so many rivals in Gameweek 2.

But you can't allow yourself to think like that. You have to be happy with whatever you get from the 'bonus chips'. Around half the time, your Triple Captain blanks! Not infrequently, he may even return a score of just 1 point or 0 points; cases have been known of a Triple Captain missing a penalty, getting sent off, etc, and actually returning triple negative points. So, you have to be grateful for any return at all; 4 or 5 points is a pretty fair return ('better than a poke in the eye with a sharp stick'), and 8 or 9 points is actually quite good. Double-digit returns are a rare freak, and you should be happily surprised if you ever benefit from one; not greedily expecting it to happen.

The 'disappointment' of the Haaland TC-ers this week, though, does give some encouragement to those of us who held off playing that chip. There is a reasonable hope for us of getting a similar or better haul from our TC play, and so making up the ground that those 1.6-million gained on us this week. With Bruno's monster return last week,... we really just had to write that off as unrepeatable, uncatchable; we'll have to try to claw most of that deficit back through our ordinary weekly hauls. It can be done, but it will be a long hard road.

A Bench Boost is best played OPPORTUNISTICALLY

I discussed last week how all the arguments commonly put forward in favour of chancing the first Bench Boost chip in Gameweek 1 of the season were utterly misguided.

I think that, in general, having too rigid a plan on when to use any of your chips is a bad idea - but perhaps particularly so with the bonus chips (and even more particularly so in the first-half of the season, when there are no 'special circumstances' like Blank or Double Gameweeks to skew our calculations of risk/reward for the chips).

Team (and individual) form can shift drastically in a short space of time: so, you just don't know much in advance when all of your 15 squad members are going to be looking particularly sharp, or when all - or most - of them are going to be facing especially appealing fixtures.

In general, for the Bench Boost, it is much better to wait until at least a few - ideally, in fact, probably several - weeks into the season, when teams have settled into some consistent form, as they've got used to changes in player and coaching personnel and new tactics. The first few gameweeks of the season are always erratic, wildly unpredictable; almost no-one shows much consistency, and few if any teams are yet anywhere near their peak performance.

Now, you can sometimes 'set up' ideally for a particularly promising set of fixtures by using the Wildcard shortly beforehand (ideally, in the gameweek immediately prior). But, if you're having to make that many changes from your normal squad, the chances are that this is not going to be an ideal set of players going forward; you're probably sacrificing some points in subsequent weeks, just to try to slightly improve your yield from the Bench Boost; and that's almost certainly not going to be worth it.

And there are so many 'moving parts' in  a successful Bench Boost - needing all 15 players to start, and nearly all of them to haul - that it hardly ever pays off that well; you almost always have something go wrong: one or two last-minute drop-outs, or one of the teams you have the strongest representation from having an unexpectedly awful game, etc.

Therefore, you almost certainly have a much better chance of achieving some success with a Bench Boost, if you keep a strong squad - with a strong bench - throughout the season,... so that you are able to consider playing the Bench Boost in almost any gameweek that suddenly seems opportune, with the way everyone's team and individual form is looking for the next set of fixtures.  [A really good set of fixtures, with everyone in your squad fit and in form, in a regular Single Gameweek is usually a better prospect than a Double Gameweek. The notion that you have to play Bench Boost - or Triple Captain - in a Double Gameweek in the second-half of the season is an entrenched FPL fallacy. Few double-fixtures are actually 'good' double-fixtures; and it's almost always a mistake to load up entirely on doubling players in such a gameweek.]

This is another of the reasons why you need your bench, and why it is foolhardy to go light on your substitute selections. Even at the start of the season, trying to conserve budget by choosing weak players, or non-starting players, for the bench positions is a self-harming false economy.

[Much the same applies to the Triple Captain chip. There are only a handful of players that are usually candidates for this, and only a handful of 'most likely' fixtures for its use. But still, there may be some surprising shifts in form that change those expectations, or add some additional options at short notice. It is unwise to decide at the very beginning of the season what Haaland's or Palmer's or Fernandes's 'best' fixture is going to be; you don't usually know until a week or two beforehand!]

Once again, the siren call of a Double Gameweek

With Arsenal suddenly having a Double Gameweek scheduled this week (only confirmed in the last few days, after they booked their spot in the League Cup Final last Tuesday), a lot of folks are getting frantically excited about the possibility of playing a bonus chip in GW26.

