Dilemmas of the Week - GW37

 

As I again pointed out the other day, 'form' always becomes more and more unpredictable in the closing weeks of the season, maiking it very risky to use any purely elective transfers, even on apparently very 'favourable' fixtures. With Manchester United and Spurs facing each other in the Europa League Final next Wednesday (and not having anything really to play for in the League any more, except scrabbling to avoid the disgrace of finishing 17th!), it seems highly unlikely that they'll bother to put out full-strength teams this Friday evening,.... or, perhaps, on the final Saturday either. And thanks to the FA Cup Final this Saturday afternoon between Manchester City and Crystal Palace, the City v Bournemouth and Palace v Wolves games for this Gameweek won't be played until Tuesday evening (giving those teams less than 5 days' recovery before their final games of the season); and, whatever happens at Wembley, I would imagine both Finalists will be somewhat exhausted and using as many rotations as possible in those games.

I am trying to streamline these weekly round-ups, aiming to confine myself to just the injuries to players that are likely to have a major significance in FPL; and also, of course, only to new injuries - I figure everyone should be aware of players who were already ruled out for the last gameweek! [I currently find the 'Injuries & Bans' summary on Fantasy Football Scout the most reliable resource for this kind of information - go check that out for more comprehensive coverage.]

So, what are the conundrums we face ahead of Gameweek 37?

Does anybody need to be moved out because of injury?

Declan Rice was omitted at Anfield last week as a precaution because of an injury worry (variously reported as a hip, groin, or hamstring issue??), and Leandro Trossard had to come off in that game with a hamstring tweak - but both have been seen in midweek training, so should be available for selection this weekend after all.

Brighton's Lewis Dunk and Joel Veltman missed the Wolves game with training knocks, but could be back this week.

Leny Yoro came off with a foot injury against West Ham last week, and seems unlikely to be available this weekend. (Does anybody own him??)

Sven Botman is also a doubt, after coming off early in the second half against Chelsea with a sore knee.

Taiwo Awoniyi needed emergency surgery for a ruptured intestine after colliding heavily with a goalpost near the end of last Sunday's game against Leicester, so will miss the rest of the season. But there is relief that he seems to be OK, after what could have been a life-threatening injury.

Spurs's woes continue, as Dejan Kulusevski suffered a patella injury last week against Palace, which has needed surgery.

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

Mikel Merino and Jacob Ramsey have to serve one-match bans for picking up a pair of yellow cards last weekend.

Nicolas Jackson is now suspended for three games (and is really lucky it wasn't longer) for rather blatantly elbowing Sven Botman in the side of the neck last week. I wonder if this might not have torpedoed his Chelsea career, since he hasn't been looking that impressive recently anyway, and will now have to miss the opening of next season as well; one suspects the club will look for other striker solutions before Jackson is eligible to play for them again.

Easily forgotten, but Jadon Sancho is still a Manchester United player, and so unable to appear for Chelsea against them this weekend.

Did anyone give other cause to consider dropping them?

Manchester City and Crystal Palace players are surely too much of a rotation-risk - and injury- and exhaustion-risks! - next Tuesday in the wake of the FA Cup Final.

And Manchester United and Spurs - absolutely awful of late, anyway - surely won't be risking their best players for long ahead of their crucial match-up in the Europa League Final next Wednesday. It looks as though Antonin Kinsky may have displaced Guglielmo Vicario in the Spurs goal - but no-one is likely to have either of them.

West Ham have also been fairly dreadful recently; and although they showed significant improvement last week, that was only against woeful United - not really impressive enough to convince that they have a snowball's chance of getting anything against Forest.

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

Um, NO....  Last week was one of the most uninspiring gameweeks in living memory, and absolutely no-one put in a really head-turning performance; most of the star names were deeply disappointing.

Oh, OK, Ebere Eze had a good game last week; but it was only against Spurs - and now really isn't the time to be buying him.

Most people must surely have used the 'Assistant Manager' chip by now. (It was never actually specified in the 'rules' for this chip if it would cease to be available in GW37 if you hadn't activated it yet... I wonder if it has?) Anyone who hasn't must surely have forgotten about it. (Or wasn't aware of it. Or couldn't understand it. Or thought it was too much hassle to work around the other chips...) With the increasing unpredictability of results in the closing weeks of the season, it really shouldn't be a good time to play a chip based on team results anyway; and most of the top teams actually have quite tough run-ins, so there haven't been many secure wins in prospect even for the biggest names, and certainly no huge margins of victory or easy clean sheets; moreover, some of the stronger teams at the lower end of the table have recovered so well in the past month or two that they no longer have many table-bonus prospects. 

This penultimate gameweek, with the fixture logjam caused by the FA Cup and Europa League Finals, is a particularly tough one to predict - with most of the match-ups looking fairly tight, and perhaps capable of swinging either way. Given City's continuing flakey form, and the distraction of their bid for glory at Wembley a few days earlier, I'd fancy Andoni Iraola and Bournemouth to have the week's best - only! - chance of picking up table-bonus points. Although, with Liverpool having looked a bit unconvincing since securing their title, some might fancy Hurzeler and Brighton's chances against them too. Probably under-full-strength (and recently terrible even when somewhere near 'full strength') Spurs and Man Utd look the only strong possibilities for securing big wins against - for Aston Villa and Chelsea; but the two bottom-of-the-table sides have struggled more with chance creation than defensive frailty, and I'm not convinced that their opponents have the rosources to achieve the really emphatic victories that many FPL managers are fondly imagining; so, I'd definitely go with Iraola.

BEST OF LUCK, EVERYONE!

AND PLEASE DON'T FORGET The Boycott; though I'm willing to comment on its possible use, I actually loathe the pointless innovation of the 'Assistant Manager' chip - and I have been urging people to please consider quitting the game, or at least refusing to use the chip, in protest. 

But if you couldn't bring yourself to do either of those things, please do criticise the Assistant Manager chip as vigorously as possible on any relevant social media channels you use, raise objections to it with any football or media figures you know how to contact, and - if possible - try to find a way to protest about it directly to the FPL hierarchy (and let me know how, if you manage that!).  I think it's particularly important to voice these objections now, because decisions will probably soon be made about whether to include this chip in the game again next year.

#DownWithTheNewChip 

Endgame

 

Gosh, there are only just over 200 hours left before the 2024-25 Premier League season is all wrapped up! The Fat Lady is doing her warm-ups....

Overwhelmed as we've often felt by fatigue and frustration (and a frequent raging sense of injustice....) during the course of this season, we'll miss it when it's finally over....

We see a lot of people on the FPL forums at the moment frantically worrying what they can do to 'improve' their ranking over the last two gameweeks, clinch a mini-league or cup victory....  The answer, alas, is NOTHING. Just keep playing your game, and hope for the best!  People who go desperately 'chasing' points by taking wild gambles usually just shoot themselves in the foot.

If you're already in an impressive rank position - top 100,000, or top 50,000 or top 10,000, or whatever; or near the top of some of your leagues - that's about as good as you can ever hope to get (realistically, it's probably far better than you ever expected at the start of the season; and, very probably, rather better than you've deserved...); so you should be happy with that.... and not still feverishly chasing rainbows.

