Team of Shadows

Episode 6 - GW 34 Wrap-up, the “Ibra is Dead” edition

Greetings, all!

Welcome back my friends to the hole that never ends. Go back and catch up if you aren’t already well down into the insanity with me. If you missed Episode 1 where Scott explains WTF is going on here then check it out here.

The Moves

I’m just going to mostly pretend that last week didn’t happen, what with Alon being on the disabled list and shit. We didn’t post Episode 5 and it will surely become a collector’s edition, circulating with bootleg copies of unreleased Prince albums on the Dark Web. Trust me, it was great. The greatest.

In abbreviated fashion, since last we met, in GW33, the early team ditched Gabbiadini, Vertonghen and Sigurdsson for Kane, deRoon and a temporary stake in Ake. Shadow team sat tight that week in preparation for DGW34.

We had lots of action this last week as we went into the DGW. Early WC team screwed it up, but in a way that is a microcosm of this whole adventure. Move fast, don’t be patient, and play the money game has been their motto, as opposed to waiting and following the conventional wisdom. Conventional wisdom here says that when a player has a midweek game, you wait and make sure they emerge unscathed. Well, most of the time they don’t get hurt, but once in a while they do. Early WC team bought Ibra for Kun on Monday, looking at Ibra sitting at 105% to go up on FPLStatistics. Gibson was the only ‘Boro defender I really trusted to be safe against rotation and return from injury and I could only afford him if I bought that day. So click-boom, it was Kun and Ake out for Ibra and Gibson. Then click-boom went Ibra’s knee and my idiotic move was going to get chronicled for all to see. Eh, whatevs. It’s a game. So I ditched Ibra and brought in Benteke to replace him and ended up on a minus eight to have six DGW players.

Shadow Team took the cautious more conservative route in keeping with a team that is saving the WC for 36. They waited until after the Europa Cup Match and avoided the above error and they also found out that Valdes was more broken than initially thought. They needed to make a few moves though, because having not played their WC yet, and having been using moves to patch up other holes that the early WC team had already fixed, the Shadows were going into DGW34 without any DGW players in place. They had saved their FT from last week so had two FT in hand. They started by dumping Baines for Bailly and Heaton for Hennessey. Those two sales made enough funds to turn Gabbiadini into Benteke and Holgate into Chambers. Some of that worked out and some didn’t, but they ended up on a minus eight with four DGW players.

The Teams

The Early Wildcard team is in the table below, as is the Shadow Team that I’m neck and neck with. The prices are at the deadline going into GW34 after the moves were made and the points in parentheses were on the bench.

The Verdict

Early WC team has edged it each of the last two weeks, led by DeGea and the United defense. It’s now a virtual dead heat between the two teams. It would be exactly tied if I hadn’t screwed up the Ibra thing. Somebody or another of the Shadow Team’s midfield differentials (Coutinho and Sane) keeps popping up with the goods to almost balance out the other advantages the early WC team may have built up.

Before I started this experiment, my overall rank was 19,971



Early WC team: 69 points, overall points 1940, overall rank 12,823



Late WC Shadow team: 66 points, overall points 1944, overall rank 11,475



Both teams grabbed green arrows from the week, closing in on the coveted 10K OR



Coming Up

We are coming all too quickly to the end of another season. We’re at that point when you can look at the remaining GW and realistically map out the rest of your transfers for the year. Sadness. But there is still a lot of action to come. Early WC team has to do some shuffling to maximize for DGW37 and Shadow team has a one week punt to take as it moves towards WC36. It seems like they have the edge in this whole experiment right now, but I think there are still plenty of twists left in this Rabbit Hole.

Scott (@tempebug)