Newsletter: GW11
It's December already...
Welcome to the post-Gameweek 11 edition of my regular “updates” series.
Fantrax players: Risers / Fallers
Interesting Gameweek matchups
“Home League” Update
A reading list of interesting things (at the very bottom)
December already. It feels like only yesterday I was sat writing about the draft. We’re about to go into the hardest part of the Fantrax season. Last year, I went into December in second in my Home League, then a series of injuries to basically all my strikers left me adrift through the barrage of games. I never really recovered in the standings from the six straight losses I took in December (or from selecting Firmino and Aguero as my strikers)!
I’m hoping to be able to continue to put out output through the festive period this time around, though with fixtures every three days in the second half of the month, there’s every chance I may have to play around with format a bit to make sure that I’m still getting timely information out. There’ll likely be a mix of these Newsletter items and Twitter posts, so if you don’t follow on Twitter, I’d recommend finding my account there too!
Lastly, December can be a hard month in much of the World for people that are struggling. I have no intention of making this Substack a monetized / paid offering, but if you’ve enjoyed any of the content that I’ve put out this season, please consider making a donation to a local charity in your area that helps those in need this year. Whether it’s a homeless charity, a food bank or a mental health support group, every donation helps. I particularly recommend Shelter or Mind, if you’re in the UK. If you’re unsure where to send your support, a cause I’ve seen Matthew Berry suggest in NFL Fantasy involved finding players who have helped your team so far and seeing which charities they support and then donating to those, which is a nice way to do it if you’re unsure where to donate.
With that bit of shameless self-promotion and begging out of the way, lets move on to our regularly scheduled content.
Risers & Fallers
Risers
Going to start with one of my regulars. It’s Jarrod Bowen who seems to have shaken himself out of whatever ghost-point less vacuum he was in for the first few games of this season. In his last three games (SHU, AVL, MUN) he has ghost point output of 8.5, 6 and 10. Throw in the goal and assist against Villa and he’s looking like what he was drafted as again.
On the progress chart, Jose Mourinho has hit “peak-Jose” at Spurs. And there are some notable beneficiaries, even beyond Kane and Son. In particular, Eric Dier has had a great run, with an average of over 11 points from his last four games. Yes, this is propped up by CS points, and that does make it harder to trust. But credit where it is due, Mourinho has turned Spurs into a tough team to score against and Dier is reaping the rewards.
Somewhere in the middle:
The Wolves attack lost Raúl Jiménez and it’s hard to imagine that it won’t impact the rest of the attack. Pedro Neto still put a really solid score in the 4-0 loss to Liverpool (10) and Adama Traore is getting on the pitch. I’m more worried for Daniel Podence, if he’s going to be expected to keep playing as a false nine. He will have easier days than he did against Liverpool but, even if we assume Wolves don’t plan to throw Fabio Silva straight into the fire, I would be surprised if he is as productive in that role as he was in the wider positions, with more freedom to roam.
Fallers:
John McGinn started the season on absolute fire. Through the first four games, he was averaging 16.5 PPS as part of a dynamic Villa attacking shape. Fair to say, he has seen things fall back down to normal since. There are extenuating circumstances. He lost Ross Barkley and Villa as a whole have had a tough few weeks, but his fall off is particularly notable. Hold out some hope that when Ross returns, Villa may pick up, but he’s not a must start midfielder at the moment. I roster him in a league and I’m hopeful for the upturn, but I’m probably going to look elsewhere in the midfield this weekend, to avoid the tricky fixture with Wolves.
Theo Walcott falls on the basis of Danny Ings returning to the lineup. Theo has played pretty well, all things considered, and he’s got a really respectable number of goal involvements (1G, 3A) in his 6 starts. But the problem is that when he’s not getting these points, he’s really not getting anything else. He’s averaging 6 ghost points per start, which sounds great, but that is heavily propped up by his 5KP haul against Chelsea in his first game. In the last 4 games, that would be 3.75. And he’s about to go to the wing. If you want optimism, maybe that will push him back to being more creative. If you want pessimism, it pushes him further away from the goal.
Interesting Gameweek matchups
This upcoming Gameweek features a number of pretty interesting ties, so limiting myself to just a small number may be hard! But much as I’m keen to talk about the Manchester derby or Everton vs Chelsea, these games are not that interesting. All of the players that are startable will be owned in most leagues, most of them you start regardless of matchup. So instead, lets look elsewhere.
