Welcome back to the Overthinking Football Gameweek Preview. We are in a Double Gameweek for many teams, which makes this a tough slate of games to Preview effectively, so we’ve got a few questions about the run-in here. But with GW34 flavour throughout.
As ever, in looking at what’s coming up I have questions. This week I’m asking:
What does the bounce-back look like for the Title challengers?
How might the Premier League Top Goalscorer race play out for Fantrax managers?
Is there a bounce-back coming for Everton, or should the nerves start kicking in?
Are Brighton already in auto-pilot waiting for the Summer?
How do the title-chasers bounce back?
Sometimes the ball doesn’t bounce the way you like and dominant play doesn’t get you the lead. Sometimes it’s for a half (as Arsenal saw in the first 45 minutes against Aston Villa). Sometimes it’s for a week (as Liverpool demonstrated in Manchester and against Crystal Palace). Occasionally it’s for most of a season (as Brentford would no doubt like us to note). But when it happens during crunch-time of a title-challenging season, the mental resolve to keep going and get back to winning ways is crucial.
Arsenal went to Munich hopeful but laid something of an egg in the South of Germany. That will definitely hurt, given this Bayern felt uncommonly beatable. And now they now have the daunting prospect of playing another 3 games in the next 7 days. First, they travel to Wolves. Then they host Chelsea. And, next Gameweek, they make the short journey to Spurs. It’s a 10-day stretch that will either make or break their year. For Fantrax, the pressure is double-edged. We know that Mikel Arteta is not a huge rotation guy unless given no choice. That’s meant that first-choice Arsenal names have been safe to start barring injury. But the negative to that is that this congestion is bound to mean more knocks and rest required. And with this Double Gameweek, the fear is that the Wolves game is seen as the only one where rotation can really be afforded. So what do you do if you’ve got one of Bukayo Saka, Gabriel Martinelli and you see them on the bench on Saturday? We tend to think that the answer is fairly simple: unless there’s an injury, you just leave them in the lineup. Chelsea (somehow) boast the second-longest active unbeaten run in the Premier League. But they’ve not got there by being defensively stingy. The Clean-Sheet versus Everton still feels very much the outlier in the data for Chelsea. The tougher decision might be whether you start a Leandro Trossard or Eddie Nketiah if we see them in the Wolves lineup, if you have alternative options in other games that may be playing 180 minutes. And giving you a definitive answer wouldn’t be based on much, honestly. I would personally not start them as Wolves isn’t an easy game and the likelihood is that if Arsenal do not run into a lead, they’d find themselves hooked off for the starters at the hour-mark anyway.
For Liverpool their midweek Europa League exit in Italy was all-but expected after Atalanta’s 3 Goal win in the first-leg. At least they went out with a win, though they didn’t really do enough to truly threaten a comeback. It’s been a rough week. On paper, their fixtures are considerably friendlier in this Double Gameweek than Arsenal’s. Fulham have been good in 2024 but are still a class below Liverpool. Everton, despite some good vibes, are circling both the footballing and financial drain. But confidence in West London will be high and derbies are always highly-vibe based affairs. For Fantrax, the big issue with projecting Liverpool is that they do have interchangeable parts in a lot of positions. And, unlike Arteta, Klopp does like to rotate and use his full stable of available players. I would personally set the expectation that you will get maybe 1 and a bit Games from the big names in this Gameweek. And be delighted if you get more. Similar to the Saka and Martinelli discussion above, you’re starting Mo Salah, Luis Diaz and Darwin Nunez regardless. I’d maybe even consider Diogo Jota, though his return from injury makes it tougher.
The title odds may have swung to City but both of these sides still have plenty to play for and these remaining games will define their season, even allowing for Liverpool’s Carabao Cup win. So despite the risks of rotation, just keep treating the stars like stars. And if the big names don’t start the first game, we’d probably leave them in starting lineups regardless.
Wolves vs Arsenal - 5.30pm UK, 12.30pm US kickoff, Saturday
Fulham vs Liverpool - 4.30pm UK, 11.30am US kickoff, Sunday
What do we make of the Top-Scorer race?
Football is not really a complicated game. Everyone who has even spent 5 minutes watching it knows Goals are important. Most of us migrated to Fantrax from lesser formats knowing that there was more to it than just Goals. But also that the players that scored more of them should be rewarded with lots of points in any Fantasy Football game. Erling Haaland scored 36 Goals last year. That put him 6 ahead of Harry Kane in 2nd and a massive 16 ahead of Ivan Toney. Kane’s all-round contribution actually saw him finish above Haaland last year in Fantrax. But generally speaking, if you score an outsized number of Goals, you end up right near the top of the Fantrax Points charts. And this year we’ve got a lot of contenders going into the final stretch. We thought it would be a fun exercise to check-in on the contenders. And there are a lot of them this year. Barring something truly surprising, we think there are six players with a shot at finishing top of the pile.
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