Big Questions for GW14

What's on our minds going into the fourteenth week of the season?

Welcome back to the Overthinking Football Gameweek Preview. It’s Week 14, and after a short break from the usual Preview schedule for Thanksgiving, we’re back.

We’ve been hard at work trawling through the upcoming fixtures, consuming player news and looking at our Overthinking Football Projections Model to make sense of what we’re likely to see.

As ever, I have questions. This week I’m asking:

• Is it a bad thing if you have no healthy CBs against Manchester City?

• How many goals will we see at Stamford Bridge between two of the league’s more generous recent pair of defences?

• Have Manchester United found a formula?

• Is there streamer value in the Burnley Sheffield United game?

• What do we do with the injuries at Liverpool?

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Can Spurs defend Manchester City if they are forced to play centre back-less again?

Just a few short weeks ago, this one would have felt like the truly premium tie of the weekend. Yes, we were suspicious of Spurs underlying numbers. But they still looked like they had the potential to threaten the top sides, even if they’d had some bounces go their way. Now heading towards this one, we’re worried about early TKO potential, with no offence meant to Spurs. They went into their most recent tie with Aston Villa starting Emerson Royal and Ben Davies at CB and that looks likely to continue here, with Cristian Romero suspended one more game and Ashley Phillips having injured himself during the International Break.

It didn’t take Aston Villa long to get the better of the pair. Ollie Watkins may have been judged narrowly offside on the 24th minute, but looked entirely untroubled by Tottenham’s defence for his second. And Davies will not want to see Pau Torres’s header again any time soon. Villa are a good attacking side and many full-time centre backs will be beaten by their attackers. But as good as Watkins and co. are, City are better. City have 5 players projected for better than 10 points (though this is because we don’t know which of Phil Foden, Jack Grealish and Jeremy Doku will start). But it also doesn’t yet account fully for Tottenham’s availability crisis and I’d honestly bet the over on most of the City projections this week.

Rodrigo Bentancur’s unfortunate injury does not help Spurs’ stability and they’ll need to bring a special game plan if they’re going to starve Erling Haaland of service. Especially if Pedro Porro is regularly faced with stopping the threat of Doku on the dribble, which is a matchup we don’t particularly favour the Spurs man in! Even allowing for recent good results for Spurs against Manchester City (winning three of their last four league meetings), if you’ve got the depth to do so, we’d probably recommend you sit all of the Spurs defenders.

Manchester City vs Tottenham - 4.30pm UK, 11.30am US kickoff, Sunday

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Can either Chelsea or Brighton sort things out defensively?

If there was a way to parlay “Both Teams to Score” on Fantrax for extra point bonuses, this would be the game to do it in. Both teams seem determined to shoot themselves in both feet defensively on a weekly basis at the moment and this weekend they face each other. You’d be forgiven for not wanting to start the defenders for this one. In Reece James, Marc Cucurella and Lewis Dunk’s cases, you literally can’t, as they’re all suspended. For Chelsea that most likely means a return to the starting eleven for Levi Colwill with Malo Gusto still listed as unavailable by Chelsea. That potentially means Axel Disasi also returns at right back. If we were betting, we’d actually go for the slight surprise and back Disasi, Silva, Badiashile and Colwill as the set. Four centre back lineups are all the rage these days. None of these players are horrible with Ghost Point tallies or potential attacking contributions, but facing Brighton, who do tend to score, you might be tempted to fade them again. On the Brighton side the combination of suspension and injuries leaves them fairly light once again. The last meeting of these two sides in October (an EFL Cup tie) saw Brighton starting Igor and Jan-Paul van Hecke and truthfully they struggled with Chelsea’s movement in that game. And in Europe they started with Jack Hinshelwood at left back, which is not an ideal situation. So presumably are we happy starting basically every attacker in this one then?