Newcastle (52%) vs West Brom (21%): Mattheus Pereira will not be a popular man amongst his fanbase this week. West Brom were matching Palace punch-for-punch, perhaps even starting to take control of the tie. Then Pereira pushed out at Van Aanholt and that was the end of that. Conor Gallagher, fresh from 2 goals in 2 games, looks to be in the driving seat to benefit from Pereira missing out, as he took over corners and free kicks with the Brazilian enjoying his early bath. There is some slight caution here. Krovinovic previously took them without Pereira in the lineup, so it’s possible this is a split task, but when both were on the pitch this weekend Conor still took them. This is a good matchup for him. Similarly, on the other side of the pitch, Jonjo Shelvey returned in the last game against Crystal Palace and had a steady, if not spectacular, return (10.5 points). He’s still only 50% owned at the time of writing and if you’re in need of a stream, he’s also an option from this game. Backing either defence is bold, frankly, despite the chance of a 0-0 here, but if you are going to look to one, 538 have Newcastle down as the more likely to win and that could be worth considering if selecting a streaming option, but Newcastle really don’t have a lot to give here. Jamal Lewis did just get 16.5 points in the Palace game, but I wouldn’t have much confidence in a clean sheet, or at predicting the games in which he is going to rack up Key Passes. He’s probably still the best pick of the Newcastle bunch, though. As a Public Service Announcement: don’t get tempted into Joelinton. Seriously. As a starter, he’s only scored above 3 points on 2 occasions. One of them was against Chelsea, where he played as the main striker with Wilson injured and won a few headers. The other time was against Palace where he had his 30 point game. It’s not worth chasing those points. It’s not that this is a horrible matchup. But there are just safer streamer picks.
Fulham (14%) v Liverpool (67%): The reigning Champions, coming off the back of a beatdown of Wolves, playing against Fulham. Is it a surprise that the best odds of the weekend are given here for a Liverpool win? Not really. But does it matter? Are there streamable players in this game? It’s a stretch, and you’re probably not going to want to count on it, but I’m going with yes. In the very first of these Newsletters, I made the statement that Andre-Frank Zambo Anguissa was Fulham’s most talented player, but that they didn’t seem to know how to use him. Well maybe they do… And this gameweek profiles out quite well for him (he gets a lot of points for CoS when he’s under pressure). But he’s 60% owned, so I imagine in most active leagues, someone is rostering him. Antonee Robinson, on the other hand, is under-owned (30%). He’s just coming off the back of games against Leicester and Manchester City. In those two games, he averaged over 11 points, without CS. He’s probably not going to get one this week, either. He’s also likely to be facing Salah and maybe Trent. This one is a gamble. But the worst score he’s put out was 3.75 (with a YC). If you’re desperate, this is a man you can roll out whilst still retaining a little hope of a respectable score against the Champions.
Leicester (51%) v Brighton (24%): The most useful game of the week is normally the one that comes last. If you were gambling on the likes of Diogo Jota or Alexandre Lacazette in the late Sunday game and the rotation didn’t go your way, it’s one last chance to find a streamer to step in. Most of the Leicester assets will be snapped up, though you could turn an eye towards Wilfried Ndidi who is coming back from his injury, or hope for a start for either of Ayoze Perez (43%) or Cengiz Under (30%), but your best bets probably come from the Brighton side of the matchup. Danny Welbeck (62% owned) has 4 games of over 10 PPG in a row and is looking to be a good fit in Graham Potter’s Brighton side. If he is on the waiver wire in your league, he’s a great insurance forward to have in this week and, as highlighted in transactions last week, he’s just a good player to have on your roster full stop.
Home-League Update
Coming in off the back of a hard loss in GW9, my team was struggling with getting to eleven men on the pitch. As a reminder of where things were coming into GW10, I had injury doubts for Ross Barkley, Christian Pulisic, Aleksandar Mitrovic and Sergio Aguero.
GW10
There were no roster moves made coming into the GW. It was actually a fairly boring one in that regard. Which with so many injuries, meant I was coming into the matchup (the second against last season’s league winner and current table topper) facing up to the possibility of only having nine available players. In terms of how that played out, I had near-blanks from both Pulisic and Mitrovic who I was forced into starting (in Pulisic’s case, because of little other option and in Mitrovic’s case because of childcare forcing me to miss the Fulham teamsheet), as well as a surprisingly poor output from Wesley Fofana, as Fulham upset Leicester.