I had been tempted to title this quick post on the prospect, The Double Gameweek Delusion. I have written before that the value of Double Gameweeks for a bonus chip play is massively over-estimated by the FPL community - it's a misguided superstition that has been elevated to the status of a cult. However....

Well, as a Bench Boost opportunity, this coming Gameweek certainly looks like a waste of time. You should only really count the points returns of your weakest players (the ones you properly should have left on your bench: many people try to delude themselves into thinking they've done well from the chip by stacking the bench with some of their best players!). If a doubling player is worth having, he's probably worth starting; hence, you won't generally have doubling players on your bench unless almost your entire squad are enjoying double-fixtures - and that's not going to happen unless we have a really BIG Double Gameweek (which are almost uknown these days: we won't get one at all unless all the fixtures postponed from FA Cup Semi-Finals weekend get rearranged to the same gameweek; and that won't be until the very end of the season - a dangerously long time to hold on to your bonus chips, for such an uncertain hope of any advantage...). Here, it's difficult to see value in any Wolves players, even playing twice. (Even if they should produce a marginal advantage over your regular squad players with their lone fixtures, it's very unlikely to outweigh the hassle of using up transfers - which should always be seen as having some effective 'points cost' - to move them in and out again.)  And your Arsenal players obviously aren't going to be on your bench! So, there is no Bench Boost opportunity here.

As a Triple Captain prospect, though.... perhaps there is a case to be made.

Gabriel looks like being the most popular choice. Timber might be an equally strong option. And some might fancy Declan Rice, who's been their most consistent source of 'assists' (as well as producing an occasional goal!) - although his form has looked a little muted of late. And a bolder ploy could be to gamble on an attacking player like Madueke or Trossard or Havertz (the main argument against being that there is much more rotation risk in the attacking positions).

In general, goalscoring midfielders (who get more points than forwards for the same attacking contribution, and might pick up additional points for a clean sheet and/or 'defensive contributions'), or forwards in such freakishly good form that they might well return a multi-goal haul, are the best options as captain or Triple Captain.

But Arsenal are having an exceptional season: their defence is miles better than anyone else's - picking up a clean sheet once every two games, and only conceding an average of 0.65 goals per game. Thus, they do seem to have a very strong prospect of picking up at least one, possibly two clean sheets from this pair of games. And, of course, there's a chance that a defender could earn 'defensive points' or bonus points as well (although that's probably a fairly remote prospect: you rarely earn 'defensive points' against weaker teams; and defenders don't often earn bonus points in a game where their team has scored a few goals...), and perhaps even chip in an attacking contribution (although that's rather a lot to hope for from a defender, even a comparative goals-and-assists monster like Gabriel).

If you choose an Arsenal defender who starts both games, it's reasonable to expect that they should return at least 8 points this gameweek, and perhaps in the 10-15 point range. That's a pretty decent return on the captain's armband.

However, betting on clean sheets is always a precarious hope: even the weakest teams can occasionally surprise you with an uncommonly spirited performance (Brentford, particularly, but also Wolves of late, are actually pretty dangerous in attack), and late goals can appear out of nowhere....

Punting the TC on Gabriel or Timber this week is a high-floor/low(ish)-ceiling kind of play; it's a fairly conservative option for the chip - one that gives you an unusually strong chance of having a player who'll produce an 8- or 10-point gameweek, but a fairly remote likelihood of a really big score.

There are going to be at least TWO more Double Gameweeks this season. So, bolder FPL managers will probably hang on for one of those to play this chip. (Manchester United could still get one, if Brentford reach the semi-finals of the FA Cup; that could make a Triple Captain bet on Bruno Fernandes or Bryan Mbeumo very tempting...)

But going for an Arsenal player this week is a very alluring bird-in-the-hand option: it almost certainly won't produce the biggest Triple Captain return of the season, but it does seem to offer a much stronger-than-average prospect of a decent 8-10 point return. (NB  Again, people like to brag about the total points they received from their Triple Captain pick, tripling the number of his actual game contribution. But, of course, he would have played for you anyway, and he would have been your captain anyway; so the actual value of the chip is only his basic points return - the extra points that you got from making him Triple Captain rather than just captain.)

