Scout Notes – Gameweek 3 – Monday

Six home wins so far isn't helping matters.

Aguero is surely the silver bullet from now on, though?

Defenders seem to be good captaincy options too these days. Seriously though, if you look at the top point scorers so far this season, its very random.

It's been 3 weeks, its too small a sample to judge. Over 38 weeks Aguero (C) Hazard (VC) will outscore Gomis (C) Mahrez (VC)

2,2,2 so far for me. (Haz,Mane,Kun)

Almost did Kolarov this week over Kun but didn't have the guts. I hate a 2pointer, but it's better than a 1 pointer!

I think it's just the dark side of probability.

Because the good captains came back to start the season unfit. Rooney and Hazard have looked slow and porky.

Sometimes the right choice just doesn't pay off.

GW1 can be a lottery as there is no form to go off.

GW3 didn't have an obvious choice in my opinion. Rooney, Aguero, Hazard, Pelle, were all decent shouts but none of them scored big.

So far my captains have been Rooney, Benteke and Aguero and don't think they were bad choices.

Next week a lot of the potential big performers have favourable fixtures. I think captain choice this week could be a real differential as can't see them all blanking.

No real point scorer in gameweek 1 for me, but captaining Bentekkers in gameweek 2 and Gomis gameweek 3 I think I've done fairly well! Like others say, some defenders are looking like good captaining options (looking at you Kolarov)

risk averse. Start the week full of bravado and intending to follow gut instinct. End up following the crowd as 40-50% captaincy selections can't be wrong can they?
there was some software going around last year that worked out what wrong captaincy decisions had cost. mine was well over 200 net pointsafter about 28/29 games!!
only ever captained one defender (Baines) when he was on a hot streak and taking the pens, freekicks etc.

Form has to be a big part of it, and that's very difficult to judge at this stage. You can argue that Mahrez's form made him an obvious pick this week, but if he'd done what he did in GW1 & GW2 this season in GW16 and GW17 last year, would people have been captaining him for GW18? I seriously doubt it - they would have said that it was too small a sample size, and that he was as yet unproven. Three gameweeks of returns is much more convincing than two though, and it's fair to say that he looks like a must-have budget enabler at the moment.

I do agree that price can mislead people - you often see critics of the idea of someone benching a 6m player, when there's nothing inherently wrong with that (bar arguably being a poor use of your budget). Similarly, would Gomis have been in more teams from the start at 8m instead of 7m, for example? It seems perverse, but I think that he might have.

However, the top players are expensive for a reason. Take Aguero for example. City blanked 3 times last season. Aguero was involved in 54.8% of their goals when he was on the pitch. City were always likely to score, and if fit, Aguero was always more likely than not to be involved. In the 29 matches where he played 60 minutes or more, Aguero blanked 10 times. That's very good, but even the best player in the game only brought the points in 2/3 of the time. Captaincy blanks are an inevitable part of the game, and we shouldn't over-react to it. Keep captaining the big hitters with good fixtures - it will work out as the best strategy over the long term.

Because captaincy is a total crapshoot, no matter who you pick.

It's the most frustratingly luck-based aspect of FPL. The new tokens don't help either.

Here's my take...

1. Past performance is being viewed through rose-tinted spectacles and not analytically. As a result certain players are used as a "comfort blanket" captain choice, supported and reinforced by the majority who then claim afterwards that it wasn't a bad decision, only bad luck. Couple this with aversion to risk - by which I mean the risk of making a mistake that others don't (safety in numbers) - and you have a reasonable explanation for the poor recent record of FFS captain polls (which didn't do well last season either).

2. First example - Sanchez is not a good captain option right now in any game in my opinion. He was brilliant in FPL for 3 months last season when Arsenal had a lot of injuries, he was playing central and everything was going through him. Now he's wide in a team with more attacking options. He can't be captained because of that unless you are willing to take a big punt (at least I consider it to be a big punt). Of course he will get some hauls but they are not going to be easily predictable and that's what you need from a captain option.

3. Second example - Aguero is not the "default" captain option (or shouldn't be in my opinion). He's unlikely to be the best option every week. He scores more goals at home than away (69 at home to 43 away in the PL) and has never scored a PL hat-trick away from the Etihad where he has 5.

I would prefer Costa to Aguero this week - Watford have been really resilient so far whereas Palace are more open. So I think Palace (h) is a better fixture than Watford (h) for goals therefore. I don't have Costa so it's academic but if I did I wouldn't be frightened to make that call even though it's only a marginal one and Aguero could very easily do better than Costa - it's maybe 55/45. But it's certainly not a default decision (or shouldn't be).

4. As a result of (1) above, lower priced players with good form and fixtures tend to be ignored and even laughed at (as Jonty pointed out). Anyone captaining Mahrez so far has been derided on here as a "casual", I have seen that superior attitude in posts a number of times. 🙁 Maybe these so-called "casuals" are just less prejudiced or convinced of their informed viewpoints?

Similarly it is not popular on here to contest or express doubt about majority choices. There's a kind of thing where these choices are supposed to be considered wise, and if they fail unlucky, and anyone saying otherwise is "captain hindsight" or worse. I have been posting on here for a year now and have gained some credibility I guess but last season I took an almighty amount of flak for challenging majority views. How dare some no-nothing newbie do that? 😕

5. In my opinion any score of 7+ is a captain success. I don't need a haul (though I'll be glad when it comes). I don't even need my captain to be considered "explosive". I just need a player that scores a goal or gets a clean sheet if a defender. That's what I try to prioritise in captain decisions. Mind you, with 3 (c) fails so far it appears I am no better at it than anyone else. 🙂

There are a lot of informed people on this site who delve into KPIs (Key performance indicators). You can't say you or anyone else has got a captaincy decision wrong if the judgement was based on sound analysis or thought process.

We should be risk averse. Whenever we make a decision it should be to get the maximum possible return from our available budget.

FPL tell you at the start of the season who they think is high/low risk through the pricing system. Our job is to figure out where FPL have mispriced and sell and buy accordingly.

Prior to GW3 we didn't have much in the way of form thus it makes perfect sense to look back at the previous season in order to draw some conclusions.

It is from now on that we will separate the shrewd operators from the risk taking punters.

because we're not captaining Kolarov

Random variance.