Have you thought that this season is a bit lacking in clean sheets? So did we so we did a little bit of analysis and that's certainly the case. Up until the end of game week 4 of last season we had a total of 26 clean sheets. This season we only have 17.
If we look back last season, the clean sheet table looks like this.
What about goals scored? Logic would tell us that if there are less clean sheets then teams must be scoring more. Look at Watford on Saturday, coming from 2-0 behind and finishing 2-4 up against West Ham at their new stadium. Even Ighalo scored! And both Liverpool and Spurs joined them in scoring 4 each with Harry Kane breaking his not scoring in August tradition. Or Swansea scoring 2 against the mighty Chelsea? Or even the great Lukaku who got a hat trick having not scored in the previous 1,139 minutes?
Last season the first 4 games brought us 83 goals whereas this season that same number of games has given us a landslide of 106 goals. That's nearly a 30% increase.
So how does all this matter for those of us planning an early wildcard?
The received wisdom in the FL is to spend your money on goals rather than clean sheets and that means investing in great forwards and goal scoring midfielders. That strategy seems to have got stronger and stronger and this season will be no different.
Don't waste money on defenders.
80 points on the week but humiliated in the Manchester Derby, United fanatic Adam has had a "bitter" sweet week. In a gameweek without Aguero and not fancying his own Ibra to do much against City, Adam went for ex-City hero Negredo as his captain, obviously not trusting Lukaku to break down David Moyes' excellent (cough) defence. And even though he's still hanging onto that dream of Pogba being a good FL investment, he managed an absolutely excellent score.
Well you can't ever accuse Liverpool fan Rob of not putting his money where his mouth is in terms of his FL team. Both Firmino and Mane were there with Mane bringing his 24 superb points as his captain. We didn't notice any Liverpool defenders in there though Rob. Wonder why?
At 114th place with 71 points we find Howard Greenwood. Howard has been a friend of the League since its beginnings, but we haven't seen him in this newsletter since week 38 of the 2013 season when he managed to scrape into 19th place.
TBH Howard, we just can't see this team doing the business for you and would advise an early wildcard and the swift dumping of Rooney.
Are you like us and have never seen the world's most expensive player ever have a good game? He's £8.5m, owned by 15% of managers and yet he's delivered diddly squat. On the Value/Form table for United players he's the same as Rashford but he's played 4 times as many minutes. It's all very well coming out of the derby pronouncing, "We don't lose; we learn" but he'd be better off pulling his finger out and earning his fee. He was well off the mark on Saturday and left the much-maligned Fellaini to do all the midfield work for United in that fantastic first half. Anyway, you guys can't afford to have £8.5m going to waste every week.
Can you believe that it's just 4 short weeks since West Ham's sponsors, Betway called the new England man "an accident waiting to happen"? He'd been employed in the left back position because of the injury to Aaron Cresswell and he was definitely not a left back. Although nominally a midfielder, he's moved into the right side of attack and scored 4 goals in the last 3 games. He's £7.1m with less than 10% ownership and both of those figures are most definitely set to rise.
The top manager of the whole league this week is England's Rakan Alkahdi who scored a somewhat disappointing 76 points this week to take him to an overall 305 points.