People who get hung up on hoping for further improvement, when they're already at Icarus altitudes, are probably just setting themselves up for huge disappointment. The upper end of the rankings tend to get pretty strung out; and there probably aren't going to be too many people who achieve significant further rises in rank in those strata over Gameweeks 37 and 38; a good number, in fact probably the majority, will slip back slightly; a good 10% or 20% (mostly the ones who were chasing too hard...) may fall back disastrously, allowing a few late entries into the upper ranks.

Croatia's Lovro Budišin and his team 'Aina Krafth Bree' (is that a pun that only works in Croatian??) are a staggering 43 points clear at the top of the global rankings, so it's pretty unlikely that anyone is now going to displace him as this year's Champion. (He's already been in the No. 1 spot for 6 weeks,... and in the Top Ten for 16 weeks!! That is a freakishly good run of form, even for the Global Champ...)

Top of the leader board -  after GW36

But only 6 other managers are within 20 points of second-place Max Littleproud, so.... there might not be too much movement at the top of the table at all over the coming week.

Only 53 managers have reached 2,600 points for the season so far; another 544 have a score from 2,550 to 2,599. And nearly 4,700 more have reached 2,500 points (an improbably large number, in fact, are currently on exactly 2,500,... and 2,499....).

98,248 managers have already reached 2,400 points - which would, in fact, be an extremely good total for season's end. And this in a season where we've had a lot of unusually low-scoring gameweeks, and a lot of surprises and upsets (City being shit for most of the season, Arsenal being much weaker than last season, Liverpool winning the title at a canter, despite being much less convincing than they were in the Klopp heyday a few years ago...); by rights, you'd expect this to be a below-average scoring season, yet all these folks have still managed to amass absolutely ridiculous points. (There's no accounting for LUCK....)

526,229 managers have reached 2,300 points or better - which I would regard as a very good total with two games left; if on 2,300 now, you should be able to reach 2,400 by the end of the season; and if you still have a bonus chip to play, or can somehow otherwise manage at least one very good gameweek from the last two (and actually, GW38 looks like it could be pretty good for everyone, with a very kind cluster of final fixtures!), you could maybe still get above 2,450. 

2,400+ points - that's pretty AWESOME: that is, in fact, about the best you can achieve on merit alone - anything more than that requires an awful lot of LUCK as well. And there is no point in hoping to be LUCKY.

A little bit of Zen (42)

 

"The amount of eccentricity in a society has generally been proportional to the amount of genius, mental vigour, and moral courage which it contained. That so few now dare to be eccentric marks the chief danger of the time."

John Stuart Mill (1806-1873)

But NOTE: to be 'eccentric' means to be an unorthodox and individualistic thinker... not to be a mad and self-destructive one. We generally see far more of the latter in FPL, alas.

Sheep Picks (14)

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 deangerously over-owned, are the subject of a sudden and misguided enthusiasm.

Well, I hate to do this, as I really like Eberechi Eze: I think he's a tremendous player, have often had him in my own FPL squad over the past few years, and would like to see him being given a more regular role with England. But.... he is my nominaton for a dangerously overrated 'Sheep Pick' for Gameweek 37 of this season.

He's the second-most transferred-in player for this gameweek (after Ollie Watkins, who I already raised doubts about a couple of weeks ago - although he looks a much stronger option at this stage,... if you can afford the transfer [people who rushed to buy him earlier in the week, to avoid a price rise, before they'd heard possible late injury news, were taking a big, BIG gamble!]), with a net influx of nearly 237,000 new owners. And that's purely because he bagged a brace of goals last week, to become the 'Player of the Week'. Indeed he did: but that was only against absolutely awful Spurs - it wasn't really a terribly convincing performance, either from him or his team. (And it was one of the most dire gameweeks overall that any of us can remember for years....! He was only 'player of the week' because almost all the other most fancied players failed to come up with anything.)  And yes, that does make it 5 goals in the last 6 games for him; he's certainly been in some tasty form lately. But as with Josko Gvardiol last week, one of my key objections to this sudden rush-to-buy is that you really should have had him already, bringing him in ahead of Palace's back-to-back Double Gameweeks in weeks 32 and 33. (I recommended him in preference to Ismaila Sarr ahead of Gameweek 30. Since then, he's scored 53 points to Sarr's 22!)

It is, however, worth noting that his team's form has been quite unconvincing since the beginning of April: they've only managed modest wins against defensively flakey Brighton and Spurs, while being held to a draw by dreadful Southampton. Their best result was probably the spirited 2-2 draw at Arsenal. But 4 draws and 2 losses in their last 8 games have seen them lose almost all hope of possible European qualification through League position. And - as I predicted - their performance in the two Doubles was particularly disappointing; that was because they struggle to perform well twice in the same week (they're not used to it, having never played in any of the European competitions [apart from a brief foray into the old pre-season InterToto Cup], and their squad is quite thin, so they're not able to rest players much); and they were up against four good opponents in those games. The same is the case now: after the huge emotional and physical challenge of the Cup Final against Manchester City on Saturday afternoon (which could go to extra time and penalties), they have to play their last 2 league games within less than 5 days. And those games are against Wolves and Liverpool. 

Admittedly, those two opponents have both stumbled in the last couple of games, but Palace would surely be nowhere near favourites to win either of these fixtures,... even if they were well-rested. Wolves have some of the best attacking form in the League since Vitor Pereira took over: from the beginning of February they went on a run of 8 wins and a draw from 11 games; and they were hard done-by to end a streak of 6 wins on the bounce against City two weeks ago, when they actually looked much the better side. They had a very off day against Brighton last week, but that's no reason to suppose that their glittering form of the past few months has suddenly completely deserted them. And Liverpool, yes, they have - not unexpectedly - lost a little focus and passion since they wrapped up the title with a month to spare; but they're still a team that can take apart anyone, even at 80% of their best. And you have to think that their passion will be rekindled by the desire to celebrate their championship in style on the last day at Anfield. On paper, Palace really don't have a snowball's chance in either of those games.

And they have only the slenderest hypothetical chance of squeaking into the Europa Conference League spot through their League finish, anyway. They not only need to win both of their games next week (won't happen), but they need Brentford and Brighton to each lose both of their remaining games (won't happen), and Bournemouth and Fulham to also drop points (that is pretty likely; but I'd bet that they'll both still finish above Palace).

