Player Picks Week 10

Welcome to Week 10! Once again, be wary of teams travelling from their Champions League or Europa matches, in particular Manchester United (from Moscow) and Chelsea (Ukraine).

This week I'm trying out a different format. This time around, I’ll look at each match-up in turn, make a prediction and pick out the 2 best possible picks.

1. Aston Villa vs Swansea

As bad as Swansea are at the moment, Aston Villa are worse. However, despite only scoring 2 goals at home so far, with Sherwood under increased pressure, I can see Aston Villa at home attack more and thus leave gaps. Score draw.

Grealish to open his account, Gomis to break his drought.

2. Leicester vs Crystal Palace

Both teams have an attacking philosophy which should not change, I don’t expect clean sheets either. It’s a high scoring match with Leicester nicking it. Mahrez WILL start by the way. 3-2

Mahrez over Vardy this week.  Jason Puncheon to score at least one of the goals, possibly a penalty.

Week 9 Aftermath

Neymar, Wijnaldum, Sterling.

If you had any of these three during the weekend, you’re probably in pretty good shape right now. I fortunately had Wijnaldum. On Saturday, I saw Sturridge succumbing to injury and joining Kolarov on the stands, while Mahrez and Hazard failed to make the starting lineups. To make things worse, I forgot to substitute in Sanchez for the late match! By the end of Saturday, I had dropped about 100 spots to 319, pretty much back to where I started last week.

Enter Sunday, enter Wijnaldum (instead of my original plan of Ayoze) and he, together with Janmaat, helped me to regain those 100 spots and then some. I have Fabianski and 1 transfer to go for tonight’s match, which will hopefully help me into the Top 200.

How did all of you do?

Gameweek 9 Player Picks

(Note: This article was published on the Stadium Astro site on Friday, but was not published in this blog until today, and is published for completeness)

Hope you enjoyed the break, we're back for Week 9, but REMEMBER to check injury news as close to the deadline as possible due to the internationals.

There are also players flying back late from their respective countries matches, so be wary of players from South America for instance, most of whom return to England late. While it might not put you off players like Sanchez, you might reconsider captaining them. Bear in mind the Champions League midweek matches, and we could see some low-scoring matches amongst the top teams.

Strikers

Costa comes in to the spotlight, well rested after a three match ban, not involved in the internationals, and publicly admitting he had a bad start to the season due to indiscipline and weight issues. Any other result than a win for Chelsea will put serious question marks on Mourinho's ability to manage his squad into a third year. The recent criticism by the Spain manager could well become motivation, as Costa might drop all the nonsense he's been doing on field and concentrate on scoring goals.

Pelle is in fantastic form at the moment and in most other fantasy games has been touted as the ideal Aguero replacement.

Speaking of Aguero's replacement, Bony is expected to take the field but I'm really not convinced that he can do the job.

Ayoze, anyone? As mentioned in my Period 3 Preview, Newcastle desperately need to start winning matches, and the upcoming fixture list gives them an excellent chance to start doing so. Since Newcastle only play on Sunday, you can use your week's transfers to include him in the starting line-up. He also frees up funds nicely for next weekend as you will want to keep him for the Tyneside derby next week.

Dark horse: I'm looking at Mbokani of Norwich, who might be ready for a start after scoring as a sub in Norwich's last match.

Midfielders

Kevin De Bruyne finds himself as Manchester City's main man, in the absence of Aguero and Silva,  and has been brought in by many fantasy managers. Doubts have been brought up as to City's effectiveness in attack without their key players,

Christian Erikssen comes into the story as he plays Liverpool who have been very wobbly in defense since they lost 0-3 to West Ham back in August. Erikssen executed to almost perfect freekicks last week so he can cause havoc to the Liverpool backline. It remains to be seen if Klopp can galvanise Liverpool so soon, so Erikssen is a strong option.

On the cheaper scale, Sadio Mane comes into fine form having scored two and assisted one in his past two matches. Southampton play Leicester who are 3 points above them but Leicester don't seem to make clean sheets a priority. However, I'm leaning towards Tadic this week as a better performer.

While I have Mahrez in my team, it's a bit hard to recommend him because a) he clocked two 90 min appearances for Algeria and b) I actually think Southampton can hold off Leicester, despite popular theory on the web about it being a high-scoring match.

Finally, Mata has been involved in most of Manchester United's goals so far. Although it's a tough match against Everton,  he could be the difference with a set piece winner.

Defenders

I won't spend much time here, but Azpilicueta of Chelsea, Janmaat of Newcastle if fit, are good choices for the weekend. Russell Martin is useful at set pieces against a defensively suspect Newcastle. I actually fancy a Terry set piece goal in the works against a sad Villa.

Ryan Bertrand is a great attacking option as well against Leicester as he continues his return from injury.

Goalkeepers

Begovic against a goal-shy Aston Villa, and a Chelsea without Ivanovic might actually keep a clean sheet for once! Worth considering but Chelsea face a strong West Ham the following week.

Fabianski will play in the last weekend match against Stoke. Stoke have yet to find some attacking consistency and Swansea's defense this season has been fairly strong.

Myhill has a chance of a clean sheet at home to Big Sam's Sunderland which will look to make defending a priority.

That's it!

My squad as it is:

I used the international break transfers as follows:

Pedro to Costa
Aguero to Lewandowski
Darmian to Janmaat

Unfortunately, after I had done them, Kolarov got injured, teaching me a lesson that it pays to be just a bit more patient (although there is a slight chance of him recovering). Janmaat is a huge gamble, but it could really pay off in the weeks ahead.

I will not be transferring any Man City player for now as I prefer to see how they do first. Most likely I will be bringing in Gomis or Ayoze, and maybe an Arsenal defender.

Good luck all!

Period 3 Preview

It's that time again folks, where I look at the period ahead as defined by the Stadium Astro game, with a focus on fixtures, highlighting the top three teams that have the best fixtures during this period.

Period 3 is from 17th Oct - 20th Nov, which is four gameweeks in total and the prize for the best performing team during that period is a Samsung S6! My S3 is getting fairly banged up, so I'll be putting a lot more effort in the next few weeks myself!

So here's the three teams whom I feel have the best match-ups:

Gameweek 8 wrap-up

Calling the weekend eventful would be an understatement. It’s a bit hard to summarise it all neatly, but here we go: 

1. Two managers gone in a day!

Dick Advocaat and Brendan Rodgers were the first and second manager casualties for the 2015/2016 season, one resigned, one getting fired. It does make selecting their players a bit more tricky, as we will not be sure how the teams will be set up at first, although with the Stadium Astro game, we get to at least see their line-ups. However, on a positive note, statistically speaking, Premier League teams with new managers tend to win, or at least perform well for the next match, so they’re worth considering fantasy-wise, but exercise caution. It’s important to note that Sunderland have a useful set of fixtures in the near future.

The Captaincy dilemma

I wanted to spend a bit of time discussing the Captaincy choice in this article.

I usually don’t spend much time discussing the captaincy in my player picks, but I really should. Let’s face it, choosing the right Captaincy can really make a difference to your points, if done properly.  Case in point, Cristiano Ronaldo scoring 30pts in Gameweek 5, nets you 60pts with the captaincy. I didn’t have him, so my ranking dropped like a rock.

I have always maintained a policy that more often than not, your captain is usually your Euro player, which would be either Messi, Ronaldo or Lewandowski (the players with the biggest potential to score multiple goals). Historically, they have an excellent record of scoring fairly regularly, not to mention the capacity to score more than 1 goal.  Unfortunately, last weekend only Lewandowski returned dividends, with Messi getting injured and Ronaldo blanking.

In fact, the best player last week was Sanchez, whose hat-trick meant he scored 24pts in total (5pts x 3 goals + 7pts for the hattrick + 2pts for playing more than 70 minutes). Unfortunately, very few picked him considering he had yet to score before last weekend, and they were playing Leicester City, who are still nowhere near the relegation zone. The only other player to have achieved such heights was Ronaldo as mentioned above, however, many had him as Captain back then and profited immensely. This means that the potential for a Premier League player to do better than an Euro player is there.

Criteria when considering a Premier League player

So how do you choose between one of those Euro players mentioned above and a Premier League player? For Premier League players, you need to consider the following: