Week 19 – The ‘second-stringers’

Hope everyone has recovered from the frustration of the early FA Cup player rotation…. 🙄

I managed to score a personal record weekly low of just 5 points…. with only 3 of my players getting any minutes (and managing to do nothing with those minutes too !)

The lack of ‘big names’ this week gives us a less familiar Team of the Week :-

T. Alexander-Arnold (£5.2m) being the only familiar name and even he was something of a surprise selection (and taken off after 60 minutes).

J. Doku (£4.4m) racked up 18 points and is our Star Player of the Week via City’s 8-0 trouncing of Salford City.

Trent’s 12 points brings him back into the Team of the Season at the expense of the rested O. Aina (£2.4m) in the only change to the standard version of the Team of the Season.

We received some positive feedback to the ‘Affordable and Available Team of the Season’ concept floated in the last couple of weeks, this is now released as a permanent edition on the Player Stats Portal :-

The only change here from last week’s team is T. Alexander-Arnold (£5.2m) replacing J. Maddison (£5.2m)

A. Isak (£5.1m) is a slight injury doubt according to the, at time of writing, Injury News:-

but, we reckon he’ll make it so have left him in. If Isak were to be replaced it would be by C. Wood (£3.5m) who’s just 10 points behind Isak with 102 Season points…

The games are coming thick and fast with another Double Game Week (20) in the TFF version of the game:-

Speaking of Double Game weeks, we’ve added an indicator of these onto the matrices form guides, pages 7 and 8 of the Player Stats Portal :-

This should be of assistance when studying the form, it helps assess the really big weekly hauls from one fixture rather than big weekly hauls but from two fixtures…

This brings us onto a theory we’ve been contemplating, there are potentially three categories of desirable players in this game we reckon (when playing in the starting eleven) :-

1. The ‘Haulers‘ (players who only ever score big or small)
2. The ‘Steady Eddies‘ – players who rarely score big but score averagely well
3. The ‘Must Haves‘ – basically anyone that does both ! 😊

We reckon the highest points scoring teams will be made up of a mix of these….?

So, for example looking at the Player Form guide (formatted to show all 19 game weeks i.e. the first half of the season) we reckon that M. Salah (£7.2m) is somewhat obviously a ‘Must Have’ and, for the second quarter of the season, not the first!, so is A. Isak (£5.1m) :-

Both of them consistently scored double digit weekly hauls, even in single game weeks. Salah wins the race with Isak as, when playing in Q2 he hasn’t even ‘blanked’ once, blanking being not getting an assist or goal, clean sheet etc. Isak did have a couple of blank game weeks, even in his improved Q2 of the season.

The next 3 top players, C. Palmer (£5.8m), E. Haaland (£8.5m) and B. Mbeumo (£3.9m) I would probably categorise as ‘Haulers’ – they’re either scoring very big or ‘blanking’.

Some other examples of ‘Haulers’ I’d say but lower total points scoring are the likes of M. Cunha (£3.6m), O. Watkins (£5.7m), J. Maddison (£5.2m) and J. Pickford (£3.7m).

Earlier in the season, N. Jackson (£4.0m). Y. Wissa (£3.3m) and, at a stretch maybe D. Solanke (£4.4m)

Finally, our ‘Steady Eddies’ with the occasional chance of a haul :-

The Forest boys C. Wood (£3.5m), M. Sels (£3.2m), N. Milenkovic (£2.7m) and O. Aina (£2.4m)

B. Saka (£5.8m) and G. Magalhaes (£4.3m) of Arsenal, B. Fernandes (£6.4m), T. Alexander-Arnold (£5.2m), J. Bowen (£5.3m), M. Damsgaard (£3.7m), R. Jimenez (£3.8m) and A. Gordon (£4.7m)

I’m not sure now quite what the point of this realisation is…. but, I reckon if your team is made up with players mentioned in this list you’ll likely be doing ok….?! 😆 Please feel free to leave any comments/feedback as always useful…

Anyway, here’s looking forward to a double game week of league and thus, full strength team action (and thus lots of points to make up for any poor Game Week 19’s) !!