PLFantasy

With 8 clean sheets and big performances from the likes of Spurs, United and to a degree Arsenal, there were points a plenty this week, though as we can see above, not all those performances were necessarily backed up by the underlying stats. A couple of names to focus on here: Alexis Sanchez The model liked the Arsenal man as the best performer of the week with 10 expected points on 8 shots (4 SiB) and 6 CC. The "three elite forward" strategy which was en vogue for all of 2 weeks has been devastated by injuries to Aguero, Morata and Lukaku and so managers are now looking back to elite midfielders to lead their team and Sanchez is well placed to potentially fill that role. His incredibly low ownership number of just 3%, plus his earlier price fall make him an incredible opportunity to turn a profit if (or should we say when) his actual points haul starts matching his xP. Arsenal's fixtures are good but not spectacular as they face City and Spurs in GW10 an...

You know the story by now; each player has been assigned a 'Buy', "Hold' or 'Sell' status. These don't necessarily reflect what I would do, more what I believe to be a reasonable action at this time: Buy - the player can be purchased immediately taking consideration of his playing time, fixtures, injury status etc. This status does not necessarily mean you should buy him now as it depends who else you own, only that it is reasonable to do so. Hold, and/or monitor - if you own the player you're not in a rush to ditch him but there's sufficient risk here to justify potential buyers holding off. Sell - the player has too many risks and should either be sold or not purchased. This does not mean he might not have value in the future, just not right now. Aleksandar Kolarov 20 points The answer is two. The question is the number of times Kolarov has notched fantasy points in more than two straight games over the past two seasons. If he was guara...

Arsenal Mannone, Jenkinson, Mertesacker, Vermaelen, Gibbs, Ramsey, Cazorla, Arteta, Gervinho, Giroud, Podolski Subs: Martinez, Koscielny, Andre Santos, Walcott, Oxlade-Chamberlain, Coquelin, Arshavin No real surprises in terms of personnel, with the biggest note being Gervinho's (#27) deployment on the right and Giroud (#12) taking a spot up top. Over the course of the year you had to believe that Giroud was going to play his way into a position to start more often than Gervinho, particularly given that the latter has only really played up front alone for Arsenal since the pre-season, but after the first few weeks it was unclear when that might happen. Giroud has played better than his goal tally to date suggests and in my humble opinion, I'd suggest deploying him up top with Podolski on the left gives Arsenal the best chance to win games. That leaves Walcott, Gervinho and Chamberlain to battle it out on the right, as well as spelling the other three attacking players wh...

Clean Sheet Rankings Powered by Tableau Captain Data I've made a change to the captain stats this week, to account for the shot data we have, as discussed in previous posts. In the interest of time I won't go into the details here, but will add more backup over the weekend. Powered by Tableau I imagine the main question will be Steve Fletcher's ranking and he has indeed presented a tricky issue for the current data setup. Cr% is essentially a team's forecast goals for a week multiplied by the share of goals an individual player accounts for. For Fletcher that is 100% which is clearly unsustainable but how do we adjust for that? The new xP90 metric regresses data to average shot rates and hence you will see Fletcher do worse there, but that's not simple when looking at things for a team. If Fletcher didn't score against Wigan this week, there's no telling what would have happened so you can't just say he 'should' have scored t...

Alright I haven't done this before but alot of other blogs do the whole 'team of the week' thing and I thought it might be fun given that my actual team is pretty boring right now (Drogba, Malouda, Berbatov, Nani and maybe Bale are all locks to stay for now). The team has to fit in with the standard rules and my budget is whatever I can afford with my current squad (currently 103.3m). Without further ado then, here are my picks for this week: GK B.Foster DF D.Boyata DF A.Hutton DF S.Carr MD F.Malouda MD J.Milner MD Nani MD R.Van der Vaat FW D.Drogba (c) FW F.Torres FW P.Odenwingie GK S.Carson DF A.Faye DF G.Jara MD S.Parker I'm pretty happy with my first stab at a team of the week and the strategy is clearly to take advantage of value spot starters in defense to free up cash for a top line front line and midfield. Still, all my starting defenders rank in the top 5 in my clean sheet rankings but only cost a combined 18.2m. That allows me to keep the un...