But be warned... the particular hazard of this Double Gameweek is how unusually protracted it is: Arsenal's two games are nearly a full week apart, and with an FA Cup tie against Wigan intervening. There is a not insignificant chance that an Arsenal player you bet your Triple Captaincy on here will get injured before the Wolves game next Wednesday....

So, are you feeling LUCKY??

Sometimes.... BRAVERY pays off

LBJ's Brass Balls

I had always thought that this Gameweek 17 fixture, at home, against West Ham, would be Erling's Haaland's best prospect for a big haul in the first half of the season - and thus the prime opportunity for betting the Triple Captain chip on him.

But it would have been a very, very risky play to hang on this long, to ignore all the tempting rival options for the chip in earlier fixtures...

West Ham looked the worst team in the league at the start of the season; but they might have improved. And they have: quickly getting rid of the anodyne Graham Potter was a positive step, and there have been some promising signs for them under Nuno Espiritu Santo's stewardship since - although they're still often a bit ropey in defence, especially on set-pieces.

City might not have been able to maintain a strong title challenge this year - especially after they lost Rodri again so early on. But in fact, they have steadily got better and better, after a rather shakey start.

The big Viking might have picked up an injury by now, or suffered a bit of a dip in form; but in fact, he's having his best season yet, maintaining an astonishing level of consistency in output all the way through to the middle of the football year.

So - waiting till now to use the Triple Captain on him.... has paid off very nicely! But damn, you needed cojones to hang on for this long!! 

And it probably wasn't the smart move for this chip. Waiting this long was too big a risk; and if the plan had gone awry at the last minute, because of a late injury to Haaland, you'd have few other remaining options for using the chip, with just two more gameweeks in its validity period after this one.

If you enjoy a big success on the Triple Captain chip - or any of the bonus chips - you should maintain a due sense of humility. 

A one-off punt like this always has a bigger chance of going horribly wrong than it does of succeeding. And if you wait until the very tail-end of their availability window to play one of the bonus chips, the chance of that play going very, very wrong is greatly increased. 

A big return from a chip - however 'likely' it seemed - is always to a large extent LUCKY.

[The picture at the top is of a giant 'Brass Balls' sculpture, supposedly those of US President Lyndon Johnson (who famously complained of his trousers always being too tight in the crotch!), recently commissioned as a joke by John Oliver (standing next to the huge hanging scrotum here), the presenter of award-winning Sunday night political comedy show 'Last Week Tonight'.]

The distant laughter of the Fantasy Gods....

 

On Saturday - when half the world had bet their precious Triple Captain chip on him - the great Erling Haaland played like a man who'd been heavily on the lash on Friday night....

But just three days later, he comes up with a goal and 2 assists, for what would have been a very decent return on the TC chip!!!

The pagan gods who preside over the realm of FPL are not just cruel and capricious, but fond of mockery; it is not enough for them to smash our hopes, they must then taunt us in the midst of our despair.

But really, backing Haaland against Leeds was the 'right' choice, Fulham are a way better team than Leeds, and this match was on their home ground: it was not nearly so favourable a prospect for a big haul from the lanky Viking. (But then, neither were the Bournemouth or Everton games; or even Burnley or Wolves.....! It's impossible to predict with any confidence when the big hauls are going to happen.)

Triple unhappiness!

 

Oh dear, the great Triple Captain play on Erling Haaland this weekend (Gameweek 13 of our 25/26 EPL/FPL season) really went BADLY.

But in times of tribulation like this, it is good to try to mainain a sense of perspective.

For one thing, an awful lot of people were in the same boat: the great majortiy of still active managers in the game were probably playing the chip in this gameweek. 

And things could have been so much worse. He might have felt an injury in the warm-up and not even started. He might have got injured, or just been subbed off early by Pep, before the 60-minute mark. (And we should feel especially grateful every time a favourite player escapes a serious injury in a game, not for the impact that might have on our FPL points hopes, but for the man himself - and for the fact that we have not been denied the pleasure of watching him play for the rest of the season, or a big chunk of it.) He might have been given a yellow card, or perhaps even a red one. (Not very likely with Haaland: his disciplinary record is very good. But you never know.... Weird shit happens sometimes!)

It is quite common for captain and Triple Captain picks in FPL to register only 1 point or 0 points in a game - or even, occasionally, negative points.

So, the Haaland TC play this weekend, while very, very disappointing, was not an utter disaster. Those happen too; and this wasn't one of them. Perspective.

