FPL Gameweek 17 team drafts: Rashford and Darwin in, KDB out?

With Fantasy Premier League (FPL) resuming on Boxing Day, we’ll be welcoming back our stellar team of Pro Pundits and Hall of Famers for the restart.

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Here, two-time Indian FPL champion Lateriser talks us through his first draft for the restart.

The Boxing Day deadline is fast approaching and while we might be in a little bit of a ‘snooze mode’, we should wake up from our slumber soon enough because the deadline is less than 10 days away.

I spent this morning having a little tinker with some of my initial thoughts and will take you through my team. It is worth noting that this is only my first draft and now I go on a four-day break away from Fantasy Premier League (FPL) before I dive into it again. My thoughts will evolve in the next few days as we gain more and more information.

PREMIUM PICKS

Let’s begin with the premiums.

I think Erling Haaland (£12.2m) is as obvious as it gets so let’s not waste any characters there.

I spoke at length about Mohamed Salah (£12.8m) in my previous article and I’m fairly bullish on him. I want to have him in if I can help it and while there are more than a few reasons not to own him, I just think Jurgen Klopp is going to play him closer to goal and his sharpness is going to show. His expected goals (xG) per 90 minutes went up from 0.4 to 0.6 in the final six Gameweeks before the World Cup break and Liverpool are surely due more than a few penalties.

It’s all well and good until I realise that I want some Tottenham Hotspur assets in my team, while I still might want to get a reliable-for-minutes Kevin De Bruyne (£12.6m) in my squad. Then, the Salah position becomes one I look at for accommodating those players in my set-up.

FORWARD OPTIONS

Salah’s strike partner Darwin Nunez (£9.0m) is someone whose song I’ve been singing for a while. His underlying numbers when looked at from a ‘per 90’ lens are close to those of Haaland and with Diogo Jota (£8.8m) and Luis Diaz (£7.8m) injured at the moment, his minutes should be fairly secure. He also has got great creative data, as well, and was second only to De Bruyne for big chances created in the last six matches before we paused for the World Cup.

The third striker in my squad is Aleksandar Mitrovic (£6.8m), who almost picks himself with a Double Gameweek on the horizon. Fulham are very attacking as a team and fixtures don’t seem to matter as much for the Serbian striker, who already has four goals scored against big-six clubs this season. He is on four yellow cards, though, and if he didn’t have a Double Gameweek, I’d have probably gone for Anthony Martial (£6.7m), who has three great fixtures to start the season (NFO, wol, BOU). I strongly believe that while people are worried about the Frenchman’s injury record, it is very much the ‘Ings syndrome’ for me, where a player is fit until he’s injured and we need to cross that bridge when we get there, if we get there.

MIDFIELD PICKS

These are still relatively early days and I write this with the caveat that this is only my first draft. If you want to hear more, we at The FPL Wire recently did an ‘FPL Reboot’ pod which should get your juices flowing.

You can view the same below: