My Fantasy Team

For those of you who play fantasy premier league, you will know that this has, in general, been quite a difficult year. There have been few players who stood out the way Suarez did last year. Hazard, Kane & Terry being some of the only real week in-week out point earners. Others such as Aguero missed large periods due to injury or endure baron spells such as Fabregas or Sanchez.

Once again on the last day of the season, it seemed hard to gain a lot of points. What this means is that the players that most fantasy teams will be comprised of were failing to score points. For example, it generally isn't a bad idea to play liverpool players. However, they lost 6-1 to Stoke, while they are not in form, Liverpool should not be getting beaten by this number. If you predicted this and put Diouf in your team, you are not a genius. You have just got exceptionally lucky.

So you're probably now thinking, I bet he had a bad fantasy year and is trying to cover himself and well you would be exactly right. However, I am here to reassure the rest of you that may have struggled that that guy who beat you by a substantial amount of points, who knows nothing about football, doesn't deserve all the credit he is going to try and acclaim.

Now I know what I am doing, I always tally up to over 2000 points but this year I have fallen just short, which really annoyed me. The thing is as much as the winners like to deny, fantasy football eventually comes down to luck. You can make educated decisions and you have a knowledge of a player coming back from injury who is likely to make points and you can assess whether a team will win or lose it's game and who will be the best player on the pitch and build your team each week accordingly but then.. You can not predict the outcome of the game, sometimes you might be right but you can't always predict it. It's why bookmakers are rich and fantasy football is fun. 

Here is the last week of fantasy football with my team on the left and the highest earning team in the middle and the dream team on the right.

It's actually fairly obvious to see where the points came from for the highest point earner this week. He captained Walcott. Walcott who has just made it back into the team and has acquired 31 points all season before this last game. Not a terrible idea to captain him as he looked like he could come back into the starting line up after his performance against Manchester Utd however, know one could have predicted how well he would have a done. It was likely that Arsenal may slow down due to the cup final next week. I however, had to leave Ozil, Giroud & Ospina in due to financial restrictions and not wanting to spend too many points after I loaded Arsenal players in for the double game week, in which no Arsenal player scored or kept a clean sheet. Again, an Arsenal win could have been predicted but a clean sheet proved elusive, nothing more than luck determined this as on another day Arsenal easily could have kept a clean sheet against that West Brom side.

To justify some of my players, I made some bad decisions and found it hard to undo them, I had just got rid of Sterling. I lost out on the double game weeks working hard to get lots of players in for this specific double game weeks and then they failed to gain points and failed to gain points after the double game weeks which meant I had several players I needed to get rid of and couldn't afford to do so. Leicester were in form so I left them in, of course they lost another clean sheet against the run of play (8 points gone) I captained Mata because I needed to gain points in my league and thought perhaps he would be a cheeky way to do that, not a lot of people would do that and I could gain some serious points. Although this would have worked with Walcott, it ultimately proves a bad move. It is always better to go for a safe option. 

The dream team of the week essentially sums up what I mean about not actually being able to predict the best players of the week. Only Cazorla is in the dream team who should be in peoples team. Potentially Albrighton because he is so cheap. Other than these two you are not often getting a return on these players on your team. 

Here are some basic tips to use for next season.

Midfielders and Attackers can play all games, you shouldn't worry if they are playing a big team even if you have a low down striker, if he is consistently racking up points for his club he has every chance of gaining points as anyone else. Avoiding strikers against Chelsea may be beneficial but every team that goes there struggles to score. If anything a team like Chelsea is tighter at the back against the bigger clubs. 

Play the numbers. Sometimes taking a risk just isn't worth it. Certain players we know will get points. It is often better to stick with them even if you need to make points up. The season is not over until it is over. Had I have brought in Walcott in the last week and captained him I would have moved up several places in my league but in my opinion I could have had Walcott and Mata could have scored more points. (easy to say that now)

Don't be afraid to spend a few points each week. Don't go crazy but spending a few points to change your team every week is definitely what you need to do if things aren't going your way and you have used your wildcard. 

Have a policy for removing players from your team. If they don't gain points after a certain amount of games, simply remove them for someone who is in form. This is difficult to implement at times due to the price rise of a player. For example I took Aguero out after he failed to score any points in his fifth game in a row. He then went onto score 10 in his next 9 games. This particular move kind of summed up my season. (I did get him back in by the way) 

So to sum up guys. I am amazing at fantasy football and everything that went wrong wasn't my fault. Shut up.