PLFantasy

The pre-season is the most hectic time for this blog, as setting a good initial lineup is a big - though not essential - step towards a good season. I had hoped to be able to take it easy for the first few weeks, assess some potential targets and start crunching numbers again after we've seen a few trends. Then all hell broke loose. There's no need to rehash the week's events but the end result is basically a press of the reset button with a few people enjoying an advantage of having a decent opening week (personally I was able to make the changes I wanted and just made a couple of picks that didn't work out). In case you missed any of them during the week, I will shamelessly plug the previous pieces on week one lineup lessons , a bit of chalkboard analysis , contrarian views to the most targeted players and potentially cheap links in team defenses . With that behind us, let's get onto this week. All the below rankings are for this week only so if you're s...

As we approach the final third of the season, a few issues stand out that should play a major part when settling on your final wildcard lineup: Where will Arsenal's goals come from? Whatever the doomsday merchants say , Arsenal are an elite scoring team, currently ranked second in goals scored (39) and have a league leading 20 goals away from home. From a fantasy point of view though it's hard to know where a steady flow of fantasy points is going to come. I received criticism for suggesting Nasri might not be the answer to all our woes and while his minutes have been solid (he was dropped against Wigan) in the last 5 games he's added just 15 points to his total. Five players have four or more goals for Arsenal, and that doesn't even include van Persie or Fabregas. It seems that Chamakh is the odd man out in the front five, having been dropped for three of the last four games. Arshavin also seems to be out of favour and behind Walcott on the depth chart. With van P...

After an unexpected hiatus from fantasy nonsense over the past couple of weeks, I am back today as the premier league launches the rules and player list for the new season. Before we get to the players later, a quick review of the rules changes and some thoughts on revised strategies are below: 1. Saved transfers carry over multiple Gameweeks This isn't quite what it looks like as you can still only ever have two transfers in a non-wildcard week but it does allow you to save the 'double' for a week where you need it most due to injuries or to take advantage of a double gameweek. I don't see this having a huge impact on who we buy each week as you are generally signing players for more than the odd week, but it does give better flexibility when it comes to taking advantage of double gameweeks which can only be a good thing. 2. An extra wildcard for the January transfer window In the past couple of seasons I have been forced to use my wildcard within the first 6 weeks o...