It was not even a particularly unlikely - and thus should not have been a completely unexpected - outcome. Captain and Triple Captain picks are going to return a blank somewhere between 1-in-2 and 1-in-3, even at the best.

When Fate shits on you like this, all you can do.... is hope that you're going to get a 1-in-3 unusually good outcome next year!

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.

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!!!

What is a Triple Captain worth?

 

There are two aspects to that question:  1)  How should you assess the points value of the Triple Captain chip?  and 2)  How many points can you expect to earn from it?

Unfortunately, if your thinking is muddled on the first part of the question (as it often seems to be in FPL-land), that prevents you forming a clear idea of what you ought to be aiming for with the chip.

People very commonly claim that their return from playing the Triple Captain is THREE times the gameweek points-haul for their chosen captain. But this is just empty bragging, or dangerous self-delusion. (People who somehow persuade themselves that the value of the chip is TWICE their captain's points-haul are even more perversely misguided in their way of looking at this!)  Of course, you should really only be interested in the points lift that the chip gives you over what you would have had without it. And you'd get the basic points haul for that player anyway. In fact, since you surely would have made him your captain anyway, you would have got twice his points-haul for the week if you hadn't played the chip. So, the additional value of the Triple Captain chip is only the basic points-haul total, not some multiple of it.

I have discussed in some detail before the issue of whether the Triple Captain chip invariably pays off better in a Double Gameweek. (Summary; it can - but usually it does not. And it's a very dangerous thing to gamble on, since Double Gameweeks are now few and small, and right at the back end of the season.)

My general advice on both types of Bonus Chip is that you have to be prepared to play them opportunistically. There can be so many swings in player and individual form over a season that you often don't know who the hottest player of the year is going to be until a streak of exceptional returns suddenly emerges,.... and you often don't know what anyone's 'easiest' fixture is going to be until shortly before it happens. You can suss out the likely most promising options some months ahead; but you need to stay flexible, and be prepared for those tentative plans to completely change. (This year, Erling Haaland is still in form, and still the only FPL player regularly producing big points returns. And it has been fairly obvious since the start of the season that his two best fixtures in the first half of the season were likely to be City's home gaines against Leeds and West Ham in Gameweeks 13 and 17. So - for once - the start-of-season provisional plan for most people hasn't changed.... yet. But a lot of people weren't prepared to risk waiting this long, when Haaland was also knocking in braces of goals against better opponents. And now there is a chance that Saka or Mbeumo might be coming into tempting form as possible alternative picks. If Haaland gets injured in the next few weeks, then there'll have to be a late change of plan.... Such things often happen.)

Of course, you hope to successfully target one of your best hauls of the season for a Triple Captain play - but it is not reasonable to expect to land on the best; it's all just too unpredictable. Almost always, in fact, your and everyone else's best haul of the season comes from some complete random that you would never have expected to produce for you - and didn't very often, so wasn't a strong bet for the TC chip. You have to focus on players who can bag very large hauls multiple times a season, and who maintain top form for extended periods. Even if they won't ultimately provide any of your very best scores of the season, they are more reliable bets to provide a good score in a particular gameweek.

You shouldn't use the chip lightly, just throw it away on impulse; you should carefully choose a week in which your best player, when he's in his best form, is facing an opponent against whom he should have an especially high chance of scoring more than one goal.

But even the most exceptional players don't return every week. Usually, in fact, they'll 'blank' at least 1 game in every 3 across the season, probably closer to 1 game in 2. And sometimes even a Mo Salah or an Erling Haaland in their hottest run of form will still manage to 'blank' against a poor side.

You have to steel yourself to accept that a Triple Captain play can return nothing - and very often does. Perhaps 1 time in 3, your Triple Captain will only produce basic 'appearance points', or even less (the annals of FPL abound with horror stories of managers who ventured their TC on a player who got injured inside 10 minutes, or missed a penalty, or received a red card....).  

You have to be grateful for any sort of return at all from the chip; and very, very grateful if your haul from it happens to break into double-digits, even narrowly. It is foolish to expect - or even to hope for - a massive dividend of 15 or 20 or 25 points. That kind of thing happens fairly rarely, and requires a very large dose of LUCK.

[I wrote a follow-up post a day or two later on how to assess the impact of your Bench Boost chip.]

