PLFantasy

I don't know when the exact point in which I lost interest in the transfer deadline day happened, but I am painfully aware that it did. I used to be glued to Sky Sports News, excitedly dreaming of the next big arrival from overseas, rapidly googling names and checking Football Manager for a quick scouting report. Now I am aware that essentially, with the odd exception, all transfers/rumours fall into one of three categories: A big name player is linked with a club in England, is 'spotted' at various training grounds across the country despite never being available (this year's examples include Kaka, Hazard and even Messi) A player gets recycled between unimaginative teams whose scouting department appears to consist of a 16 year kid watching the Premier League highlights and recommending whoever scored that week or was good 5 years ago (examples include Crouch, Jenas, Parker, Wright-Phillips and Bellamy) A player of genuine quality arrives or moves to a better situ...

The pessimist in me is wondering where I go from here after a very successful first week in which my predictions did well and my team dominated to a three digit score . However, I am going to be positive and look to have another good week of predictions and hope to show that last week was no fluke (in reality it was probably was a fluke, as my countless failed predictions in the past show). One thing I didn't focus on last week, which I now wish I had, is the prediction tool I use to create my clean sheet rankings. Without getting too bogged down in Excel nonsense, the basic idea is to break down teams historic performance at home/away, against other teams and against certain types of team along with the corresponding data for their opponents. To get the historic data for the promoted sides I used a historic relationship between teams' performance in the EPL and the Championship to try and gross up/net down the expected goals conceded/scored. Anyway, the poin...

Due to a lack of time I am going to cut short this week's preview to give you an idea of which players to target this week. Clean Sheet Rankings Birmingham Stoke Liverpool Tottenham Man Utd Everton Portsmouth Arsenal Fulham Sunderland Aston Villa Burnley Man City Bolton Hull Chelsea Blackburn West Ham Wigan Wolves Captain Rankings Bobby Zamora Mikel Arteta Samir Nasri Danny Murphy Matt Etherington James Milner Carlos Tevez Fernando Torres Didier Drogba Frank Lampard The choice this week is really between your elite players against a top side (see Chelsea and United) or your form players against weaker opponents (see Arteta and Zamora). The exception is Arsenal who get Wolves at home but with Fabregas and Van Persie out, it's tough to be totally sold on any of their fantasy prospects. As always, why not post your thoughts below or @plfantasy .

Before we get stuck into gameweek 32, I am going to quickly fly through my top strikers for the remainder of the season, as promised yesterday. I also urge, nay implore you to look at yesterday's ramblings on midfielders which while somewhat of a Cesc-love-fest contains at least a few useful stats for your amusement. I am limiting this discussion to the big three strikers (Torres, Drogba and Rooney) though that is not a slight on the prospects of Tevez, Bent etc, more that most of us can only afford to employ one or at most two of these stud strikers and so we really need to know which one (or two) we should hitch our wagon to. It must also be noted that Van Persie still leads all strikers with 7.7 PPG, an astonishing stat given the plaudits Rooney (7.4 PPG) has received this year. While some reports are suggesting Van Persie may be back before the end of the season I will only entertain the prospect of spending 10m+ on a player when he is a lock to start, which just isn't th...