The halfway mark in the season has come and gone, and there
is still no sign of Kane or Lukaku in my fantasy team. Even more significantly,
the first double gameweek – featuring Tottenham, no less – has passed without
any particular incident. Frankly, this is a minor miracle: while managers
flocked in their hundreds of thousands to give Kane the triple-captaincy, I
doubled up on the Tottenham defence, got in Alli, and hid behind the sofa. The
somewhat unfortunate withdrawal of Sanchez after 58 minutes in the first game
and the Obiang wonder-strike in the second prevented a good week from being
great, but a leap of around 150,000 places was more than I dared to hope for
going into the gameweek. As it stands, Chicken Tikka MoSalah sits inside the
top 400,000 for the first time since gameweek 4. Not something to write home
about, perhaps, but enough to further validate the strategy - and apparently
enough to warrant a blog post to the internet at large.
Of course, this upturn in fortunes is largely down to the
wholly unconvincing form of Romelu Lukaku. After an annoyingly prolific start,
the United frontman has managed just two goals in his last eight; he was also
forced to sit out all but thirteen minutes of the two most recent games,
following a concussion suffered early on against Southampton. Despite this
slump, he is still owned by nearly a quarter of all players: £11.3 million is a
very significant chunk of the budget to be taken up by somebody offering such
average returns, and conversely a very significant saving to invest elsewhere
for those who have opted against him. In my team, the money is probably best
viewed as funding investment in Kevin De Bruyne – this is somewhat arbitrary,
in that he is one of a number of ‘premium’ players in the squad alongside
Morata, Salah and Sterling, but Morata is essentially a Kane alternative and of
the three premium midfielders De Bruyne is the principle differential from
those who have opted for the big guns up front. His high starting price,
combined with a natural inclination of many fantasy managers towards wingers
rather than central playmakers, has kept the Belgian’s ownership well below
that of the other two; he is even owned by fewer managers than Lukaku, despite
outscoring his compatriot to the tune of around forty points. This has been a
big part of my recent progress under the no Kane/Lukaku strategy.
As expected, the ‘no Kane’ limb of the idea is the one
causing the more problems. I may have got through the double gameweek
unscathed, but this did come on the back of consecutive hattricks for the
English marksman – Burnley and Southampton were on the receiving end, but the
real victim was my fantasy team. The striker’s ownership is only a little shy
of 50%, so in the blink of an eye almost half of managers had a seventeen-point
headstart on me for two weeks running. This is before his popularity as a
captain pick is factored into the equation. There was some consolation in the
fact that people who were giving Kane the armband were not going for Salah, so
his returns of 10 and 9 respectively kept my head above water; the performances
of Firmino and the inspired selection of Ederson, who kept two clean sheets and
saved a penalty, also prevented calamity. Nonetheless, another strong showing
from Kane in the double gameweek would have brought my season to a grinding
halt – Alli’s squandering of the first chance laid on by the striker, only to
tap in the rebound, was nothing short of heroic. Such slices of luck cannot be
relied upon to keep Harry down forever, though: normal service will likely be
resumed before long, and when it does I need to be able to rely on my
alternative.
As has been the case throughout the season, it is this part
of the team that is proving the hardest to nail down. Firmino has been a
near-permanent fixture in the second striker slot, and has been a great
success, but the truly premium forward has yet to properly pay off for me.
Aguero, Jesus, Lacazette and Morata have all taken stints in the role: it
recently occurred to me that any one of these would have done at least a decent
job had I just picked one and stuck with them, but with the chopping and
changing I’ve probably managed to lose out on points. With that in mind, I
decided to give Morata a proper run in my team – this could hardly have been
worse-timed, as he picked up a knock and then proceeded to showcase some truly
horrific form over the next two fixtures. However, the underlying statistics show
that he should start finding the back of the net again soon – the plan going
forward is to stand firm in the face of his tumbling price for at least the
next couple of gameweeks, and re-assess from there if he is still struggling.
He has a nice run of fixtures on the horizon, so with any luck he will be able
to recapture some of the returns he was putting up at the start of the season.
Morata woes aside, though, there really isn’t much ground
for complaint. The big savings from eschewing Kane and Lukaku have generally
been invested on premium options that are delivering at similar or better
rates, and even most of the budget punts have paid off to some extent –
Loftus-Cheek has posted some handy numbers, and I’ve definitely made worse
rogue picks than Demarai Gray. There is only one further thought to add –
agreeing to stick to this strategy at the start of the season has thrown up an
interesting benefit that I simply hadn’t envisaged. Quite apart from the
personnel involved, a self-imposed rule against tinkering with a particular
aspect of the team has saved me points simply by preventing me from jumping on
short-term trends a week too late. Without the rule, Kane would almost
certainly have come in for the double gameweek only to blank; Firmino would likely
have been in and out a lot too, and the erratic nature of his returns mean it
would have been very plausible to own him for significant periods but miss his
points altogether. Even if the self-imposed Kane ban is relaxed for next
season, I will certainly continue to heed its lessons about not tinkering too
heavily.
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