This was made all the worse by my opponent running out to a good opening tally. Djenepo, Jota, Barnes and Telles all putting up good scores. Even with City running up a 5 goal win at Burnley, Gabriel Jesus struggled to get in on the fun. Things weren’t looking good. Going into the West Ham vs Aston Villa tie, I needed West Ham to come through big time, with Bowen, Coufal and Watkins lining up against Konsa, McGinn and Grealish. Bowen came through for the team, but Coufal found it hard to make an impact, up against Villa’s main man, and Watkins managed to miss a penalty (my team has now missed 4 penalties this season, which has been tough to swallow!).
On the other side of the fence, Grealish really went big and his 39.8 points meant that this wasn’t really even a contest. The opponent put up 173.92 to my 116.88 and I was 5-5. This league remained incredibly competitive, with the majority of teams (7 out of 10) sat between 4 and 6 wins.
GW11
Ahead of GW10, I wrote my normal Newsletter article. In it, I called out two players that I thought were good value that were on waiver wires. If you’re wondering how I ended up so roster-locked that I couldn’t start 11 players, part of the story is that I had my watch-list add button ready to pick up Conor Gallagher in GW10. But on Saturday morning, I was beat to it. The pain was further compounded when Conor marked that good GW with a goal.
Ollie Mcburnie, on the other hand, was not snatched up by anyone. Full disclosure: I don’t think that Ollie McBurnie is a particularly great footballer. But he is absolutely a great Fantrax footballer. So the first priority was to go out and get him, particularly as the postponed Aston Villa and Newcastle game meant I was down a striker, a midfielder and a goalkeeper.
On Tuesday morning, he was grabbed for 15% of my FAAB. So far as I can tell, no one else in the League had actually bid for him. So you could argue that this was an overspend, but my view was that I wanted to secure him, so I don’t mind the value at all. Also, perhaps slightly questionably, Conor Gallagher was dropped by his manager in exchange for Jonjo Shelvey. So I went back in for Conor. At the end of the waiver period and the weekend’s fixtures, I had picked up Ollie and Conor and Azpilicueta and Ait-Nouri were released back to waivers. Both remain on the watch-list ready for any future starts, but they couldn’t be held into this GW.
The other decision that I made, and accept was risky, was that I didn’t want to pick up a second goalkeeper to cover Karl Darlow. This might be surprising to many of you, as Goalkeepers are a divisive topic in Fantrax. I may return to talk a bit about Goalkeepers in future Newsletters. But I don’t believe they have no value. Darlow this season is producing a few points ahead of his competition. That’s important. But the main issue that makes Goalkeepers pointless to draft early is the simple fact that it’s hard to predict which team is going to create the right conditions for a valuable Fantrax Goalkeeper.
So what did that mean in terms of who started? Well this is where I got far luckier than I probably should have. The really rogue decision was that I started Pulisic, despite the fact that he didn’t start for Chelsea. It really shouldn’t have worked out. But the Ziyech injury and a late goal meant that he came out with 19.2 points. Similarly the instant pick up and starts of Gallagher and McBurnie couldn’t really have played out any better, with both getting around 19 points and a goal.
Even with my 9.5 men, the team had run out a 158.27 score and despite good showings from Timo Werner, JWP and Son, the opposition tapped out at 110.99. So it’s 6-5, in a league where the top and bottom team are separated by only 3 wins. Technically, could go top with a win, technically could fall to seventh with a loss. It’s a tight league this year!
Thank you for reading, if you’ve got any comments / questions, please don’t hesitate to let me know in the comments / on Twitter. Next week, we are back with Transactions. See you all then and good luck with this weekend’s fixtures!
Reading List
This is a really interesting piece, which talks about “finishing” as a concept. It’s traditionally been seen as very difficult to quantify. Abhishek (who is a great Twitter follow) has had a go here. Well worth a read.
On a similar note, Ryan O’Hanlon writes about Son Heung-Min and what to make of his (frankly obscene) shooting performance. He also looks at other players too, whilst trying to tackle similar questions to Abhishek in the first item.
Great article as always.
Roughly, what kind of MIDS would you consider comparable to C.Gallagher now? Particularly if we take the slightly bold prediction that he remains on set pieces for the next 3, but then of course loses them.
Low-key in awe of your decision to hold Darlow, coming from the perspective of someone who dropped him in my home league for S.Johnstone, copped -4.75 and then had to spend 25% of my (very little) remaining FAAB to get him back.
Patience is a virtue.