Avoiding the Drop

One of the worst parts about fantasy is the fact that you can only transfer one guy a week, which means that if you picked up a sub-par team, there isn’t a lot you can do in one week to remove the mistakes in your lineup. It’s understandable, because I’m sure you weren’t the only one to think that Robinho was going to have a stellar season thus far. So what do you do to right your wrongs?

Unfortunately there really isn’t anything you can do immediately, it all has to be gradual. The one thing you can do to help your team along is to use your wildcard if you absolutely need to. It’s probably best to try and hold onto your wildcard incase 4 of your players all go down injured one week and you need to pull some quick magic, but it’s better to use that wildcard when you know it’ll be useful than to never use it at all.

Beyond that you’ve just got to slowly knock the dead weight off week by week. Sometimes it’s best to plan two weeks worth of transfers ahead of time. Let’s say you want to get rid of Tim Cahill for Glen Johnson, and you can’t really do that without selling off two players. What you need to do (assuming you don’t have enough cash in the reserves) is pick a defender you want to sell and sell Cahill for a player so that you’ll have the surplus required to sell that defender off and buy Johnson. It takes two weeks, but in two weeks time you’ll have two players that you really want and you’ll have gotten rid of two of your slower starting players.

Figuring out who’s faking the funk and who’s legit: The one thing that you can finally start to do is start to figure out who’s the real deal and who’s just a fluke that scored 2 goals the first week and won’t score again the rest of the season. So lets take a look at a few high scoring players who you might want to be wary of:

Brian Jensen, Burnley, 28 points, 4.1m: Jensen has had a stellar start to the season as Burnley has performed well above expectations. The only problem with his scoreline is that he had that penalty save against United, giving him 5 extra points that he’s surely not going to see every game. The one thing holding his score up is his insane amount of saves the last two weeks. In the past two games he’s conceded 7 goals, but saved 21 shots which gave him a 4 and 3 points each week. This here says to me that he’s been having a rather lucky run of form and I’d be weary of someone who has conceded 9 goals in 3 games, even if he’s got 2 impressive clean sheets.

Ryan Shawcross, Stoke, 29 points, 5m: Shawcross has been so popular that his value has gone up .5m since the season started. The biggest issue with Shawcross is that his fantasy fame is based largely on his goal in the first week of the season, take away that goal and he’s sitting upper mid table and not much of a better pickup than a lot of his counterparts. If you’re really looking for a Stoke defender, I’d suggest Abdoulaye Faye, he costs .4m less than Shawcross and I’d suspect he’ll probably finish the season above Shawcross

Yossi Benayoun, Liverpool, 32 points, 7.5m: I’m not completely saying to stay away from Yossi, if he gets regular minutes I think he’ll be a big part of Liverpool’s attack, but he had one monster week, a week that he’s not likely to reproduce again this season. Nobody’s probably going to produce a week like that again this season. He’s scored 8 points other than last week, that’s not very impressive. Now his price will almost certainly go up some after this week, but it’s probably better to hold off a week or two and see if he does start, and if he does do anything significant.

While it’s nice to pick up a player before their price blows up, you also don’t want to buy Yossi and have him continually pick up 1 and 2 points a week, only to waste another transfer to bring back the same guy you dropped him for. Hold off, wait a couple weeks and see what he does before making some rash purchase.

Team of The Week

Last week, in its first week, the team of the week scored a very respectable 53 points.

As you can see this week I didn’t make too many changes. I dropped Bassong for Dunne due to the unfavorable fantasy matchup that Spurs has with Chelsea (though it should be an incredible game). Having 3 Aston Villa players will probably screw me, but they play Portsmouth, so Collins and Dunne are very good candidates for clean sheets. Robert Green gets dropped for Thomas Sorensen who goes up against the rarely threatening Bolton attack. The front line, which grabbed 13 points last week doesn’t change at all, even though Jones only scored 1 point thanks to only getting a late substitution.

The midfield didn’t change either and Gerrard is still the captain. I was debating on Drogba being captain, but Liverpool has the better matchup. Johnson also would have been a suitable capitain. Finally, if Shawcross is injured Abdoulaye Faye will come in for him, both are good, but it’s kind of a wash between the two.

That’s all for this week, so go forth and ask your questions in the comments, or you can just make fun this team there. Either way.