Key Observations from Week 7

The Premiership race is heating up, with players exploding into form and upsets abound, causing havoc for fantasy football players everywhere! Here are my key observations from the weekend:

Manchester City in crisis?

Manchester City have now lost three matches in a row in all competitions, is it pre-mature to call it a crisis? Maybe it is, but they’ve now been displaced by the red side of Manchester in the table.

City were without Hart, Kompany, and Silva, and without this core group, the squad didn’t have the drive to recover. In particular, it’s quite glaring that without Silva, the Manchester City attack is seriously having problems.

Fortunately, they have the fixtures to recover. This Wednesday, they should comfortably win in the CL against a team rooted at the bottom of the Bundesliga, and they play Newcastle this weekend before the International break.

However, we shouldn’t discount the role of Spurs in City’s downfall.  They did not buckle despite going one down, and grew from strength to strength. The Spurs backline wre in good touch, with Lloris exceptional, and the attack was on form with even Lamela scoring. Kane finally broke his duck as well, which brings us to…

The Who’s Who list

Hazard, Rooney, Sanchez, Costa, Kane

Remember this list from my earlier article before Week 6? Well, Costa is now the only player yet to break his scoring duck, and he was suspended. Sanchez was the pick of the lot with his sumptuous hat-trick, but let’s face it, he was the one person in this list who looked likely to explode given his exceptional work-rate in the opponent box. The question you should consider now is which ones will go on a goal-scoring run for you to exploit.

Especially now that…

Messi’s out for two months!

I captained him for the weekend, only for him to suffer ligament damage early in his match. He will now be out for almost two months, so you now have some extra funds to play with.

 Fortunately, Ronaldo didn’t score either, but Lewandowski still scored two. Neymar now becomes a serious option though, and he will want to step up to the plate and prove that he’s capable of leading the line for Barcelona in Messi’s absence.

Meanwhile, back at the Premiership…

Sturridge returns

Just when the striker slots are looking harder and harder for us to allocate, along comes Daniel Sturridge to put a spanner in the works. He practically saved Rodgers his job  with his weekend brace against Aston Villa. Next weekend they face Everton, a team whom he has a useful record against with 5 goals against them so far. It’s a risk picking him though, as Everton are in reasonably good form.

And finally,

The Goals Against table

The top three teams conceding goals are now Sunderland (16), Chelsea (14) and new entry Leicester (14), somehow justifying the observation I made in my last article about Leicester’s inability to keep a clean sheet. I profited from that by having Sanchez, but even I didn’t see them conceding FIVE goals. Will this latest match trigger a different approach from their manager, Ranieri? Not likely, to be fair.

An interesting side-note is that Leicester were the last team to remain unbeaten, and this has now come to an end in spectacular style.

Okay everyone, time to catch a breath, it was quite an entertaining weekend. See you next time!