After the craziness of week 1, things seem to have settled down a bit in week 2. My simple fantasy football cheat sheet performed admirably predicting 60% of games accurately including newly promoted Norwich winning away to Sunderland. On a personal note I scored 133.5 points in PlayTogga Perfect XI, 130.7 in Fantrax AMCR League, 98 in Fantrax Beat the Bloggers and a paltry 37 in Premier League.com. This highlights to me that a/maybe I’m playing too many games and b/what’s good for one game isn’t great for all of them. Whilst I can’t do much about the first problem as I write about all of these formats, it certainly shows that I need to warn managers who use the vast array of information on Rotoworld to make allowances for the differences in games.
Let’s start this week, like last week with the predictions from the cheatsheet:
Rather unsurprisingly Manchester United at home to Newcastle look the safest bet, with a 10% drop back to Chelsea away and Arsenal at home to Liverpool. Palace at home to Villa are slightly lower in percentage terms but I think that they’re a relatively safe bet.
One result that stands out to me is the draw between Spurs and Leicester. Bet365’s odds of 3.3 put this as a 30.3% probability, but the results suggest a 41% probability. That’s the definition of a value bet plus it also feels about right to me.
Goalkeepers
Last week’s return to goalkeeper predictions was a great trip down memory lane and also a good exercise in predictions with Romero scoring 12 points in the beat the blogger game – that’ll do for a player who costs just 5000. As I explained last season with this feature, I’m happy to take on any other tipster with one weekly goalkeeper pick and I guarantee that at the end of the season I’ll have returned more points per £ spent – anyone brave enough?
So here’s this week’s:
As the 5000 keepers start to disappear (just 4 remain) the situation becomes a little clearer. In order of preference, you should be looking at Romero at 8840, Courtois at 7381 and McCarthy at 5000. Many of you will be thinking of drafting in Adrian’s replacement Raphael Spiegal however this system works on a minimum probability of winning to nil of 32% so he misses out. You will obviously have to keep an eye on news reports regarding De Gea and his starting position – yes Van Gaal has said he won’t play until after the window closes but if we believed everything that came out of a manager’s mouth….
I might have to break my own advice this week as the drafting in of Raphael Spiegal will allow me to bring in a significant number of United players and Hazard and Payet and Kane….
Player Picks
At times last year I found myself mentioning a few player picks that I thought were worthy of note. Whilst I don’t intend to write reams on this, and I miss Nik’s article as much as you all, here’s my top three picks by position: Rooney, Kane, Aguero, Hazard, Mata, Sanchez (depending on your game), Smalling, Shaw and Darmian. This is obviously too Man U focussed for the premier league game but I suspect that it’s too early for many of you to be playing your wildcard.
See you next week!
