Winter Wildcard 2012/2013

Wildcard is here BUM BUM BUMMMMMM. Beyond the countless debates on WC teams, there were many thing to consider, and this post shall not be one of them. This will serve more as a record on what WERE considered, as well my "theoretical XI if I were to WC this week.

Factors considered were (a) fixtures over the 2 weeks (b) what happens after Jan and (c) liquidity and transfer plans.

Fixtures

Let's start with the obvious. Double Gameweeks (DGW) for Chelsea, Arsenal, West Ham and Southampton over 2 weeks had many FPL managers either firing their wildcards before them or planning their entire transfer plan prior to these gameweeks around these DGWs in order to transfer them out with the Wildcard later. GW22 saw Chelsea have (sto,SOU) while GW23 had Arsenal facing (che,WHU).

For Chelsea, stable options such as Mata and Hazard were mainly picked up, and the real debate lied between Luiz, Azpilicueta or Ivanovic. Demba Ba's inclusion up front also played into consideration as he debuted against Southampton in the FA Cup and scored twice. Southampton's assets were also strongly considered despite both fixtures being played away from home. Puncheon and Lambert were the usual culprits included in RateMyTeams, while budget picks such as Shaw and Clyne were also picked as convenient filler for the fixtures.

Arsenal's DGW saw many transfer in Walcott, Gibbs and Sagna over the past couple of Gameweeks. Some teams even had Cazorla ready alongside Walcott as few were willing to spend on Giroud making 180 minutes. Down at the budget end, Jaaskelainen, O'Brien (despite his knock) and Demel were popular choices while up front, Nolan was the popular choice while Joe Cole and Chamakh split opinions between many FPL managers.

Now for the important stuff. Capitalising on the DGWs implies that you need to have good squad composition, whether you Wildcard or not. So let's start there. Many managers would run with 3 players from each team for the wildcards, and to be honest that's a good strategy, but a suboptimal one. The mentality for the 3-players strategy is that you're maximising points for 1 Gameweek only, while you're meant to be optimising your points over both Gameweeks (especially if you're WCing after).

Squad Composition

Having 3 players from each DGW team implies that you will have 3 players left. While this is the best strategy to maximise your strategy while hedging your bets, players with 2 Wildcards will probably find it viable to use this strategy going into the 2 DGWs.

With that out of the way, let's examine choices for players with just 1 wildcard. At this time of writing at least, no Chelsea player is certain to start both games, but what you CAN do to deal with that is by picking players that you'd keep for the season. Hence, my recommendations, if you're going for Chelsea season-keepers are either A.Cole (6.5) and Mata (9.9). 

The Arsenal gems are even more prominent, with Sagna, Gibbs and Szczesny all operating within the 5-5.5 range. Arsenal's players are actually value for money at the moment, and I will explain why somewhere down the post. While Southampton and West Ham do offer decent options, their value will also be explained in the rest of the post.

Now that we have DGW gems explained, this is where most managers will take separate paths, where I will summarise each one quickly as concisely as I can, and then state my personal faves and why I would go for them.

Prelude: The Season Keepers

There has been much debate on playing a power 5 midfield which consists of in-form players Bale, Fellaini, Walcott, Mata and Michu (The Power 5). This midfield alone will cost you 44.3, which I will use as a "solid block" for now.

There is also the matter of a certain Red Purse up top that costs 14.0 now, and adding a 10.4 Suarez will amount to a 24.4 Red Block that I'll use in my explanations later.

Plan A: Heavy Front 7, tape everything else together with paper

A strong starting XI WILL mean that the same starting XI will start week after week, likely with your bench looking something like Mariappa/Pearce/Harte, Fryers/Baker/Briggs and Henriquez/Pogrebnyak/K.Jones/Ruiz/Cheap Mid. Going the cheapest route possible plus 10 to 11 on keepers provides you around 80 million to work with your 3-5-2 or 3-4-3.

The Power 5 and the Red Block adds up to 68.7, leaving you around 12-13 bucks for your 3 defenders. 4 million a defender is then what you'll be looking at for the price you pay for a luxury front 7.

The variants are definitely plenty, but thankfully the "direct" replacements are unavailable: Aguero is injured, Gerrard has tough fixtures and Hazard, Lampard, as well as Cazorla are not value for money. With direct replacements not really available, the alternatives were quite obvious: Those chasing 3-4-3 would've gone Ba and dropped Walcott for Puncheon for the DGW, while Defoe, Jelavic and Tevez have all come into play for a strong front 7.

PROS: Predictable starting XI and transfers. Your lineup will not be "chasing" any Mini-league Leaders, but at least you'll be scoring consistent points. Your free transfers will also most likely be used on replacing any injured/off-form players from the front 7 for January Gems. I like that term already.

