Top Points
Winston Reid takes top honours this week for both his top FPL haul of 15 points and placed 3rd in our Player Ratings for GW7 (available in full here). Last week we had noticed Reid was amongst the top rated players of the season in our rankings, but did not see much prospect of anything but a clean sheet for Spurs against West Ham, nevermind a 0-3 thrashing. Where did that come from? Reid now jumps up to 2nd overall in our full season player ratings on the back of the highest xGoals rating of any defender (expected goals) .
Next up is Adnan Januzaj, two nicely hit goals sparking up the fantasy transfer market once again. He's the most transferred in player this week, 72,000 in already. At £4.7m and with the international break here he'll surely hit the £0.3m price rise limit. He's ranked 11th in our ratings for GW7 with 6 shots in total, 3 on target. 3 of his shots came from outside the box and only 1 in Zone A/B which is why he's not higher placed. Still, he's ranked highest of any United player from the Sunderland game and offers genuine potential.
Loic Remy hit 2 goals against Cardiff to make that 5 in 3 starts since he regained fitness. His 5 shots, 4 on target, and 3 from Zone A/B see him placed 2nd overall for GW7. Fantasy interest in Remy has been cooled by Romelu Lukaku's goals and and when you look at the immediate fixtures for Newcastle you can understand why [LIV(H), SUN(A), CHE(H), TOT(A)].
Daniel Sturridge put any doubts to bed about him being marginalised by the return of Luis Suarez. We talked last week about the dominance of Suarez in their first two games together. Against Palace Sturridge emerged on top, both in terms of his underlying stats and gaining maximum bonus points to Suarez's none, despite a goal each, Overall, the BPS will probably not favour Suarez' game, and we imagine missing a 'Big Chance' and getting caught offside 5 times will have counted against him here.
Artur Boruc
A clean sheet, two save points and based on both these two extra bonus points takes Boruc to the top of the scoring charts for goalkeeprs, 1 ahead of the much more popular Mignolet. Liverpool have gone 4 games now without a clean sheet whilst Southampton's whole style of play is based on a tight defence. They've still only conceded 2 goals this season.
Top Performances - Goal Threat
Pappis Cisse is the top ranked player in our xGoal ratings for GW7. He's in the team at the expense of Ben Arfa but still can't buy a goal. Will he ever come good?
Sergio Aguero was good value for his points despite the penalty miss/assist bizarreness. If you consider how excellent City were against a hitherto unbeaten Everton side you can get an appreciation of how good they are going forward, particularly at home. It could be a risky play, but catching Aguero at the right time in your FPL team could be a real winner.
Daniel Sturridge, as already mentioned, was not to be outshone by Suarez and was rated 3rd overall for goal threat this weekend.
Top Performances - Most Creative
Mark Noble was the top creator in West Ham's victory over Spurs, with 5 key passes, albeit failing to find an assist. He's not had a great time so far this season with West Ham's lack of goals and has only 1 assist to his name despite 17 chances created jn total. He now has the highest xAssist value for the season our ratings.
David Silva and Yaya Toure both picked up attacking points against Everton with an assist a piece and both could have had at least another assist, creating a total of 9 chance between them. Silva's performance here on his return to action after injury is a reminder of his potential and he could be an excellent differential, owned now by just 5%.
Vastly more popular is Toure, the 2nd highest scoring player in FPL (50 points) and in 36% of teams. He's not someone we've talked about on this blog much. In truth, we've overlooked him as overpriced player considering the more obvious potential of elite midfielders around him. But as the more attacking midfield stars of the league misfire or succumb to injury Yaya's consistency has seen him keep on trucking.
As always, we'll have more player and team analysis through the week. We've updated the Player Ratings for GW7 and GW1-7. You'll notice we have added two extra columns to the full-season ratings - Minutes Played and aP90. The latter of these is attacking points per 90 minutes played and helps sort through the players who have missed some games this season. We've also updated the Fixture Analyser for the games through GW8 to GW17.
- GW7 Player Ratings
- GW1-7 Player Ratings (updated with Mins and aP90)
- Fixture Analyser GW8-17
