With the long gameweek in play I though I’d take a stroll down memory lane and relive my best and worst fantasy premier league matches. Not necessarily in terms of scores but more in terms of experience.
fantasy premier league matches – my best and worst
It’s worth stating that I don’t have the fantasy premier league match details so I’m doing a decent amount from memory so just ignore the vagueness at times.
The Best
Bournemouth 1 Spurs 4
This was a GW30 game in the 17/18 season played on 11 March and was a live match on Sky so the game unfolded before me rather than just being a Saturday 3pm game where in the UK you just get the good or bad news in one go. Here’s the video highlights
In this game I had Son Heung Min, Harry Kane as captain and Serge Aurier. Both Son and Aurier were fairly low owned players and I recall Harry Kane being the player that most FPL managers had laid their fantasy premier league bets on as their captain choice.
The game started very badly with the Aurier clean sheet lost after 7 minutes. That was made worse by Harry Kane going off with an injury after 34 minutes. In retrospect that was the key event which lead to this being my favourite FPL game.
Things improved somewhat with the Aurier assist for Alli’s equaliser before half time. However after half time the game completely turned into my favour in a way that I could never have anticipated.
Son scored from an Alli cross in the 67th minute which was a nice bonus and I was thinking that ok this isn’t too bad.
However the reason this match is my favourite FPL match was down to the last few minutes. Son scored a breakaway goal and although had a clear option to pass decided to round the keeper and score. I couldn’t believe my luck. However in injury time Trippier crossed and Aurier headed home. In 4 minutes I had added 11 points plus probably 5 in bonus points to my total. These weren’t just any points either these were rank busting differential points. When Aurier scored I remember sending a message into our FFGeek wattsapp chat which just said OMG with the shocked Emoji.
As I said neither were particularly well owned players. I had been trying to get rid of Son ironically he had 3 tough fixtures in the weeks leading up to GW29 and had gone in that spell 4 games without a return. His name was pretty much mud with FPL managers. Aurier had just come into my side due to an injury elsewhere. Most people in the replacement had gone for Ben Davies but I had more belief in Aurier’s attacking ability.
I can’t recall how much this moved me up the rankings but it was pretty significant that’s for sure. Games like this that you watch live make FPL worth playing and compensate for all the days when things just don’t go your way at all.
The Worst
Bournemouth 0 Liverpool 4
This was a GW16 game in the 18/19 season. You can see the you tube highlights here. If you’ve ever wondered why I’m so scathing of Eddie Howe and his inability to sort out a defence then this article with his defence at the heart of the article may help explain it to you. This seems to be a phenomenon which is getting worse rather than better. Even against a Burnley this week potentially without Wood and Barnes they are still as long as £3.60 on Betway to get a clean sheet.
The Salah hat trick the game after a relatively mixed period with 2 goals and an assist in his last 5. I sold him the game before for at least a -4 I recall. At the time I had become a little over obsessed with having the top captain poll player. Aubameyang was the top captain pick in a game to the pretty hopeless Huddersfield. Aubameyang had upped the anti significantly as well by scoring twice 2 gameweeks before.
The outcome couldn’t have been worse. Salah gets a hat trick and Aubameyang manages a solitary assist. It’s a huge negative rank impact. Luckily I didn’t watch it live.
The irony of the Salah sale is that there had been alot of grumblings about his poor returns and he was seemingly unable to get any bonus points unless he got 2 returns which he had been struggling to do. I was a positive proponent of him as he had great underlying stats and I felt that he was an explosion waiting to happen. I just hadn’t though it would happen the gameweek after I sold him.
One of the things to come out of this was the fact that sometimes you’ve just got to take the pain of not having a highly owned captain favourite. You can’t own everyone. Yes there will be times when you get totally hit by it but there will also be times that you escape. Even the best players only return 60% of the time and probably only 1 in 5 games get 2 returns which are the ones that really hurt.
It was interesting that this game saw alot of Social media taunting of those managers like myself who sold Salah. That was disappointing
Anyway if you want to add what are you best and worst FPL games add it in the comments below
Thanks
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