Here’s our fantasy premier league gameweek 5 wildcard tips article where we pretend we are using our wildcard. It gives player suggestions with more longevity than just for the up coming gameweek.
Fantasy premier league gameweek 5 wildcard tips – the FFGeek imaginary wildcard
With this being a popular wildcard week there are a number of imaginary and actual wildcard articles on the site:
Rob, Joseph, Alex and Scott’s imaginary wildcards
Mikael H and Costas’ imaginary wildcards
This article also brings together the various earlier articles in the week.
It’s a short article where I’m pretending I’m using my wildcard to give you player picks with more longevity than the next game. It’s short as there are few stats.
I’ve given links to articles below with all the detailed stats you’ll need if you want to investigate a player in more detail.
In this article there’s some brief narrative on the selection below. There’s stats in the player ranking articles which can be found here using the links below
Player rankings defence and GK
There’s also our fixture ease article which gives player suggestions with good fixtures. You can also see who the popular transfers are in our bandwagons article .
The FFGeek imaginary wildcard team
The team value fits within mine at £101.5m which is consistent with my team.
Structure
The team is pure 4-3-3. 3 premium defenders and a Wolves/Palace rotation. A midfield and forward line of 3 starters in each.
I started the team by putting the 5 defenders as above, plus the 6 attacking players and then filled the rest as best as I could.
That meant a single £4.5m GK rather than a rotating pair and no £5.0m ish midfielder to strengthen the bench. So this week Mitrovic at City can’t be benched
GK
As I said for budgetary reasons I ended up with a £4.5m and a £4.0m back up.
Rather than being forced to choose a same club pair I choose the best defence with a £4.5m GK. At the moment that is Watford so Foster it is.
To choose the back up £4.0m GK I went through all the £4.0m GK’s I thought were 2nd choice and then chose the one that I thought was the back up to the worst keeper who is currently first choice. That was easily Begovic who’s made 2 howlers already in 4 games and has already conceded 2 more goals than his xG conceded. Boruc it is then
Defence
I’m hoping I don’t need to justify Mendy and Alonso.
I then chose TAA for Liverpool. Liverpool have a bad run of immediate fixtures but for £5.0m TAA is great value and a good attacking outlet with some set piece representation. Now I’ve decided against the decision to put another player in there and then plan a transfer down the line.
The reason being that reactive transfers to injuries, suspensions and loss of team place are becoming more and more common. They also force a 1 transfer week rather than waiting 2 weeks to do 2 for greater flexibility. Just look at Shaw, Zaha, Walcott, Richarlison, Alli etc all recently. Therefore planning a transfer is a difficult thing to do. At £5.0m TAA has season keeper potential so I’ll put him in now and ride out the potential lack of clean sheets. I prefer Robertson btw the way but the savings especially during a difficult run make sense to me.
Wolves and Palace are a good rotation. For Palace I’ve gone for cheapie Wan Bissaka and for Wolves I’ve skipped Bennett to go for the attacking potential of RWB Doherty.
There is some tenuous speculation that Wan Bissaka could be injured in which case I would go for Bennett and Schlupp as my rotation or Tomkins if he’s fit.
Midfield
My core 3 are Salah, Hazard and David Silva. They are the top 3 in my midfield player rankings schedule.
I’m along way off selling Salah. He’s posting better stats than even last year and is still a viable captain option with 51% ownership. There are less risky battles to be fought than dumping the 2nd highest owned player in the game who last year scored 32 goals and 12 assists.
Then I was left with the requirement of 2 £4.5m mids and I chose Billing and then Westwood hoping they are reasonably gametime secure. The £4.5ms are a minefield this season.
Forwards
Upfront Aguero was a no brainer. It remains to be seen how the UCL affects Pep’s team sheets though.
The next 2 value for money players in my rankings were Wilson and Ings but I chose Mitrovic instead as gut feel he seemed the better option.
Other options
If I wanted to save money to beef up my bench I could have gone for Ings over Mitrovic, Ramsey over Silva and Bennett over Doherty but I stuck with the choices I made and will just have to pretend to live with a less than ideal bench.
See also Rob Reids August review the 10 top FPL managers article, the underlying stats GW4 article and the early thoughts on the FFGeek team article
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