Sky Sports fantasy football – analysing the double captain rule

Sky Sports fantasy football has a new rule where you can put 2 captains in to 1 gameweek.  That is you can pick a captain on Saturday and then a different one on Sunday or Monday.  You can’t have 2 captains in the one day though.  So before I picked out the best players for my “ones to watch article” I thought I should analyse the first 10 or so fixtures to see what the implications are

Firstly I thought I should establish a captain pool ie a set of players from the top 4 challenging teams that I would consistently be happy with to captain my Sky Sports fantasy football team.  After much thought this is

Man Utd – RVP

Man City – Silva or hopefully a striker who gets selected with some sort of consistency

Chelsea –  Mata/ Hazard

Arsenal – Walcott

Liverpool – Sturridge or Coutinho – assuming Suarez leaves

Spurs – Soldado – assuming Bale leaves

Unfortunately getting a player in from each team is unfortunately impossible if you include RVP unless you butcher the defence which I wasn’t prepared to do.

So I set up a schedule which showed which of those teams played on which day so I could see any risk areas in the captaincy “rota” if you like.  I wont bore you with the schedule but here are the basic findings and implications

1.  Most of the sides are evenly split playing either 5 on Saturday or Sunday/Monday or 6 and 4 either way.  The only exception is Arsenal who play 8 times on Saturday and twice on Sunday/Monday.  Strangely that does have too many implications except that having an Arsenal player doesn’t widen the captain choice very much with them mostly playing on the day with the majority of fixtures.

2.  I then looked at the days in the gameweeks ahead where there was either only 1 team of my captain pool playing on a Saturday or Sunday/ Monday as this seemed be the risk areas where there was only 1 captain option unless there was another juicy fixture to go for

Lets look at these instances

• gameweek 3:  Saturday, Man City v  Hull.   12.45 game so we will be able to see the line up to see if our City player of choice is playing.  Everton at Cardiff is the next best pick
• gameweek 4: Monday, Swansea v Liverpool.  Only game.  Again at least you can see the line up to make a change if necessary.  The only other fixture is Southampton v West Ham which isn’t great.
• gameweek 6:  Sunday, Sunderland v Liverpool 2nd game.  Everton v Newcastle is the Monday alternate
• gameweek 8:   Sunday, Villa v Tottenham only game.  Palace v Fulham is the alternate game
• gameweek 10:  Sunday Everton v Tottenham first game.  Alternate is Cardiff v Swansea

So what does the above mean.  A Liverpool and Spurs player is desirable for GW1 if you want to avoid a transfer later on.  Luckily they both have good fixtures to start with and have good players to pick from.   The good news though is that Coutinho and Soldado are fairly nailed on to play and only in 1 game will we be relying on the more rotation prone teams of  Chelsea and Man City and in that instance at least we will be able to see the line up and react accordingly

Interestingly Everton feature as an alternative in 2 of the 6 fixtures and if you’re unsure about whether to pick an Everton player over another then this may help the decision.

Right with that established I’ll get on to my Sky sports fantasy football “ones to watch” article and a draft team

Follow us on twitter @fantasyfoot20 or facebook at www.facebook.com/fantasyfootballgeek.co.uk