CONS: Rotation, Injuries and paper defences. With the Champions League fixtures coming up in mid-February, elite teams such as Chelsea, Arsenal and United WILL rest their big guns for the big ties. Your squad will not be able to handle this. But no player comes without risk, and this is yours.


Plan B: Heavy Front 6, slightly upgraded defence

This plan revolves around rotating 2 midfield players who are relatively cheap that have favourable attacking fixtures. This strategy will allow you to have an early punt on early transfers such as Joe Cole and Sturridge, which obviously represents potentially undervalued players while keeping most of the desired front 7. The tricky bit comes down to who you will sacrifice from your highly valued front 7 in order to raise the value of your third striker.

Let's start our calculations from the aforementioned strategy. Assuming a cheap forward/midfielder is around 4.5 to 5 million, you're looking at mixing 4.5 million (best case) with one of your front 7. Mixing 4.5 with one of the front 7 can nab you 2 players between 12.2 (Fellaini) to 14.4 (Mata) and 18.5 (RVP). I have highlighted these 3 reference points because I would like to present alternatives to the current "Cookie Cutter" midfield as illustrated in plan A.

With these 3 values, we will examine the DGW options available. The standout candidate for this DGW will be Ricky Lambert (6.1), who will allow you to have 6.2 (Ramirez or Puncheon), 8.4 (Ba or Berbatov if you haven't picked him up or a Lampard in midfield), or 12.4 (A high profile differential such as Tevez + A significant upgrade in defence such as a certain Blue Elephant).

The variants of this plan revolve around who you not include from the famous front 7. This is the popular strategy among most seasoned veterans, as this strategy also accomodates the presence of cheap DGW players such as Southampton and West Ham defenders. Having 2 cheap players in the front 8 (popular candidates are Noble, both Cole(s) in West Ham and Ramirez or Jay Rodriguez) provide an extra 1 or 2 million to turn your Clyne into a Sagna, or a Davies into a Reid.

PROS: Decent Attacking Bench, Less Affected by Attacking Rotations, and Chances of Discovering a January Gem. Quite a few January gems have been named already beyond Ba and Sturridge. An all-rounded strategy like this one will "prepare you for the worst".

CONS: Paper Defence (still), lack of Transfer Flexibility. Unfortunately, while this strategy is excellent for the short term, the lack of liquidity in your squad also implies that you're likely to take 2 weeks to make your transfers. However, if you pick your transfers carefully, you should still be able to pull off what you want, just not as smoothly as everyone else.


Plan C: The Rotation Policy

This plan becomes interesting at this stage because it's more catered to those who are planning for the rest of the season, but with the additional option of switching up their strategies at any point during the remainder of the season. This strategy will revolve around having favourable fixtures for your defence, as well as a decent rotational policy up front with a decent amount of money left in the bank for January Gems.

Firstly, let's start on the nature of the strategy itself. This strategy meant to be a reactive one, which implies that while there are season keepers that you'll never want to drop, you'll have to be prepared to drop them as soon as they lose form, especially if another player hits form himself. The previous 2 strategies revolved around the defence making way for the attack. This one will rely on relative heavy hitters at both ends of the squad, which covers half your potential tactical changes in case defense becomes the trend for the second half of the season.

Goalkeepers

So let's get to the rotations. Goalkeepers are actually a real issue now that 4 teams have Double Gameweeks in the next 2 weeks. Sczcesny is the popular pick among fantasy managers at the moment with good reason, but with Chelsea's goalkeeper situation being vague and Southampton fielding 3 different keepers this season, many are either going Bunn as a second keeper, or keeping faith with the famous Bego/Jaaskelainen combo that carried them through the first half of the season.

The Bego/Jussi combo is actually a fantastic combo to carry on to the end of the season. Their Home/Away rotation is perfect, and assuming you picked both up at 4.5, you're probably better off keeping both. However, if you're looking to cash in on your profits (perhaps due to mid table teams losing more CS at the second half of the season) here are the "rotation perfect" combos, along with their par price:

NOR/WIG (9.1 or 9.6)

QPR/SOU (9.3 or lower)

AVL/WBA (9.7)

RDG/SWA (10.0)

NEW/SUN (10.4)

ARS/TOT (11.2)

EVE/LIV (11.3)

CHE/FUL (11.5)

MCI/MNU (12.4)

I wish this post could be in two parts but I'm on a roll, sorry guys. Out of the combos, teams most likely to "improve" are the ARS/TOT combo, the NOR/WIG one, AVL/WBA and EVE/LIV. I have mentioned these 3 pairs a number of reasons, but without going into too much I'll just reveal that I'm a believer in the Pythagoran Theory, as well as the fact that these teams are likely to go on "winning streaks" through defensive resolve rather than scoring more than their opposition.

