The gameweek gets started at White Hart Lane with Blackburn Rovers taking on Spurs before the three o’clocks roll us on through to Arsenal’s trip to Hull at 5.30.
The team news finds Jermain Defoe restored to the starting lineup with Crouch dropping to the bench. Pavlyuchenko keeps his starting role then and Bale remains on the left flank by the looks of things. David Dunn returns to the Rovers lineup with Andrews making way and it appears that Olsson is back in a midfield role with Chimbonda looking likely to start at left-back. Diouf also drops to the bench to make way.
The Dugout Discussion chat room is now open and will remain so throughout the day to host the emotional rollarcoaster as today’s seven Premier League games take place.
Saturday starts with a big change. This pre-match preamble posts contains all the usual ingredients – a big dose of team news analysis from the morning papers, followed by a the usual array of match facts to throw your last minute fantasy thinking in turmoil. This post does however bring about a big change.
The new comment system is to be introduced on this post and possibly on this post only. Please refer to this morning’s earlier post on how to get involved. In a nutshell – you need to register with IntenseDebate and log in with this account below in order to post a comment this morning. Your existing login will not work but you can change your display name to your existing name on this site, should your username be taken in IntenseDebate.
I’ve opened up the Saturday Surgery in the chatroom early should anyone need some help with this in real-time. I’ll be popping in there while I prepare breakfast.
Now, on with the Preamble… [click to continue…]
With the last post at over 2000 comments and with the new comment system tentatively ready for it’s next round of testing, I’m going to try something this morning.
We’re going to put a new comment system through a “public beta”.
In a few hours a new comment system is due to “go live” on this site. There’s a very good chance that the new system won’t solve all our problems and hand us a load of new bugs to solve. However, I’ve decided to go with it this morning and hopefully over the Fantasy Premier League deadline period to see how it copes. The beauty of this new system is that it can easily be rolled back to what we have now if things should go awry.
The first thing to stress then – this is just a test. No decision will be made on whether this stays permanently as yet and there’s a 99% chance that we will revert back to our old comments system later today… [click to continue…]
With double gameweek’s for Villa and Wigan, plus some desirable home fixtures for Chelsea, Liverpool and United and the injury to Cesc Fabregas, the script for gameweek 30 almost writes itself.
Covering the Villa defence, with four clean sheets in six, looks essential. Covering the chances of Milner taking another step towards South Africa by winning more plaudits and Fantasy Premier League bonus points looks almost essential. The only real dilemma appears to be how you back those three big sides at home this week – with Drogba, Rooney, Torres, Gerrard and Lampard all lining their sights up on obliging opponents and big fantasy hauls, where does your big money go?
Here’s the Scout Picks to offer my two-penneth… [click to continue…]
Hilario and Carvalho miss out but Zhirkov returns as Chelsea prepare for the Hammers. Cahill and Saha in the reckoning as Everton take the trip to St Andrews. Bowyer makes a recovery and should be in opposition. Agbonlahor comes through training as he readies himself for Villa’s double gameweek. Pulis hints at a shake-up for Stoke as they lie in wait for O’Neil’s men…
Today’s team news from around the grounds is almost complete. This new crop has been added to the earlier harvest and predicted lineups have been updated for the gameweek. Get over to the team news section for the latest and keep one eye on Greek Fan’s tweets for fresh goods.
In case you haven’t been paying attention to Greek Fan’s impeccably updated twitter feed (Why not?), a few little fixture nuggets have traveled down the wires in the last day or so.
Perhaps most interesting is that one of the remaining few pending games being rescheduled into gameweek 34, giving us more double gameweek food for thought. The fixture to be played on Wednesday 14th April will be Fulham FC vs Stoke City.
Stoke will have two away days against Fulham and Wolves on the cards, while Fulham add the fixture in perhaps their most unappealing gameweek possible; their other match being against Liverpool at Anfield. That game on the Mersey could be postponed however if Fulham manage to snatch and grab a victory at Spurs in their FA Cup replay…. [click to continue…]
by SIR PAULOS on March 12
Next up in our double gameweek analysis is Wigan Athletic, a side undoubtedly buoyed by last Monday’s home win over Liverpool. Despite having beaten two of the “Big Four” this season, Roberto Martinez’s side have been blighted by an inconsistency that sees them sit just four points above the drop zone and will be hoping to string together a run of results in their fight against relegation…
[click to continue…]
It appears we can count Cesc Fabregas out of our gameweek plans with Arsene Wenger today declaring that it would take a “miracle” for his skipper to step out onto the KC stadium surface on Saturday.
Fabregas was regarded as 50-50 for the weekend prior to Wednesday’s Champions League win over Porto. Those odds have somewhat shortened over the last 24 hours according to the Arsenal boss… [click to continue…]
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