Season Review
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The TL;DR version is as follows:
This is a really interesting nugget further down in the article, bearing in mind that ATFPL were the guys who hunted out the five man uber-rotation in the pre-season period:ATFPL wrote:
Pick Aguero
Eriksen and Coutinho have great promise of returning more points
Costa could be a mega-points scorer next season
Hazard is as good as you think
(1) you need a bench for the inevitable rested stars or players who will give way so a manager can reward someone off the bench. This takes planning and if you are in a dog fight in your ML, start thinking about Gameweek 38 around Gameweek 33-34.
(2) Don’t bother with a hit unless you need it to field 11. The -4 requires a goal to make up and at this point you don’t have any ‘long-term’ to make up the points.
(3) Transfer out the lad in your side you know in your bones will be rested. For me, that was Ramsey and a straight swap for Wilshere or Walcott was as clear as the nose on my face. With 20/20 hindsight.
(4) Do not dump out a proven point-getter even if he isn’t “in form”. “Form” is b***s***. There, I’ve said it. In fact, the fact that Kane had not scored in a while was an excellent reason to keep him.
(5) do not captain your “differential” unless you simply don’t care or you are chasing a big lead. Put it on the money choice; he’ll reward you and you never know whether your rival will do something dumb.
The ability to utilise cheap defenders is vitally important to me and is something I spend a lot of time on, so if that statement is true then I would be concerned for my teams tactics, however I don't think the situation is quite as clear cut as the exert makes it sound. Firstly, the comments were based on a team that played two pairs of defenders rotating home and away. As has often been argued, home/away pairings are not necessarily the best way to do rotations since you end up with inferior defensive units due to the lack of choices. Also, two pairs of cheap defenders was not the optimal way to start the season from what was discussed in the STC thread and I think 1-from-3 was a better bet.ATFPL wrote:Budget Defenders: Mostly, You Get What You Pay For
Alas, I can report a failed experiment, at least on the home/away budget defender front. Too often defenders were benched without warning (see, Moore, Liam, Wisdom, Andre, Hutton, Alan, van Aanholt, Patrick (under Gus Poyet)) or teams with budget defenders went for long, long stretches without clean sheets (Leicester, three clean sheets through the first half of the season, QPR with, at least early, the widely owned Stephen Caulker, six clean sheets all season. It is telling that only three defenders who were priced under 5.0 mil at season’s start – Wes Morgan, Neil Taylor and Jason Shackell – cracked the top 25 defenders in terms of total points. Coming in at 19th, 20th and 25th. And you would have had to have been a patient manager indeed to see Wes Morgan come good (five clean sheets in the last seven games).
In short, FPL has changed the game and fantasy managers should tread with caution below 5.0 mil if they are hoping for consistent, “nailed-on” starts and returns.
Later in the article there is talk about having 3 defenders out of your backline (including keeper) being from top 4 (defensive?) sides. I think that's overkill and is too far the other way, however their conclusions are based on numbers so cannot be dismissed entirely and they also state that they are crunching the numbers on favoured fixture rotation. I may well try to follow this up with some analysis of my own on my main three defensive ideas tomorrow.
I don't entirely agree with (2) since any hit needs to be evaluated on its own merit. Most are not worth the 4pts (so IMO hits should generally be avoided) but some are and should be made. Transfer hits are an interesting debate because it is possible to play the game well and with greater enjoyment by making lots of transfers. A guy who finished second in one of my leagues knows how to play FPL well (has 3 top 5k finishes) and finished in the top 5k, just 20 points behind me but made 58 transfers to my 39. Every one of those extra transfers was a 4 point hit so that's 80 points lost and yet he was only 20 behind by the end.
(3) I disagree with entirely. But then it falls into the "feel" category and I don't play the game as much that way as others so maybe I'm biased. I do need to qualify that by saying that I don't think you should pick players who are likely to be benched/rotated a lot, so you just have to accept the occasional benching of star players as normal, but you shouldn't be trying to guess when an otherwise useful player is going to be benched and transfer him out on that basis alone.
(4) Don't transfer out proven points scorers is good advice, but I don't agree with the reasoning as I don't think form is bs. I'd happily transfer out an out of form Sigurdsson type player for an in form player of similar value. I wouldn't keep switching between Hazard and Fabregas based on "form" however.
There's lots more in the articles so if you have a spare half hour I'd definitely recommend reading through them yourselves.
