Our Gameweek 1 coverage climaxes as we reflect on the player, the team and the latest talking point to demand our attention.
Raheem Sterling returned to Premier League action quicker than expected to remind us of his potential, while Crystal Palace provided the perfect performance for the multitudes of Fantasy managers who had Eagles assets in defence and attack.
We also examine the “death” of the Fantasy Premier League forward…
The Player
Raheem Sterling was far from most FPL managers’ thoughts and teams ahead of Manchester City’s trip to Arsenal on Sunday afternoon.
Sitting in just 2.1% of FPL squads, the England international was only the seventh-most popular City midfield asset in the game before the Gameweek 1 deadline.
A World Cup-affected pre-season and increased competition in the midfield spots – notably the capture of Riyad Mahrez and the summer form of Bernardo Silva – were contributing factors in his unpopularity among Fantasy managers, but a price hike to £11.0m was perhaps the chief reason why the highest-scoring City player in FPL last season was overlooked.
That Fernandinho (£5.5m) had over three times as many owners as Sterling ahead of the meeting with Arsenal summed up just how ignored the former Liverpool midfielder had initially been. Only 21,600 managers have snapped up Sterling since then, too.
With Mohamed Salah’s starting price ballooning to £13.0m and City alternatives such as Mahrez (£9.0m) and Leroy Sane (£9.5m) available for less money after a full pre-season, Sterling was the inevitable fall-guy as FPL managers endeavoured to make their £100m budgets stretch that little bit further.
It took all of 14 minutes of the match at the Emirates for the England international to serve a reminder of his worth: cutting in from the left flank after a lay-off from Benjamin Mendy, Sterling rifled home City’s opening goal past an unsighted Petr Cech from just outside the box.
Sterling registered more penalty box touches (11) than any Premier League midfielder this weekend, while only Callum Wilson could better that tally among FPL forwards. No City player had more shots than Sterling in the win over Arsenal, either.
Sterling’s deployment on the left flank was also a reminder of his versatility, an all-the-more important quality this season following Mahrez’s acquisition. While predominantly stationed on the right wing in 2017/18, Sterling played across the City frontline last season and, of course, toiled up front for England as a forward this summer. If Mahrez starts, it doesn’t necessarily follow that Sterling won’t.
By contrast, Leroy Sane’s route into the City team is seemingly one-way: of the German international’s 27 Premier League starts last season, only one wasn’t on the left flank.
That Sterling was fast-tracked straight into City’s team after only five days of training at the expense of Sane, who had a full pre-season under his belt, says much about Pep Guardiola’s trust in the 23-year-old.
After establishing himself in the City starting XI in Gameweek 11 of last season, Sterling was to start 24 of City’s final 28 league matches. Two of the fixtures he missed were enforced through a hamstring injury, while one of the other two non-appearances was the Double Gameweek 37 draw with Huddersfield after City had wrapped up the league title.
With all six of the most recently promoted teams to come in the next half-dozen Gameweeks, the fixture list couldn’t be better poised for Sterling to add to Sunday’s seven-point haul. Attacking returns in the matches against Huddersfield and Wolves in the coming fortnight will have the 97%+ of us who don’t own the City midfielder questioning our position and, just perhaps, looking at ways to accommodate yet another premium pick.
The Team
Was there a more talked-about team in pre-season than Crystal Palace? Every other social media post seemed to be musing on either the cluster of attractive defensive options in Roy Hodgson’s squad or whether Wilfred Zaha was worth the punt as a reclassified FPL forward.
Those who lumped on the Eagles’ assets for their Gameweek 1 trip to Fulham weren’t to be disappointed.
Three of Palace’s FPL defenders – Aaron Wan-Bissaka, Patrick van Aanholt and an “out-of-position” Jeffrey Schlupp – all delivered attacking returns to add to their clean sheet points, while Zaha found the back of the net after starting the game alongside Christian Benteke in attack.
No team had more shots on target in Gameweek 1 than Hodgson’s side, with eight of their 12 overall attempts on goal coming from inside the box.
That Palace managed this in spite of their otherwise unremarkable attacking statistics could be seen in both a positive and negative light.
The Eagles’ possession rate of 34% was the lowest of all the 20 Premier League clubs last weekend, while Palace also ranked in the bottom three for touches and possession in the final third.
That only five clubs had more penalty box touches than Palace, however, showed just how clinical Hodgson’s troops were with what little time on the ball they were afforded: something the Eagles will surely have to emulate next Monday for the visit of Liverpool.
Though the fact that Fulham were allowed 15 shots on Wayne Hennessey’s goal is a slight worry for those FPL managers sticking with a Palace defender for the Gameweek 2 encounter with Mohamed Salah and co, cut a little deeper and the underlying defensive statistics aren’t quite as troubling: Palace were one of just five teams who didn’t allow their opposition a single “big chance” at the weekend. Only six of Fulham’s 15 efforts were from inside the area, meanwhile.
Saturday’s shut-out was Palace’s fifth clean sheet in nine Premier League matches, too.
The Talking Point
Not a single Premier League striker scored more than one goal or registered more than eight FPL points last weekend. Of the 25 goals recorded in the English top-flight in Gameweek 1, meanwhile, only six of them were scored by a forward.
The move away from a top-heavy FPL squad was already in motion before the opening weekend of the 2018/19 season, but the meagre attacking returns from our forwards – only three of whom registered assists – in Gameweek 1 has seemingly increased that momentum.
Nine defenders and six midfielders registered double-digit scores in the weekend just gone and, of the ten most-bought players of this round so far, not one of them is a forward.
While the short-termist, knee-jerk response would be to jettison our premium forward picks, it is far too early to write them off as disposable budget-freers.
Harry Kane, admittedly, looked well off the pace in Spurs’ 2-1 away win over Newcastle United and didn’t manage to register a single shot on target in the match. That Kane was starting the game at all, though, came as something of a surprise. The England striker was one of a number of premium picks, not just in attack, who looked unlikely to start in Gameweek 1 following their World Cup exertions, but whose selection made a fool out of many an FPL manager/pundit/writer/”expert” who were expecting a gradual reintroduction.
That unremarkable run-out against the Magpies, then, will at the very least have helped Kane to improve his match fitness and provide a platform to end his August goal drought when newly promoted Fulham – who conceded more shots on target than any Premier League club in Gameweek 1 – visit Wembley this Saturday.
Manchester City and Arsenal’s fixtures are about to take a turn for the better, too. Having faced each other in the final match of Gameweek 1, Sergio Aguero and Pierre Emerick-Aubameyang will have far easier fixtures ahead of them in the coming months.
As mentioned earlier, City face all six of the sides promoted in 2017/18 and 2016/17 between now and the end of September, while Arsenal just have to get a trip to Stamford Bridge out of the way before a sequence of eight league matches in which they play none of the other “big six”.
After a 25-minute run-out against Leicester City, meanwhile, Romelu Lukaku will surely line up this weekend against a Brighton & Hove Albion side who conceded the most attempts on goal out of all 20 Premier League clubs in Gameweek 1.
Jamie Vardy was the only premium forward to get on the scoresheet last weekend and his Leicester City side now face a Wolverhampton Wanderers team that looked very exposed on the counter-attack against Everton on Saturday: a defensive flaw that Vardy has exploited time and time again in the past.
While we should, of course, pay heed to the weekly Fantasy trends, we need to be beware of the forward backlash that might lie just around the corner, particularly when reallocating funds to other positions. It wouldn’t take anything more than an Aguero/Kane/Aubameyang brace or hat-trick for us to be scrambling to raise funds again for their services.
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