Palace's season now rests on the Cup Final; they can't realistically finish in the top half of the League, they can't qualify for a European competition any other way - Saturday is the be-all and end-all of their season. And whatever result they get, they are likely to be completely wrung-out, and not in any condition to focus much on those two remaining League games, which will be meaningless for them. Plus, of course, there's the very serious risk that Eze, or other key players, will pick up an injury on Saturday, or at least be too fatigued by that game to be capable of many minutes on Tuesday,... or maybe even next Saturday,... or to play very well, even if they do trot out for the full 90 minutes both times. I really hope Palace can upset City at Wembley; but either way, that match is surely going to ruin them for next week. [Well, HOORAY - Palace did pull off that fairytale 'underdog' win in the Cup (though, on this season's form, they can't really be considered underdogs in this match-up), to the delight of all 'neutrals' around the world. Moreover, they didn't appear to pick up any injuries (though Wharton, who is pretty important to them, might be a doubt; and Guehi, who took a ball in the side of the head, might be excluded on Tuesday night by 'concussion protocols'), nor get any suspensions either (but, oh boy, was Dean Henderson lucky!); it didn't go to extra time; and City didn't even give them that tough a game physically (although it was, by English standards, quite a 'hot day'....). So, my reasonable concerns about whether they might be severely fatigued or demoralised, or suffering a significantly depleted squad this week, may have come to naught. And maybe there's even a possibility that the elation of their Wembley success will raise their game over their last two league matches. However, I still maintain that it was a huge risk to assume/hope that they would come through Saturday so well.  And it is still overwhelmingly likely that they will be tired, and lacking motivation in these remaining matches - particularly on Tuesday evening (when they'll presumably also be very short of tactical preparation, having spent 24 or 48 of the intervening 73-and-a-half hours celebrating...!). It is a very rare - almost unheard-of!! - circumstance to have teams playing in the Cup Final before the end of the League season; but when that does happen, you don't really want to be gambling on players from those teams.]

Ebere Eze is a tremendous player who can come up with a goal contribution at any time, against any opponent. But in the context of a crowded last week of the season, when he and his teammates will have nothing to play for, and facing two very dangerous opponents, it really doesn't seem at all likely that he will do so in Gameweeks 37 and 38. If you'd fancied his prospects over the past month-and-a-half, with the double Double, you should have had him already. But now is the time to sell him, not buy him.

The LOTTERY

I've joked a few times recently in my weekly roundups that, because of cumulative fatigue, nerves, or complacency, form tends to get more ragged for just about every team in the last few weeks of the season, and game outcomes thus wildly unpredictable. Hence, trying to predict FPL points returns becomes even more of a lottery than usual.

Apparent fixture-difficulty is no longer much of a reliable guide to likely points returns. (We just saw Manchester City held to a goalless draw by [second] worst Premier League team ever, Southampton!) And, basically, any attacking player might produce something between 0 and 3 attacking contributions across a couple of fixtures - regardless of how 'hard' or 'easy' they ought to be. Few, if any, will get any more than that; quite a few of the most fancied options, the biggest names.... will probably blank twice.

With only 2 games left to play - within the space of 7 days (less than 5 days for Palace, City, Wolves, and Bournemouth!), it really is impossible to guess how most of the remaining fixtures are going to pan out. Hence, elective transfers - choosing to swap out a starting player for someone else - at this stage of the season are a huge gamble, particularly if they're to be made at the cost of a 'hit' (although there can be indirect costs even with a Free Transfer, if you then don't have that available to sort out a last-minute injury problem and have to use a 'hit' there instead). It's always very difficult to be confident of recouping that 4-point spend in just one gameweek; but you can sometimes justify it if you foresee likely additional value in the new player over the next 2 or 3 fixtures as well; at the fag-end of the season, that consolation is no longer available to you. You are simply betting that the player you're dropping wouldn't have scored anything, and that the player you're bringing in is bound to score something,.... and should produce more than 4 points more than the guy you're replacing. And that is a VERY BIG BET at any time, but especially amid this end-season climate of increased uncertainty.

The one small kindness the Fantasy Gods have shown us this year is that the final Saturday is full of very unevenly-matched fixtures, so there should be rather more predictability about results than usual then - and the prospect of some good points returns from several leading players. (It's actually looking rather a promising Gameweek to drop the Bench Boost or Triple Captain chips,.... if you've somehow forgotten to play them until now. Even without a chip for that last week, it's probably worth saving up transfers until then.) But even that apparently tempting prospect may turn out to be illusory, just a taunting mirage.

And making elective transfers this week??  GOOD LUCK with that!!

Are you a 'good' FPL manager?

 

How can you judge if you are any good at the game of Fantasy Premier League?

Well, unfortunately, your results do not provide any convincing proof of that, since they are determined at least as much by sheer luck as by 'skill'. If you got a good year-end points total, that might have been more through luck than anything else. And even if you earned that good points total through consistently smart decision-making,.... you are likely to have been outscored by numerous other managers, the majority of whom were merely luckier than you; so, your 'Overall Rank' is really no evidence of anything.

So, I say it's unwise to be too results-focused in this game; instead, you should concentrate on the process of the game - on becoming more self-aware about how you make your decisions, and constantly seeking to improve in that.

Here are the elements that I believe you should look at to determine how good you are at playing Fantasy Premier League:

1)  Do you know the rules?  That might seem very obvious - but it is astonishing how many 'casual' players really don't even know the basics, things like what the 'chips' are, and how transfers work. And really, if you're going to be 'good' at the game, you should know the game rules in detail (not just the key rules, but also the subtler underlying ones like how the bonus points allocations are calculated, and what the ranking tiebreakers are), and you should appreciate their implications (such as that the scoring system is heavily biased in favour of midfield players, and against defenders, and hence 3-5-2 should be the preferred default formation).

2)  Do you know something of the history of the game?  And I mean not just the history of FPL, but the broader history of football, particularly of top-flight English football in the Premier League era. It really does help a lot in understanding what's going on now - and what's likely to happen next - if you have some context for how teams and players have changed and developed over time, what the patterns of form and points-returns over different phases of the season tend to be, and how far exceptional players may out-perform statistical averages. One example I especially like is that, although it's a common superstition in FPL that a Double Gameweek is bound to produce an enormous return for the Triple Captain chip, in fact that only happens occasionally (rather less often than with a well-chosen SGW punt), and a 24-year-old Wayne Rooney is the only player in the entire history of the competition to have achieved a double-digit haul in both games of a double-fixture week (well, until last year, when Jean-Philippe Mateta also managed it - but it is very much a 'Black Swan' Event!).

3)  Do you know the schedule (for the entire footballing year)?  Most people seem to be barely aware of the upcoming fixtures on the next match weekend, and few look at anything more than the next few weeks of match-ups (as listed on FPL's Fixture Difficulty Rating list). But the dates for all rounds of the European and domestic cup competitions are set before the start of the season (and until this year, the Club World Cup had been held in December, and sometimes provided another - small but significant - piece of fixture disruption [in fact, that competition still exists, though now rebranded as the Inter-Continental Cup; so, that could still take away one of our top teams in December, when we've won the Champions League at the end of the preceding season]), and if you look at them alongside the League programme, you can see where fixture logjams will occur, when Blank Gameweeks will happen, and when corresponding Double Gameweeks are likely to happen. Moreover, the African and Asian Cups happen in December/January every two years, removing a lot of top players from EPL competition for a month or so in mid-season; that always seems to catch a lot of FPL managers by surprise - but it really shouldn't.

4)  Do you watch a lot of games?  There really is no substitute for that. You cannot play FPL in isolation, purely as a gambling or statistical analysis exercise (well, many people do; but they rarely do very well...); you should always be basing your Fantasy selections on your own understanding of the game, derived from close observation of matches. Broadly speaking, the more football you watch, the better you will become at FPL. (And it's helpful to watch other games outside the Premier League too; the form and confidence and stamina of players and teams can be greatly affected by how they've performed in other competitions - including international appearances.)

