| GW7 Rank | Player |
GW7 Pts
|
GW7-38 Rank |
|---|---|---|---|
1
|
Ivanovic |
56
|
98
|
2
|
Hazard |
51
|
14
|
3
|
Ba |
49
|
52
|
4
|
Tevez |
48
|
27
|
5
|
Torres |
47
|
100
|
6
|
Michu |
45
|
10
|
7
|
Baines |
45
|
17
|
8
|
Crouch |
44
|
103
|
9
|
Cole A |
43
|
121
|
10
|
Bale |
43
|
2
|
The above table is the top 10 players at this stage of last season's Fantasy Premier League campaign, after 7 gameweeks, and then their ranking through the following 31 weeks from GW8 to GW38. Only Bale and Michu hung on to a place within the top 10 although honourable mention must be given to Baines and Hazard.
There's no sign of some of 2013/14's top fantasy performers. Van Persie, Suarez, Mata, Cazorla, Lambert, Lukaku, Benteke, Walcott, Fellaini, Gerrard, Lampard.
The point.... the season is far from over. What we know now from the first seven gameweeks is not what we'll now at the final whistle of GW38. There is still a lot of opportunity to get ahead and our advice to fantasy managers at this point is to ... stay on your toes! Do not burn your transfers and desperately spend point hits just to get the current top scoring players in your team.
Rather, look at this current crop of players and ask yourselves which one's will have a chance at the end of season dream team, and which don't. Which players look below the cut right now but could well end up in the 2013/14 Dream Team.
We are not suggesting that you should sit patiently with these 'sleeper' players in your team while watching other mangers race away on their bandwagons, but you should pay mind to you team balance so that when the times comes you'll have the transfers in hand to ease these players into your team. This means not knee-jerking every week, not replacing a player just because he hasn't scored for a couple of weeks, holding on to a transfer if you can.
We can look at last year's data in a slightly different way by looking at the top 10 players over the latter 31 weeks of the season and seeing where they were placed after the first 7 weeks.
| Player | GW7 Points | Rank GW1-7 | Rank GW8-38 |
|---|---|---|---|
Van Persie
|
41
|
12
|
1
|
Bale
|
43
|
10
|
2
|
Mata
|
35
|
24
|
3
|
Suarez
|
38
|
17
|
4
|
Walcott
|
22
|
91
|
5
|
Santi Cazorla
|
41
|
14
|
6
|
Benteke
|
11
|
214
|
7
|
Gerrard
|
35
|
27
|
8
|
Lambert
|
35
|
22
|
9
|
Michu
|
45
|
6
|
10
|
As already alluded to, not many of the season's best players were in the top 10 by GW7 however this view also shows us that most players were at least in the top 20-30, so whilst not running away with it were already showing good consistency. The big exceptions were Benteke and Walcott who both missed a lot of minutes at the start of the season.
This means we should not, of course, dismiss a player's form over the first 7 weeks, especially were a player has has missed a significant amount of gametime.
Our advice remains the same though - stay on your toes. The players with the most points now will certainly not be the players with the most points at the end of the season. Don't be too trigger happy with your transfers without having a think how it positions your team for later weeks and emergence of genuine players. Sometimes the transfers you don't make are just as important as the one's you do.
