My FPL 17/18 Season Review Part One

Phew! The premier league is over, and with it the fantasy football season too. How did I do? In this first part of the review I will look at the highs and lows of the season, with my best and worst weeks, my favourite and least favourite players.

Preseason Targets

My preseason target was to finish in the top 100,000 players in the world. For the first time I kept my eye on preseason fixtures and was very careful selecting cheaper players. It paid off and I finished with 2303 points, 90 points clear of my original target.

I started so brightly my target quickly became to finish in the top ten thousand players in the world. Unfortunately I was 11 points short, with an overall rank of 13,356. Despite smashing my original target, I can’t help feeling a little disappointed. Let’s take a look at my season and how it evolved.

The Highs

My best weeks were game weeks 3 and 27. In game week 3 eight of my players returned with goals, assists, bonus points and clean sheets everywhere. The big results this week was Lukaku missing a penalty  and getting zero points, whilst Liverpool thrashed Arsenal 4-0. Salah and Firmino helped me score 84 points, when the average was only 43 points. This gave me a game week rank of 4,167 and an overall rank of 1,478.

Game week 27 was my highest scoring week overall. Man City scored five and Liverpool scored two. All seven of these goals were scored by players on my team, along with five of the assists. This gave me 109 points, well ahead of the average of 61 and a game week rank of just under 38,000.

My Favourite Players

I had a lot of favourite players this season. In goal, Matt Ryan (BRI) was fantastic, racking up bonus points and save points galore. In defence Kyle Naughton (SWA) had some crazy weeks scoring double digits several times. Jamaal Lascelles (NEW) scored three goals and Christopher Schindler (HUD) was a reliable bonus point machine, getting 15 bonus points over the season.

My forward line changed consistently but there were three mainstays. Salah, Firmino and Stirling. They kept their form all season, I bought them so cheaply, it was almost impossible to sell them. They will have been in most of the top teams, but I had very early which helped a lot. I bought Salah and Firmino after seeing their preseason form, which was a big part of my fantastic start. I bought Stirling after he dropped in price. He was being heavily rotated by Guardiola, but he was consistently scoring with very limited minutes. I correctly predicted that his form would soon make him undroppable.

The Lows

There were a lot of bad weeks however. Game week 26 was hands down my worst, with only 35 points, and only one player (Salah) out of fifteen getting any returns. I finished with a game week rank of just above 4.2 million. Strangely this is the week before my best week of the season displayed above.

My Worst Buys

Which players disappointed? My first choices for cheap midfielders were let downs. Tom Carroll seemed like a real bargain set piece taker at Swansea who achieved so little. I was expecting regular assists and price rises from him. His original partner in crime was Tom Ince at Huddersfield who had a very good preseason, but didn’t deliver the goods for FPL.

I also had some dodgy defenders later in the season. I put my faith in Watford’s defence when they had great fixtures, and got nothing. I even doubled up by playing Gomes in goal, which clearly backfired. Ogbonna from West Ham was a similar story, but I did get clean sheets from him. The most frustrating was Fosu-Mensah at Crystal Palace. I had him last on my bench for several weeks, and so I didn’t notice that he had stopped playing, even though I was relying on rotating him in to play in future weeks.

Finally in midfield, I expected Walcott to do a lot more at Everton, and I had him for about ten weeks before he gave me any real returns.

To be continued

In my next post I will talk about my captain choices and how I played my chips.