Throughout the 2022/23 Fantasy Premier League (FPL) season, our team of Pro Pundits, Hall of Famers and guest contributors will be sharing their thoughts, tips and own transfer plans.

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Here, two-time Indian FPL champion Lateriser wonders whether knowing your current rank could negatively affect how decisions are made, looks at Liverpool’s new tactics and urges positivity to those Fantasy managers who didn’t captain Erling Haaland in Gameweek 9…

Gameweek 9 was brutal for me. As one of the few that captained Mohamed Salah (£12.8m) instead of Erling Haaland (£12.2m), alongside also being a Manchester United fan, let’s just say that Sunday’s derby wasn’t fun.

That night, my overall rank fell from 400k to 1.3 million yet, thanks to James Maddison’s (£8.1m) brilliant 18-pointer on Monday, it quickly settled on 800k.

Don’t Give Up

I normally don’t cite these rises and falls in my articles but it’s important to do so this week. There was so much season-ending online sentiment amongst those that didn’t captain Haaland, where people were already talking about giving up on their team.

Managers kept whining about how everyone is going to permanently captain Haaland and there will be no opportunity to make up this difference which, honestly, felt like so much over-the-top overreaction to me.

Most of us who captained Salah lost 18 points to the field (because everyone owns Haaland) and those that captained Maddison lost only five points. You don’t need an extreme captaincy call to make these points and your season is definitely not over.

I entered Gameweek 8 at around 893k, so am only a week back in terms of rankings. One or two decent weeks where a couple of your players beat the field and you’re back in business.

The campaign is extremely long and we’re not even a quarter of the way through it, with Double Gameweek season still to come in the second half. Again, I talk about this because I had a poor start in 2020/21 and the mistake I made was doubling down on my initial problem and subsequently becoming different for the sake of being different in order to shoot up the rankings.

This was very much a mistake that we need to learn from and you don’t need to necessarily go differential to make up the points. Opportunities will arise and sometimes when you least expect them.

I had Marcus Rashford (£6.5m) from Gameweek 4 onwards and, in the game against Arsenal, I wasn’t expecting much but he brought me 18 points, which alone helped me gain 600k in rank. In fact, it is very important that after taking such a big hit, you don’t go on tilt which only leads to you falling behind.

The negative impact of live ranks

One of my friends from the community, FPL Reuser, plays the whole FPL season without looking at his overall rank. His thinking is that not knowing rank helps you make optimal decisions and simply pick the best players, rather than overthinking and panicking.

This makes a lot of sense. I was recently on the FML FPL podcast where host Alon asked how to recover from a poor start and my answer was simply that I don’t know because, if I knew, I’d be able to salvage my season.

However, upon thinking a little more, I remembered Reuser and replied that the answer is probably to not think about rank and focus on making the right transfers. Alon said “so basically, dance like no one’s watching” and I simply smiled and agreed.

So much of FPL is psychology and emotion, at least for me. I was chatting to my pod partner Zophar just this morning, telling him how so many transfers may even depend on the day you make it because our thoughts are always evolving, we just don’t know whether it’s for better or worse.

New Liverpool tactics

Moving on, one recent thing has caught my interest. Liverpool tested out a new 4-2-3-1 in the Champions League against Rangers and the FPL implications of that could be very significant.

A lot of us will be looking to buy Liverpool assets when they follow a couple of tough games by facing West Ham United (H), Nottingham Forest (A) and Leeds United (H).

There was an excellent video on this on TIFO, which you can see below:

It could mean that one of the Liverpool forwards becomes an option, while maybe Trent Alexander-Arnold (£7.3m) could be more withdrawn. We don’t yet know how it will impact Mohamed Salah.

Either way, let’s observe over the next two or three weeks and begin planning because you will want their players soon enough. And it’s worth paying attention to Jurgen Klopp’s words:

“It had a little bit to do with the game but not too much. It was for us, we wanted to defend differently to what we usually do.”

Keeping this in mind, you need to decide where to allocate funds in the upcoming weeks. But I’m monitoring the £9.0m striker bracket closely due to certain Liverpool and Chelsea forwards becoming options in the future.

I feel like there is more upside to chasing Gameweek 12 onwards and whatever you do with your transfers, you need to keep these fixtures in your thoughts.

That’s it from me, I’ll see you next week. In the meantime, you can check out our Gameweek 10 pod here:

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