5)  Are you a good judge of a player?  This is the core skill that 'Fantasy' games like ours are intended to test. But even this is not a straightforward, single attribute: it involves being able to assess a player's overall skill-set, their strengths and weaknesses, how they may be likely to develop over the coming season or adapt to changes of personnel around them, how they function in their current team and how well that team suits them; and also, how prone they are to injury, or how resilient and swift to recover from knocks they seem to be; and how variable their form is, and what the key indicators of a positive or negative shift in their form are; and then, of course, understanding how their abilities will translate into likely FPL points returns (many great players, particularly defenders and central midfielders, simply don't offer anything in FPL).

6)  Do you understand tactics?  Tactics have a key impact on game outcomes. And they have become increasingly intricate and subtle in recent years, more highly adaptive in-game or from week-to-week, and more quickly and sometimes radically evolving from season to season (or even within the course of one season - especially at Manchester City!). It is no longer possible to properly evaluate a player's attributes and points-potential (my point 5) above) without a shrewd understanding of how well they thrive with their team's current tactics - and how they might be adversely affected by changes in those tactics,... and how well the tactics are likely to work against the tactical set-ups of upcoming opponents. I do strongly recommend studying up on tactics (viewing some of the excellent tactical analysis channels now appearing on Youtube is an easy way to get started), in order to improve your understanding of the game, and hence improve your FPL performance.

7)  Are you highly numerate?  You don't necessarily have to be a maths prodigy to do well at FPL (though it might help!), but you do have to have a very good general 'number sense' - an easy ability to 'see' proportional relationships between figures, to compute simple sums in your head, and so on. There's no getting away from it - so much of the game revolves around mathematical relationships: weighing the highest absolute points returns against the highest points-per-pound returns in apportioning your squad budget, evaluating 'differential advantage' (which has nothing to do with a player's rate of ownership, but is rather a matter of assessing how much of a relative points lift one particular transfer or selection may give you, in comparison to all other possible alternative picks), projecting likely points returns and so assessing the optimum weeks to play your various 'chips' in, judging when it's worth making a transfer - that's all maths. Moreover, most of the statistics you might want to refer to for help (see further point below) cover the entire season (or a series of seasons), and if you're only interested in a shorter run of games, or you need to adjust for the fact that a player you're considering had a long injury absence, you often have to work out per-game averages or recent form figures for yourself. It really is a big, big help in FPL if you can do these sorts of calculations swiftly and accurately in your head - or, sometimes, if you simply have an instinctive (accurate!) awareness of what these figures are, how they relate to one another, and hence what they mean. That's not an ability that many people have. Some specific mathematical knowledge - especially in the areas of statistics and probability (and also in the understanding of odds: the bookmakers aren't a completely accurate and reliable guide to past form or upcoming results, but they are a very useful resource) - is also a significant advantage.

8)  Do you understand statistics, and how to use them?  Sadly, I think almost no-one in the FPL community does - certainly not the majority of online 'gurus' out there. There is a lot to be said about statistics, and how to use them. For now, I'll just caution that statistics - even if used appropriately - are of limited value, because they just don't capture the fine detail of games, the intricacy of real-time interactions between multiple players; the 'eye test' - so long as you're a shrewd, experienced, and careful observer of the game - is always far more valuable. Statistics can be useful - if you know what you're looking for in them,... and always take them with a grain of salt, staying very conscious of their flaws and limitations. It is important to be able to recognise patterns, to have an awareness of which figures might or might not be statistically significant, and in particular to be alert to how far exceptional players are diverging from the mean level of performance. But most of the time, you just see self-styled 'experts' cherry-picking one or two stats in isolation to support a preconceived opinion - you should always be very wary of that. (I think of it as the "Underlying Numbers" Fallacy.)

9)  Are you fully up-to-date with relevant football news?  It really helps to be pretty thoroughly immersed in what's going on with the English Premier League. And that's a big challenge if you're not actually living in England; it is very difficult to stay on top of breaking team news, transfer gossip, injuries, fallings-out between players and managers, scandals and legal problems, etc., etc. if you're in another country (as I am). You have to do your best with the Internet - but that's a time-consuming and often unreliable resource; it's not really any substitute for being readily able to pick up all the latest tidbits of news several times a day through... free newspapers left on the subway, hourly bulletins on the TV or radio, water-cooler conversations at work, bumping into one of the Arsenal physios at Pret-A-Manger...

10)  Do you spend enough time on the game?  If you're going to do well at FPL, you really do have to put in quite a lot of time on it: watching games, checking fixtures, seeking out team news. And it really helps to have disciplined habits about this - to make sure that you're not occasionally skimping on certain key elements of preparation or overlooking key facts,.... or - horror of horrors! - forgetting a Deadline sometimes...! But equally, 'life balance' is important: you should not be spending too much time on the game either - that easily becomes counter-productive, leading to you becoming mired in 'over-thinking' (stop that, Pep!). There is a 'right' amount of time and effort to devote to this game, a happy medium: try to find that sweet spot.

11)  Are you self-aware?  In this early post on the blog, I outlined the main reasons why people tend to be bad at FPL. We all have cognitive biases, personal prejudices, sentimental impulses, non-rational superstitions, etc. which lead us to be unduly indulgent towards some players and teams, but resistant to recognising the merits of others. We can't ever expect to completely eradicate these natural, inevitable human flaws in our thinking and decision-making, but we can at least strive to be aware of them and to fight against their influence over us. One of the greatest of these universal weaknesses is the reluctance to recognise that we've been wrong. If you can become more open to the fact that you are fallible, to recognising and accepting your mistakes, and trying to learn from them - then, you can get better at FPL,... rather than just making the same kinds of mistakes over and over again (which is, alas, what most people do - in FPL, and in Life...).

12)  Are you relentlessly eager to improve?  This is not the same as competitiveness; in fact, it is somewhat antithetical to that. Competitiveness tends to be externally focused, concerned simply with attaining some arbitrary target - whether that is reaching a points goal or defeating a particular individual. A genuine desire for constant improvement has no end-goal, it is focused internally, it looks at the activity or process itself, rather than its interim outcomes. Such a desire to strive towards an unattainable 'perfection' is intrinsic to a certain personality type, and it is very difficult to cultivate if it is not naturally in you; but it is not impossible, and you can make progress with dedicated effort. And this, I believe, is THE MOST IMPORTANT factor in becoming a 'successful' FPL manager. People who just say, "I want to win my mini-league,... and that's enough for me." or "I want to finish in the top 100,000,.... and that's enough for me." or "I want to reach x points for the season,... and that's enough for me." will never become truly great managers in the game because their motivation is too limited, too weak, the fire does not burn strongly enough in them, the will to excellence is not there.

If you can honestly answer YES to all of these self-directed questions,.... then you are a GOOD FPL Manager - regardless of your current points total or rank.

But it's extremely unlikely that anyone can truthfully tick all of these boxes with absolute assurance (I know I sometimes come up short on a few!!). What this LIST is actually seeking to show you is that you're not 'good' yet - but this is what you need to do to become better.