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.

SOMETIMES the Sheep get lucky!!!

Now, I said at the weekend, just ahead of the Gameweek 6 deadline, that I thought all the enthusiasm for risking the Triple Captain chip on Haaland against Burnley was probably misguided....

And look what happened!  Yes, I was very soon proved 'wrong'!!

Except.... I carefully said 'probably'. And I was specifically criticising the reasons given for this pick (exaggeratedly denigrating Burnley's defensive abilities; and that on the basis of a single  - misinterpreted, misrepresented - statistic!), and reviewing some strong counter-arguments for waiting for later, potentially better opportunities to use the chip (on Haaland, or someone else).  In fact, I explicitly acknowledged that this chip play on Haaland might turn out OK!

But still I get pilloried by the online dingbats who insist that I made a foolish, ill-informed and obviously incorrect 'prediction'.  I did not. I just pointed out a few facts they were wilfully overlooking, and they got pissy about it; and when things work out OK for them,.... they then want 'revenge'!!!  Petty people.

Actually, things worked out much better than merely 'OK': a 16-point haul might well prove to be Haaland's best return of the entire season; and there probably won't be too many other scores much better than it. It did, as it happens, turn out to be potentially the best Triple Captain return for the season (or at least for the first half of it, since we now have two of these chips).

But the people who gambled their Triple Captain chip this week didn't know that was going to happen. And most of them are doubly stupid, because they think they did know. Trebly stupid, because they think that a successful outcome proves the 'smartness' of the original decision. It does not: it only proves that they were lucky - very, very lucky.

These people appear to fall prey to the common fallacy that if something happens, it must have had a 100% probability of happening at some point long prior to its happening. That is not so.

No-one ever has quite a 100% probability of even starting a game (because there are so many little last-minute accidents-of-fate that might thwart that - how often have we seen players pull a muscle in the warm-up, for example?). In this case, given that Haaland had missed some training earlier in the week with a back-muscle problem, he can't have been much better than a 95% probability to appear from the beginning, perhaps much less; there was surely a good chance that Pep would prefer to leave him on the bench as a super-sub option, against a team who were not expected to be very difficult to beat.

And the probability of him playing most of the game was perhaps no better than 60% or 70%, given that recent injury concern, and the fact that Pep almost invariably withdraws him as soon as a game looks safely won - especially when there is a European match coming up the following midweek. And the likelihood of him being left on until the final whistle can't have been more than 50%.

While Haaland does produce a fair few assists, it's still a relative rarity: usually only about a 25% chance in any given game. (And last year the assists really dried up for him; so, with this evolving City set-up, we might expect that probability to be even lower at the moment.)

And then, of course, he ended up getiting a brace - right at the end of the game, when he could not reasonably have been expected to be still on the pitch. Even a very poor defensive team (and Burnley are not that....) will rarely make two 'errors leading to goals' in the same game; and the chances of them both occurring in added-on time, and both being converted by the same player are vanishingly small.

Haaland's 16-point return in this game was a completely unpredictable freak event!!

Sure, City were favourites to win, and win fairly comfortably. There was a good chance they might score 2 or 3 goals against them (all of this I acknowledged in my discussions of the prospects for the match). But there was no compelling reason to suppose they would obviously be able to score a lot of goals (and really, Burnley were on top for a lot of this game, nearly took a 2-1 lead early in the second half; they didn't deserve to go down this badly), nor to expect that Haaland would claim more than 1 of any they did score (and he didn't - for nearly 90 full minutes of regulation time, which must have been agony for all those TC punters!!). There is always a range of likely points outcomes for any player in any game; and this result for Haaland was way, way above the median of that range this week.

Those who now smugly proclaim that they predicted "exactly what was going to happen" in this match are lying to themselves and everyone else. 

They made a risky bet, a brave bet - that paid off. Puffing themselves in those terms would be acceptable. But to pretend that it was 'a safe bet' and 'a shrewd decision' and so on is fatuous nonsense. You had no idea how that bet was going to turn out: it could have gone very, very badly instead of very, very well. But it just happened to go very, very, very, very well. Thank your lucky stars - and shut up about it.

And there is still a chance that another TC bet over the next three months will pay out even bigger.....

[And yes, that sheep does appear to have 8 tiny legs!! AI is not ready to take over the world quite yet....]