"Imperfect Rotations" also exist, where keeper combos have near-perfect Home/Away rotations. I'll list the combos below, and probably their prices so that you can take your pick based on your budget:

NOR/SOU (9.0 or lower OMGWTF)

 FUL/SOU (9.5 or lower)

WIG/QPR (9.9)

WHU/AVL (10.0 or lower if you got Jaask cheap)

RDG/TOT (10.2 or lower)

ARS/SWA (10.3)

MNU/NEW (10.4)

AVL/LIV (10.5)

EVE/WBA (10.5)

STO/WBA (10.8 or lower if you got Bego cheap)

TOT/FUL (11.0)

CHE/QPR (11.3)

MCI/SUN (12.1)

Some interesting combinations here, much more interesting than the perfect pairs as we have pairs within striking range of 10 million available as really, really good alternatives. Note that due to imperfect rotations, there are meant to be more than 10 pairs. For example, TOT can actually rotate with both RDG and FUL, but better with FUL. So don't be surprised if you see more than 10 pairs.

Defenders

Defenders are actually similar to the above rotations, but with an added dimension of a 3 team rotation, due to your choices being 3 from 4/5 instead of 1 out of 2. A quick scour through the market will probably get you any defender from the above teams depend on your rotations (I think I've confused you by now), but this is not the point.

THE POINT IS that your rotation strategy for defenders can be one of the following: 1 strong + 2 pairs of rotation or 2 strong + a TRIPLET of rotations. 3 team rotations are a bit more difficult to identify, but shoot me an email on luxian.work@gmail.com if you wanna use this strategy and I'll pass the document to you.

Which brings me to my next point. The 2 strong defenders are season keepers, the most reliable being Baines obviously, but I'm gonna take a punt here and list Ashley Cole and Kieran Gibbs as your season keepers. These two are players I feel are severely undervalued and should start keeping clean sheets soon.

Attackers

Well with significant investment in your backline (2+3 is about 25 while 1+2 pairs is about 23), and 10 on goalkeepers, you'll have about 65-67 million to invest in your front 8. At first glance, an average of 8 million per player sounds quite healthy considering you're likely to invest in a couple of budget players, so let's examine how efficient we can be.

While this strategy doesn't have any variants due to the fact that there are no constraints (at the moment at least), referring to the squad rotatioins above you could potentially rotate Taarabt and Angelo Henriquez to give you a "clear option" to dispell any selection dilemmas. This is only an example however, but in a similar "template", spending 10.0 on 2 players, as mentioned in the aforementioned example will leave 55 for 6 players, which is basically a pair of Gerrard/Fellaini or a Suarez/Berbatov combo.

*Special paragraph for Robin van Persie*

Adding this constraint however leaves you 50.0 to work with for 7 players. This is where you have to make your important decision: Can you live with 7-8 million per player or do you get a cheap gem for 4.5 to upgrade to your average $ per player? The decision varies from individual to individual at the moment, and it comes down to who you pinpoint as your "must-have"s beyond RVP.

Personally with a rotation strategy, without RVP I would have a front 8 of Tarrabt/Henriquez or Puncheon/Ruiz and go Fellaini(7.5), Michu(8.3), Bale(9.7), Walcott(9.0), Papiss Cisse(8.8) and Tevez(8.8) for a cost of 52.1. This allows me a margin of 2 million or so to make transfers. I am aware that you miss out on Mata but what can you do. The lack of 90 minutes makes the decision slightly easier to take.

With RVP however, I would posssibly downgrade my Michu to a Hernandez, Walcott to a Lampard if he gets more minutes, or possibly, POSSIBLY, Sessegnon for 7.1. Generally there are a lot of undervalued players at the moment and it would not hurt to pick them up. Snodgrass, Sessegnon and Morrison are among my favourites among the differentials, while up front Sturridge, Benteke and Berbatov are all decent differetials for the price you pay (their stats are inconsistent dependent on opponents but against weak ones they generally do well).

PROS: A game plan for the long term and Tactical Flexibility. You're covered in defence, able to switch to any of the form players (bar RVP).

CONS: Punts that might not work. Everyweek you'll be punting on someone, somewhere. But this is FPL (Faith Plus Luck) after all, and if you have faith in your consistents and luck with your punts, you should get green arrow anyway.

And lastly,

DON'T TAKE HITS

Maximum 4 points. The last thing you want is to chase a punt and lose ground instead. If there are more DGWs coming up I'll write on them. Until then, ENJOY THE GAME :D