The Eternal Quest

I said a little while back that I would attempt to produce a comprehensive but simple guide to the elements that I think make up a 'Good FPL Manager' [added a couple of days later].

I already wrote something of the sort at the start of the season, but I want to revisit that idea now - and, hopefully, come up with more of a checklist that people can measure themselves against.

I have also previously offered some guidance on what I think various points thresholds tend to indicate about a manager's level of ability (though that's a crude, inexact measure). and suggested some external objectives you might use as a gauge of progress and a source of motivation: tallying a personal head-to-head (even if not formally entered in such a league) against key rivals, or against people you've identified as being consistently impressive managers; seeing how well you can do in a small or mid-sized mini-league that seems to offer a high standard of competition; or forming a mini-league of your own to compete against friends, family members, neighbours, co-workers, etc.

However, that kind of thing is really just for fun, to help boost your motivation and enjoyment. And there is a danger that it can become too much of a distraction from The True Path.

Because The True Path is not about any external goals; it is about focusing on the process - becoming aware of how you make your decisions, and striving to become better at that. You don't need any external benchmarks to achieve this. Obsessing over 'rank' or points totals is a dangerous waste of time and effort; most of the time, it simply leads you into making worse decisions.

My full post on this should appear in a day or two.

 

Luck-o-Meter (36)

 

The rate of injuries has slowed somewhat in recent weeks, but a greater incidence of fatigue, nerves, perhaps occasional complacency or dipping in motivation, and a preoccupation, for some, with the final rounds of the European competitions, has meant that already over the past few gameweeks we've seen more and more bizarre swings in form and unexpected results. The tail-end of the season becomes even more of a lottery than usual. 

And Manchester United, Spurs, Chelsea, and Arsenal are likely to be a bit tired - mentally as much as physically - by their European exertions this midweek. Eccentric coaching decisions and incompetent refereeing may add even more to these uncertainties.... Will they this week? Let's see.

And, oh dear, we are in the dog days of the season, aren't we? Mental and physical fatigue is taking its toll, and we're likely to see more and more woefully dull games. Saturday brought a whole clutch of embarrassing snoozefests.

Everton started poorly at Fulham, and were lucky that the home side failed to capitalise on the period of dominance they enjoyed following Raul's early breakthrough. A deflected Mykolenko shot gave Everton a toe-hold in the game on the stroke of half-time, and they improved strongly through the second half. The main talking point, though, in a very mid-table kind of game, was Darren England's near-unique sticking by his original call after a visit to the VAR monitor; it is very gratifying to see a ref not being prejudiced into reversing his initial decision by a VAR intervention (and here, it felt like the right call: Traore fired the ball at Mykolenko from very close range, and he was clearly trying to pull his arm out of the way of the ball, not reaching towards it).

Usually prolific Brentford only managed a solitary goal against dogged Ipswich? More FPL woe! And it fell to their overlooked third striker, Kevin Schade, rather than the more fancied Wissa and Mbeumo? Double woe!! And Brentford really should have got a penalty on a previous attempt to take that corner, when Greaves wrestled Van den Berg to the ground, but VAR didn't see enough to intervene. So, the goal should by rights have been penalty-taker Mbeumo's.... Thrice and four times woe!!! They really should have had two more penalties, either side of half-time, when Schade was clearly held when receiving Mbeumo's incisive pass, and then when Collins was rugby-tackled to the ground at a corner - VAR adopting a far too lenient attitude to 'holding' in the box, which led to increasingly extravagant wrestling from both sides at set pieces. Ipswich very nearly nicked a result, with three good chances falling to them in a flurry of late pressure.

Southampton produced a tediously unadventurous but impressively dogged display to frustrate an uninspired Manchester City. It would be tempting to say that Haaland was ring-rusty after nearly two months out of the game, but in fact he looked pretty sharp (winning a lot of high balls beyond the far post and heading them back into the six-yard box... where no-one was ever following up); it was more a case of the rest of the team having apparently forgotten how to play with him. Pep's selections were a bit of a head-scratcher as well; City looked far more dangerous once they brought on the likes of Doku, O'Reilly, Savinho, and Marmoush (who crashed a thumping shot on to the crossbar within minutes of coming on at the very end of the game), and you suspect they could have broken Southampton down if they'd been on from the start. The home side were maybe a little fortunate to get away with a couple of shoves in the penalty area, but in both cases the City players didn't help their appeal by going down so heavily under fairly trivial contact. The last quarter of an hour (half of that, amazingly, added on) actually became quite tense and exciting, as every football fan in the world other than City supporters was praying for the minnows to hang on to their hard-earned draw. (And it's hard not to indulge in a little schadenfreude at all the naive FPL managers who brought in Haaland and/or DeBruyne this week - often at the expense of far more reliable producers like Salah and Isak! It is dangerous to chase week-by-week points from a 'soft fixture'!)

Wolves were yet another team who were strangely flat this Saturday. On recent form, you would have fancied them to spank Brighton quite comfortably - but they rarely got in the game (a solitary low shot from the edge of the box from Cunha being well turned away by Verbruggen early in the second half). A particularly rough day for fans of the recently popular Matheus Cunha (over 15% ownership in FPL), who conceded a penalty (WHY was he playing in the back line???), got booked for it (and maybe was fortunate not to get a red card: if it was a deliberate foul [though I think you could take the view that it was just a clumsy late swish at the ball rather than an attempted trip; and he barely made contact with his toe on the side of the attacker's shin], it was surely also a 'denial of a goal-scoring opportunity'?), and was then subbed off just shy of the hour - for a nul-pointer. Cruel, cruel game!

Bournemouth were perhaps a little unlucky not to get at least a point out of their game, but their finishing just wasn't good enough: Semenyo drilled a shot just wide of the post, and right at the death, substitute Jebbison somehow managed to head over the bar from a yard or so out. Early in the game, Asensio had hit a firm shot against the foot of the post. That was about it - Watkins's solitary goal came 'out of nothing'; there was no sustained pressure from either side. Tyrone Mings was lucky to escape a red card for breaking Alex Scott's jaw; the collision did look 'accidental', but when you catch a guy in the face with your elbow, at speed, you can expect to be penalised most of the time.

Chelsea, too, were a shadow of the side that embarrassed Liverpool last week - perhaps somewhat flummoxed by Howe's crafty decision to line up with a back-three. Newcastle, however, were lacking a cutting-edge themselves, and failed to capitalise on Tonali's early breakthrough goal - even after Chelsea had been reduced to 10 men. Indeed, Chelsea grew into the game through the second half, and were piling on some worrying pressure during the last 20 minutes - until Bruno G pinged in a dipper from just outside the box with a few minutes left. There can't be any dispute about Jackson's sending-off: he clearly had a look at where Botman was, and then charged into him, leading with his elbow. It was such an ugly foul, so obviously committed with intent, that I wouldn't be at all surprised if the FA add another game or two to his mandatory three-match suspension, for exceptionally dangerous play. The only surprise here was that referee John Brooks initially gave the foul only a yellow card; and that it then took such an inordinately long time for VAR to recommend a second look,.... and then that the second look also seemed to take him forever. It was such an obvious and clearcut red card - what on earth was the problem?? (Some of the offside checks have been taking well over a minute lately too - even when there's no close call to be determined. Something amiss with the technology, it would seem.) Later on, VAR declined to intervene when James shoved Gordon to the ground in the box; Gordon was perhaps suffering for having got himself a reputation as someone who goes looking for fouls in the box a bit too obviously, but here James clearly shoulder-charged him in the back - and it was definitely at least worth a second look.

