The FPL thread: discussing the highs and lows of fantasy football, and tactics for the run in.

[booze and cake]

My problem us that I pick players because I like them, not because they are necessarily any good. I had Shay Given in nets and Gary Holt as my captain a couple of seasons ago. I think Rickie Lambert was vice captain.

The Townsend thing is a bit of a mystery. I think it's because he looked the only vaguely interested Newcastle player for a while.

Yeah I understand that, I have an Ipswich Town supporting mate who always puts in ex Ipswich players, and if he could'nt get a 11 out of that he'd use ex Championship players in his fantasy team....and then wondered why he was doing so rubbish, if he could have Darren Bent in his team tomorrow he would. I kind of admired the dedication but its not going to successful.

I always have favourites (Mane the last few years) and also players I refuse to have. For years playing the Telegraph game I refused to have Drogba in my team, as I despised the constant diving and conning refs. For such a strapping 6ft 2in bloke to repeatedly fall over in so much as gentle breeze, was just too embarrassing to watch. The 2nd clip on the following link of some of his 'specials' made my blood boil for weeks.
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/sport/fo...ogba-some-of-his-most-melodramatic-dives.html

However fantasy footy is a cruel game and I think the following year was his glory season when he was smashing in goals from all over the place, and after having avoided him most of the year I caved and got into my team. I felt so dirty about it, I'd sacrificed my principles for short term fantasy football progress, it clearly still haunts me!

 

[AndyRM]

No sacrifice, no victory.

 

[booze and cake]

Here's some other links I use that other FPL'ers may find worthy of bookmarking. I find these colour coded fixture grids useful when looking at upcoming fixtures and planning future transfers, green fixtures are stand out easy ones.

http://fantasyfootball247.co.uk/fixture-tracker/

The 2nd grid has until the end of the season. I like the look of Liverpool's and Man City's run in so plan to get some more of them in.

If you use Chrome as a browser you can also install 'Better FPL' which is a free extension which shows on your FPL team page your players' next 5 fixtures, so kind of like the above but it gives you a good at a glance look at your teams short term fixtures.

I'm not sure but I think you can see it when you look at my team, here's the link to my team page.
https://fantasy.premierleague.com/a/team/353648/event/25

And I like this site for an overview of how well or bad you've done so far with some useful headline stats. There is always a stat on here I find I'm disappointed with!

https://www.gargatron.com/

To use it you need to enter your FPL id, which is shown on the web page address bar when you are logged in on the FPL site, and you click on the 'view gameweek history' button. So mine from my team link above is 353648, enter yours, and voila!

In Fantasy news City's Gabriel Jesus has broken a metatarsal, so looks set for a spell on the sidelines, min 4 weeks, 6 weeks out? Either way sell if you have him. Jesus has a history of coming back at Easter though .

So Aguero seems back in play (I rage transferred him out after his 2nd benching the other week), though I think Pep really does'nt like him and he seems destined to leave in the summer. That seems mad, surely any team in the league would have him in a heartbeat.

I'm glad I sold Ibra and Sanchez, the former has dropped in price once already this week and Sanchez is due to drop tonight. I think they'll both drop at least once more before next week.

Lovren is still an injury doubt so I'm all set to play my All Out Attack chip this coming week, allowing me to play a 2-5-3 formation. I think with lots of people benching the likes of Ibra and Sanchez this week, its a good opportunity to use the least valuable chip in week I don't think many will use it, and I have a decent front 8 with decent fixtures next week.

Barring any injuries in the FA Cup this weekend, here's my team for gw 26, the teams in brackets are who they are playing, upper case games at home, lower case games away.

All out attack chip played! 2-5-3 formation for a week.
Jakupovic (BUR) on bench- Foster (BOU)
Coleman (SUN), Nyom (BOU) on Bench: Lovren-injured, Valencia & Cedric-no fixture in gw26
Philips (BOU), Barkley (SUN), Alli (STK), Pedro (SWA), Mane (Lei)
Costa (SWA), Kane (STK), Barnes (Hul)

I'm hopeful of a good score, but this game has a habit of punishing me when I get that feeling.

 

[AndyRM]

I have a huge amount of respect for the effort you put into this @booze and cake. It directly contrasts my own.

 

[booze and cake]

Ha thanks, though I'm well aware it can also look more than a little tragic

 

[Roadhump]

A strange week this week as there are only 4 PL fixtures and therefore many fantasy league teams will not have a full 11 players to field. A mate of mine who is in a another league with me, said he had a full 11 players to put out, but I have just checked and he has 3, not sure if I have missed something.

I have managed to put 9 out by selling Costa and buying Lukaku, then swapping to and from the bench. I checked and saw that Phillips from West Brom is out injured and I had no one to replace him with so I decided to sacrifice 4 points and take a chance on Chadli which is a bit of a gamble, I have to hope he scores 4 points or more to make it worthwhile, and as he is playing against Everton today and as I am an Evertonian, I hope my gamble doesn't pay off, but may as well cover as many angles as possible.

 

[Pro Tour Punditry]

Are any of my players still turning out on a regular basis, or have they all buggered off to the Taiwanese 3rd division?

 

[booze and cake]

Alas I did'nt managed to keep this thread updated, but the season is over and it all went great for me and I finished with my highest ever FPL rank of 3,300 overall out of 4.5m, so I was in the top 0.08% of managers, and was well pleased with that. It looks like some of our league gave up but there was a good scrap for the top 4 and it was surprising how some seemingly un-managed teams stayed quite high up our league.

I think the wildcard before a double game week to load up on players playing two games in a week proved to be a great success, and I'll probably do that again next year. I had originally planned to use the triple captain chip on a double game week, the early double game week Aguero had two easy games and was a popular triple captain pick. I did'nt fancy it so resisted. I think the next most popular option was triple captaining Sanchez in their double game week 36, but Arsenal had'nt looked great so I dodged that too.

I did have a disastrous first double gw, gw34. I had watched Arsenal V Boro in week 33, and tho Boro lost, they played well, and they had 2 decent fixtures with Bournemouth and Sunderland in gw34. I had planned to wildcard in gw35 and stock up on a full squad of 15 players who had two games each in gw37 and half the team with 2 games in gw36 too.

So thought I'd take a major punt and bring in 3 Boro players before getting rid of then all in the wildcard, I brought in attacking defender Baragan, dribbling assist hopeful Ramirez and Negredo up front, who I captained......Unfortunately Ramirez got sent off in the first game, scoring minus 2 points and was therefore banned from playing the 2nd game, Baragan got injured in the first 15 minutes of the first game and was subbed off and did'nt play in the 2nd game, and Negredo did play but did nothing both games. A spectacular nosedive into the sea and a reminder how cruel the game can be.

I rallied after this though, I wildcarded in gw35 and only got a lowly score of 46, but it was a really low scoring week so not much damage was done overall, and the team was nicely set for the final 3 games where I had great scores of 88 in gw36, an amazing 177 points for the big double gw37 thanks to captaining Kane for his 4 goals, and I played my triple captain on form man and golden boot hunter, 'Arry Kane, who blasted in a hatrick in the final game to score me an amazing 121 points for a single game week, which I'm sure is a record for me.

I thoroughly enjoyed it and hope we have another league next year and I shall try and defend the title. Have a good summer break everyone, roll on August.

 

[mark st1]

See you there. Well played

 

[Roadhump]

You have obviously put a lot of thought into it and it paid off, well done. I did well in my other leagues, but couldn't even get hear your coat tails to hang on to, so hope to try a few of the tactics you told us about in the OP. Agree about next season, looking forward to it.