Team of Shadows

Greetings, all!



Hi, I’m Scott (@tempebug on Twitter). We’ll get around to proper introductions and backstory and shit later on, but that takes time. For now, suffice it to say that I play FPL and I spend way too much time texting, emailing and tweeting Alon and Walsh about various shit. About various shit that over 90% of our acquaintances neither know nor care about. Jordi Amat? Ilkay Gundogan? DGW? ROOP? Yeah guys, we’re way down the rabbit hole in this game. But once you go, you may as well go all the way. And one of the things you do when you’re down there in the darkness of your rabbit hole; you’re going to obsess about the timing of your wildcard. So that’s how we got here.

I played my second WC in GW29. Yup, I did it. Premature? Timely? Who the fuck knows? Popular theory had been that you WC36, ahead of a BB37 to get 15 DGW players and then you just sit back and turbo nitrous blast your way to a huge triple digit score, an awesome overall ranking and a mini-league title. Right?

Well, I was sitting there in GW28 with a bunch of players that I was starting to properly despise. Or worse. They were boring me. And I felt like if I wanted to get max benefit from shiny new friends, I needed to have them in my squad right now. Not just for the last three GW, one of which they might not even give a toss about. So the debate rolled on. And in the loving words I’ve heard so many times from Walsh, “Bro, are you fucking mental?”

Maybe I am, because despite the wise FML FPL advice, I took the plunge. But then I wondered, “what if??????” How would it play out if I had just taken a hit or two to paper over the cracks, kept my WC in my pocket and soldiered on towards a standard GW36 WC? And finally, that’s what this is all about.

I took my pre-WC squad, figured their purchase prices, and set up a shadow universe in which I can compare how an imaginary team in which I had saved my wildcard for GW36 would do against my real team where I have occasional impulse control issues.

My team after GW28 had been:

Heaton/Jakupovic

Alonso/Azpilicueta/Baines/Robertson/Holgate

Mane/Coutinho/Sigurdsson/Allen/Fletcher

Aguero/Kane/Lukaku

with 1FT and 0.1 ITB

Broken Kane, underperforming double Chelsea, injured Baines. Bleh…

The Teams

The Early Wildcard team is in the table below, as is the Shadow Team that will play a Late Wildcard. The prices are at the deadline going into GW29 and the points in parentheses were on my bench.

The experimental shadow team took a four point hit to make two moves, swapping out injured Kane for Gabbiadini, (not a great match in 29, but I would want him for the upcoming pair of Soton DGW), and swapping out Joe Allen for Dele Alli, the potential new focal point of Spurs’ attack.

The Verdict

After the first week of this experiment, it’s about a wash. The non-WC team had a slight advantage, 76-73, largely because of Heaton’s ten spot trumping DDG’s measly two-pointer, but the Shadow Team took a minus four to get there, so the score ended up: Early-WC 73, Late-WC 72. The new boys to both teams came through with the goods, Alexis and Valencia for the WC team and Alli for the Shadow Team.

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

Early WC team: 73 points, overall points 1645, overall rank 16,944

Late WC team: 76-4=72 points, overall points 1644, overall rank 17,463

Both teams with green arrows

Coming Up

The Early WC team has decent fixtures this week, and with Alexis looking to have rebounded, they are in fair shape from an injury standpoint. Gabbiadini is the main question mark, but it doesn’t seem too severe, so I’ll probably just hold him, and let JWP come in off the bench. The Late WC team will rely on Mane and Coutinho to deliver against Everton and will probably have Robertson coming in for Gabby. That team needs to get Alexis in, but doesn’t have the money to do in a single swap, so will likely save, and then swap out Azpilicueta as well.

Tune in next week to see where this rabbit hole takes us. R.I.P. Seamus, I truly despise international breaks.