A lot of surprises at the City Ground: a rare-ish goal - a very, very rare headed goal! - from Morgan Gibbs-White (the blocking defender standing nearly 15 yards back from Elanga's touchline free-kick was a big help with that - but that appeared to be his decision, rather than a referee's instruction); Chris Wood, somewhat out of form over the past couple of months, suddenly coming up with a superb diving header; a surprisingly tough performance from relegated Leicester, but still no 200th goal for Jamie Vardy; and then a late equaliser from Buonanotte, to devastate Forest's Champions League hopes.

West Ham finally seemed to be clicking under Graham Potter at Old Trafford, playing with passion and cohesion to end a long winless drought. But it was only against United, who seem to be getting progressively more dire with each passing week. Ruben Amorim's relentless negativity in post-match interviews is now extending to admitting that United don't deserve to be in next season's Champions League if they play like this - which, while obviously true, isn't the sort of thing that the fans like to hear, or that serves any useful purpose. His gloom now even extends to his own prospects in the job, acknowledging that maybe someone should replace him if he can't quickly re-instil a winning mentality in this shambolic team - not clear if he's asking to be sacked, or acknowledging that he's under the threat of it, but again.... not the sort of thing it's encouraging for players or fans to hear at this point.

Rotations ahead of looming Cup Finals for Spurs and Palace were perhaps not as bad as might have been feared: Glasner gave recently-back-from-injury Adam Wharton the day off, but otherwise went with his best eleven, including Eze. Postecoglou put in back-up keeper Kinsky (though that might possibly be a permanent, form-related change?), though he yanked Betancur at half-time, and Porro just minutes shy of the hour - sore vexation for any FPL managers foolhardy enough to still hold any Spurs players! Sarr's tap-in of a great Munoz square-ball across the six-yard box to give Palace an apparent early lead was laboriously ruled out by VAR for a highly questionable offside: ultimately the computer graphic picture showed Mateta ostensibly offside at the start of the move, but.... only by a matter of inches/centimetres, which - I think - is always too close for any technology to convincingly adjudicate (and it was his upper arm only, an area which gets a very subjective and inconsistent interpretation in handball decisions!), and he was standing in his own half at the time, so his upper-arm being in the opponent's half could only be a presumed 'offside' if all the opposing outfield players were in the Palace half.... which I'm not at all convinced of, because by the time he actually received the ball, barely a second later, there were at least three Spurs defenders well back in their own half, all ahead of Mateta. Moments later, the constantly dangerous (because Spurs were consistently omitting to mark him at all) Munoz blasted a shot off the top of the crossbar - bitter frustration for the rather less foolhardy FPL enthusiasts who still have these very popular Palace assets from their recent double gameweeks. At least Ebere Eze came up with two slick finishes to make the result safe - and claim the FPL 'Player of the Week' crown. But Palace really had been rather profligate with their chances: Spurs were so ragged and disorganised here that the visitors might easily have won 5-0 or 6-0. I can't see Big Ange keeping his job now, even if he does sneak into next season's Champions League.

Liverpool v Arsenal wasn't quite the great game we might have hoped for, but there was at least enough excitement in it to brighten up what had been a thoroughly dull weekend of football. Salah blanked (although he had a lively game.... and really ought to get some credit for the sublime 'pre-assist' for the second goal!). The home side went 2-0 up in the first 20 minutes, but then allowed a much improved Arsenal back into the game in the second half - even the great Van Dijk went to sleep and allowed Martinelli to ghost in behind him for an unopposed glancing header. Lots more strangeness in the game: Saka beating an offside trap early on, but then missing a sitter; Alexander-Arnold narrowly playing Merino on for the equaliser; Merino getting himself sent off for two silly fouls; Robertson blazing a great chance for a late winner wide, then having an apparent winner ruled out shortly afterwards (either for a very, very marginal offside, or for a soft foul by Konate - not clear which, and either seemed a bit unjust); in between which decisive moments, Odegaard also had a chance on a counter-attack, but scuffed his effort narrowly wide of the post.

Oh my god - if there was a Razzie for 'The Worst EPL Gameweek of All-Time', this one would surely at least have to be on the shortlist. Gary Lineker joked on the Beeb that it had been the most boring Saturday he could remember in 26 years of presenting 'Match of the Day'; and Sunday wasn't really much better, was it? It's difficult to point to any team that produced a really good performance (Southampton's spoiling display against City perhaps; that was the emotional highlight of a drab weekend, anyway), and just about half of them were really, really poor. For the third Gameweek running, the 'global average' score was stuck down in the 40s, and very, very few people were managing any better than 60 points. Almost all of the most fancied players (including leading 'sheep picks' for the week, DeBruyne and Haaland) came up blank. The 'Team of the Week' includes FOUR defenders, has Ramsdale in goal, and features such low-owned surprises as Gibbs-White, Soucek, Tonali, Schade, and Raul.

There were a couple of penalties and red cards missed, and a few very tight offsides (the Mateta/Munoz/Sarr one to me looked certainly unjust and almost certainly wrong); but the officiating problems this week were mainly about taking too long to reach the right decision rather than making a lot of wrong ones; it was actually one of the better weeks we've had from the refs and VAR.

Only looking just about a 5 out of 10 on the 'Luck-o-Meter' this time, and mainly for the flurry of disappointing player and team performances.

DON'T FORGET The Boycott.  Most people will have played the dratted 'Assistant Manager' chip by now; but if you haven't.... this is the last week that you could refuse to do so!  I took the high road by quitting playing the game for the rest of the season when it was introduced in GW23. [I worry that, if people don't protest vociferously about it, the new chip may become a permanent feature of the game - and it will completely ruin it.]  If you didn't feel able to join me in such an emphatic gesture, I hope you at least thought about refusing to use the Assistant Manager chip (and still might refuse, if you've kept it till the last few gameweeks of the season).

Please also criticise and complain about it online as much as possible. And raise objections to it with any football or media figures you know how to contact, and - if possible - try to find a way to protest about it directly to the FPL hierarchy (and let me know how, if you manage that!).

#QuitFPLinGW23         #DownWithTheNewChip

Dilemmas of the Week - GW36

Goodness me - we seem to have yet again been spared many new injuries this week...  It really isn't often we get so fortunate - especially at this tail-end of the football year.

Nevertheless, 'form' always becomes more and more unpredictable in the closing weeks of the season...  And with Manchester United and Spurs now facing each other in the Europa League Final (which, this season, is unhappily scheduled between EPL Gameweeks 37 and 38) - and not having anything to play for in the League any more (except avoiding the ignominy of finishing below the other...) - I imagine they're going to be concentrating their focus on that, and not putting forth much effort in their remaining League games. Arsenal, however, after being narrowly bested by Paris St Germain in the Champions League Semi-Final on Thursday night, can now give all their attention to trying to finish as strongly as possible in the League; something that might perhaps have been in doubt, if they'd had a Final to prepare for over the next few weeks. Also, of course, Palace are playing City in the FA Cup Final next Saturday, so are quite likely to be resting a few key players (but which ones, and how much???) this weekend.

