Week 23 – Up for the Cup

Round 4 of the FA Cup leaves us again with a rather unfamiliar Team of the Week ! although this should now be the last time we see heavily rotated teams and we did lose some more of the big clubs – this will start to shape our thinking as we move towards the final third of the season, finalists in the FA Cup will play 4 more fixtures than teams knocked out in round 4.

As first and second favourites, Man City and Newcastle for instance could play 4 more TFF games than Liverpool/Arsenal (after Liverpool play Everton tomorrow of course 🙂

Anyway, back to Week 23’s Team of the Week, sorry J. Clarke (£2.6m) of Ipswich (who was star man of the week!) but we’re going to focus on the more ‘recognisable’ players who did score points this week in helping their sides through to the next round – D. Munoz (£2.7m), K. Mitoma (£3.6m) and to a lesser extent, J. Gomes (£2.9m) and M. Rogers (£2.9m).

D. Munoz (£2.7m) in particular has been on our radar for a little while now (he was actually in the author’s original starting 11, until I grew impatient with him some while ago 😊) Munoz is also highly rated in FPL chat sites posting excellent attacking potential XG ratings….now it appears he may finally be converting that potential into points?!

Munoz’s 12 points this week have led to his (and Crystal Palace!) debut into both the Affordable and Available Team of the Season as well as the standard ‘money no object’ team !:-

The other changes this week are a debut for J. Pickford (£3.7m) replacing M. Sels (£3.2m) and a debut for D. Kulusevski (£4.8m), who replaces A. Iwobi (£3.5m).

C. Wood (£3.5m) comes back into the Affordable TotS version replacing the expensive and rested E. Haaland (£8.5m)

Forest are playing Exeter tonight, it maybe worth keeping an eye on their starting line up if considering bringing in any Forest players (C. Wood (£3.5m) IF starting anyone?!)… don’t forget Everton host Liverpool on Wednesday night also in a double game week 24 for Forest, Everton and Liverpool.

The fixture ticker has ‘settled down’ a bit now although note the double game week 25 for Liverpool and Villa, although those two ‘blank’ on Week 29. Note also Palace and Newcastle are also 95% certain to also ‘blank’ on Week 29.

FA Cup round 5 will be played in TFF Game Week 26 (which slots in as 27.5 in the above ! 🙂 so, extra fixtures coming for these teams, albeit with likely player rotation… :-

Finally, to dissect that wealth of confusing information above 😆 – I would say players from Liverpool and Bournemouth are definitely worth ‘piling into’ closely followed by Palace and possibly even Brighton and City..?

K. Mitoma (£3.6m) and J. Mateta (£4.1m) are two of only a handful of players to have four ticks on the Player Selector page on our Player Stats Portal :-

We’ve focused on Bournemouth players in recent blogs and Liverpool and City kind of speak for themselves – but Palace in particular and Brighton to a lesser extent, feature a number of players in form:-

Led by the already mentioned D. Munoz (£2.7m), his team-mates J. Mateta (£4.1m), M. Guehi (£3.3m), M. Lacroix (£2.8m), C. Richards (£2.5m) and T. Mitchell (£3.1m) may also be worth consideration from Palace.

G. Rutter (£3.5m) and K. Mitoma (£3.6m) in particular as an attacking Midfield option are the stand outs from Brighton.