But at least we've been spared having any more blank and double gameweeks to have to worry about, as the fixtures missed next weekend for the Cup Final have simply been moved back a few days into the following week, and remain part of Gameweek 37,

I am trying to streamline these weekly round-ups, aiming to confine myself to just the injuries to players that are likely to have a major significance in FPL; and also, of course, only to new injuries - I figure everyone should be aware of players who were already ruled out for the last gameweek! [I currently find the 'Injuries & Bans' summary on Fantasy Football Scout the most reliable resource for this kind of information - go check that out for more comprehensive coverage.]

So, what are the conundrums we face ahead of Gameweek 36?

Does anybody need to be moved out because of injury?

The big news of the week seems to be that the recently excellent (though barely owned!) Youri Tielemans has picked up a muscle injury that seems likely to keep him out for the rest of the season.

Poor Solly March of Brighton missed last week's game because of a new knee problem, and Bournemouth's Dango Ouattara has a groin strain - though apparently not too serious (and nobody has him any more, anyway).

Christopher Nkunku missed last week's win over Liverpool - and both the Europa Conference semi-finals - because of an unspecified knock; originally not thought serious, but now it seems doubtful that he'll be available again before the end of the season.

Adam Wharton suffered a twisted ankle against Forest last week, but Glasner is hopeful he'll be OK for this weekend. (One of those where nobody has him, but Eze's and Mateta's prospects look much better with him playing behind them.)

Timothy Castagne has had to have surgery on a recurring ankle problem this week, so will be out until next season. (At least Fulham have Kenny Tete available again now, who might be a better choice anyway.)

Matthijs de Ligt had to come off with a muscle problem against Brentford last week; not thought to be too serious, but has been ruled out of this weekend.

Kieran Trippier and Fabian Schar suffered muscle soreness in last week's game; might have been just cramp or fatigue rather than a strain, but Eddie Howe was evasive  about whether they'd be OK for this week.

Murillo had to come off against Palace with an apparent hamstring strain, but Nuno claims to be hopeful that he'll be back this week; this could have a big impact on Forest's prospects over the run-in.

And at Spurs it has been announced that injuries picked up 10 days ago by Lucas Bergvall (ankle) and James Maddison (knee) are going to keep them out for the season (although I wonder if Maddison isn't just pissed off with the way he's been treated by Postecoglou and put in for a transfer).

At Wolves, though, Jørgen Strand Larsen, who was a last-minute precautionary withdrawal a week ago because of a groin strain, looks as though he might be back in the side this week - although 80,000 of his owners have given up on him already since last Friday! (And, amazingly, despite having clocked 6 goals and 42 points in the previous 6 games, his ownership was barely above 4% anyway.... What??)

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

Joao Pedro and Leif Davis are serving the last instalment of their three-match bans this week. But - remarkably - there are no new suspensions to worry about. 

Did anyone give other cause to consider dropping them?

West Ham under Potter have joined Spurs in the 'embarrassment to watch' category - though at least Jarrod Bowen continues to provide occasional bright spots for them.

Oh, and Arne Slot has indicated that he wants to give Conor Bradley more minutes, and will probably be starting him ahead of Trent Alexander-Arnold this week. That shouldn't be any great surprise to anyone. (However, I suspect Trent is still likely to be allowed an emotional Anfield farewell in the game against Palace on the final Saturday.)

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

Well, this may be a tad premature, but... I think Mason Mount has looked absolutely outstanding since his return: he really has the air of a player hungry to make his mark again after two seasons on the sidelines. Amad Diallo looked lively on his (earlier than expected!) return too. It's a pity they're stuck in an absolutely woeful Manchester United side....

And, of course, Kevin DeBruyne and Cole Palmer are starting to attract a lot of interest again - though that's probably sentiment getting the better of people. Chelsea have a tricky run-in, and KDB can't be relied on to be capable of full minutes, or big performances, in all three of the remaining games.

Most people must surely have used the 'Assistant Manager' chip by now. (It was never actually specified in the 'rules' for this chip if it would cease to be available in GW37 if you hadn't activated it yet...) Anyone who hasn't must surely have forgotten about it. (Or wasn't aware of it. Or couldn't understand it. Or thought it was too much hassle to work around the other chips...) With the increasing unpredictability of results in the closing weeks of the season, it really shouldn't be a good time to play a chip based on team results anyway; and most of the top teams actually have quite tough run-ins, so there aren't many secure wins in prospect even for the biggest names, and certainly no huge margins of victory or easy clean sheets likely; moreover, most of the stronger teams at the lower end of the table have recovered so well in the past month or two that they no longer have many table-bonus prospects (Wolves and Spurs might have been expected to have one this week, but... no). Brentford, Manchester City, and maybe Wolves look the likeliest prospects for a big win - though maybe not a clean sheet...? - this week. If you're chasing a table-bonus, Leicester seem the only slim prospect of that; Midlands derbies do often produce an upset, and Forest have been faltering in the last few games - and Vardy looks hungry to rack up his 200th goal for his club; I doubt Leicester can win it, but maybe they can snatch a draw.

BEST OF LUCK, EVERYONE!

AND PLEASE DON'T FORGET The Boycott; though I'm willing to comment on its possible use, I actually loathe the pointless innovation of the 'Assistant Manager' chip - and I have been urging people to please consider quitting the game, or at least refusing to use the chip, in protest. 

But if you couldn't bring yourself to do either of those things, please do criticise the Assistant Manager chip as vigorously as possible on any relevant social media channels you use, raise objections to it with any football or media figures you know how to contact, and - if possible - try to find a way to protest about it directly to the FPL hierarchy (and let me know how, if you manage that!).

#QuitFPLinGW23         #DownWithTheNewChip 

Sheep Picks (13)

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 deangerously over-owned, are the subject of a sudden and misguided enthusiasm.

I wasn't expecting to have to nominate anyone in Gameweek 36, but - strangely, amazingly - there are quite a few players gaining a fair old flood of new owners this week; and the most curious of these selections is surely Josko Gvardiol. As of Friday morning, he's already reached 200,000 transfers-in for the week, with more than 24 hours to go before the Gameweek deadline; that puts him neck-and-neck with Bryan Mbeumo, not far behind Yoane Wissa, and miles ahead of Chris Wood and Matheus Cunha (though trailing in the dust of his illustrious teammate, Kevin DeBruyne) - all of whom (including KDB) I find far more justifiable picks.

Now, yes, Pep does seem to have ironed out many of Manchester City's problems, has got them looking reasonably dangerous again (though still far from impregnable, and a pale shadow of what they were last season). And the big Croatian has been playing very well of late: in fact, thanks to the recently faltering form of formerly strong defensive sides like Forest, Bournemouth, and Palace, he's just managed to edge into the Top Three of the FPL defender rankings (his best placing of the season, I think; he's usually only ever been hovering around the Top Five briefly, when he's just scored a goal - and has quite often dropped well out of the Top Ten...). And yes, they are facing Southampton this weekend - which could be an invitation to a spectacular goalfest.

However, City's final two fixtures - Bournemouth and Fulham - aren't at all straightforward: a win in those games can't be guaranteed, and I wouldn't be betting on City keeping a clean sheet in either of them. (And, since Gvardiol is currently playing in the centre of defence, he's not terribly likely to pick up points for anything else...)  Even Southampton shouldn't be taken for granted: they are the only one of the promoted sides to really show some steel - and some threat - over the past month or so, with their big striker, Paul Onuachu, in particular, looking quite dangerous. City will surely win that one, and win it quite comfortably; but the clean sheet might elude them.

Frankly, I think I'd still rather have almost any of the other top fifteen or so FPL defenders of the moment than Gvardiol. In addition to the consistently dependable-in-defence Forest and Liverpool, Wolves are in very impressive form and have an invitingly soft run-in, while Everton, West Ham, and Brentford might also offer some tempting defensive options because of their fixtures.

But the key problem with acquiring Gvardiol now is not whether he's any good (he is; but he's not clearly the best prospect in his position, and he's too damned expensive!), or whether City's form has convincingly turned around (I still have a few doubts on that), or how good their remaining fixture-run is (I'd call it just so-so) - but.... WHY DON'T YOU HAVE HIM ALREADY??  He's just kept 4 clean sheets in the last 6 games! He's just had a Double Gameweek!! Surely everyone who fancied him (and/or City) for the closing phase of the season should have already brought him in at least a few weeks ago???

Maybe people moved him out for his Blank in GW34, and are now moving him back?? It's a terrible waste of transfers to do short-term swapsies like that, particularly for such an expensive player (and one who's gone up in price so much, meaning that you might lose quite a bit of money on him via the dreaded 'transfer tax'). But some people don't know what they're doing....

And maybe some are only just using their Wildcard this week, and thinking they can bring in a bunch of players primarily for this week's fixtures. Though with a Wildcard rebuild, you really have to consider the whole upcoming fixture-run, not just the juicy opponent this week. And in any case, the Wildcard should really have been dropped before now (ideally, two weeks ago...). Some people don't know what they're doing.

But if you haven't got the luxury of a Wildcard rebuild to deploy this late in the season,... and you haven't got a bunch of saved 'Free Transfers' burning a hole in your pocket,.... if, like most people, you've just got your one cost-free transfer of the week to use,.... at this stage of the season, when fatigue and injuries can take such a toll and last-minute dropouts threaten every week, you really need to just roll your transfers for possible emergency fire-fighting (you might find yourself without 2 or 3 starters next week!).

'Elective transfers' are an extravagance you can rarely afford to indulge; and in the closing weeks of the season, they are positively reckless. And burning a transfer on a defender,.... just because they have one 'good' fixture....?  That is absolutely, certifiably NUTS!

A little bit of Zen (41)

 

“To live only for some future goal is shallow. It's the sides of the mountain that sustain life, not the top.”

Robert M. Pirsig 

The OTHER kind of 'Form'

A couple of days ago, I tried to produce a helpful analysis of what should properly be understood by the often dangerously nebulous term 'form', in which I highlighted the importance of relating individual form to team form, and also suggested that it is useful to view 'form' in different categories - across three different timeframes.

It now occurs to me that there is another, completely separate - rather weird - type of 'form' which is often discussed as being potentially relevant to FPL: a player's record against a specific club.

I am very sceptical as to whether there's any value in this:

1)  The supposed correlations that many FPL fans crow about are rarely statistically significant. (Perhaps a player has had 3 decent hauls in his last 5 outings against a particular club... But he's a fairly prolific player who usually manages at least 2 from 5 against almost everyone, so....??  If he blanks in this next one, it may suddenly look like he has a worse-than-average record against this club rather than a better one!)

2)  As I commented in the earlier post on the shortcomings of FPL's 'Form' statistic, these numbers don't take any account of the particular circumstances that led to hauls (or blanks) over a series of games. Often, the figures cited don't even distinguish between home and away games. They certainly don't deign to remind you if key players were missing from either side in certain fixtures, or only recently back from injury, or if a big - possibly wrong - refereeing call distorted the game outcome.

3)  'Historical trends' are unconvincing, because so much changes over time. Even the player you're focusing on will have developed his skills in certain areas, perhaps radically changed his style of play in some aspects; but also he'll have aged and suffered injuries, very possibly he's become at least a little less incisive than he was four or five years ago. There may also have been huge turnover among his teammates, and/or one or more changes of manager at his club - and hence a major shift in the team's style of play.  And of course, that also goes for the opponents. Beyond the last 2 or 3 seasons, you can't expect these player-against-club records to be revealing of anything very much at all.

However, I do allow a small amount of credence to the potential significance in such a 'successful trend'. While I think it's mostly a dangerous superstition, there are a few instances in which there might be something to it.

Primary goalscorers, we know, are very susceptible to 'vibes': if they can discern a possible 'trend' for scoring more often against a particular club, that may inspire better performances from them against that club and become a self-fulfilling prophecy. And that can be particularly the case with fixtures that are especially emotionally-charged: derby games, or matches against your strongest traditional rivals/enemies.  As we see in the table above, Mo Salah does 'like' to score against Manchester United! (However, even with that fairly strong trend, I would counter that a large part of Salah's record here can be attributed simply to the fact that United have been mostly pretty awful for the last several years. If they were suddenly to turn things around and start looking a strong defensive side again, a formidable opponent, his previous record against them would be much less persuasive.)

Sometimes, though, these emotional lifts to performance may come from circumstances external to the history of the fixture between the two clubs. The phenomenon of players - and not just goalscorers, but players in every position - rousing themselves to a match-winning performance against a former club (especially if it's a club they've only recently parted from, and on less than amicable terms) is very pronounced; and I tend to put more weight on that in considering FPL selections than on whether Player X often has a good game in the derby.  And few visiting teams come away with anything from Anfield on the weekend that the Hillsborough disaster is commemorated: the emotion of the crowd on that day is utterly overwhelming, and the home players too usually seem fired up to honour the victims with a particularly powerful performance.

So, yes, 'history' does count for something, sometimes; but not for nearly as much as the majority of FPL pundits try to make out - with their comparisons of every player's average haul against every opponent since the dawn of time.....  Charts like that, you can usually ignore.

The ONE GREAT TRUTH

The point of the game is to pick who you think are the best players. And then see how well you did.

Sometimes it goes well; sometimes it goes badly.

Those outcomes are mostly the result of luck - so, you shouldn't fret over poor outcomes (or feel smug over good ones!), But the outcomes can also give you some hints as to how accurate your judgement of the players was. If you can recognise where your judgements were mistaken, and why that happened - you can get better. That is the purpose of the game.

It has NOTHING to do with 'rank'. People who obsess over their 'Overall Rank' position have fallen victim to a sad delusion. How many points you get has little to do with how good you are; how many other people get more points than you has nothing to do with how good you are.

You should focus only on trying to choose the best players, self-analysing your mistakes and weaknesses, seeking a path to become better in your selections. That is all.

As Dogen Zenji said, "The practice is the goal."