FPL Daily: Ranieri sacked, Hodgson linked and Covid cases fall further

We round up the key Fantasy Premier League (FPL) talking points of the day in FPL Daily, a weekday series that serves non-Premier League matchdays and days when we don’t bring you a team news/press conference round-up.

RANIERI DISMISSED

The inevitable happened on Monday evening as Watford confirmed that they had parted company with Claudio Ranieri.

The Hornets’ 3-0 loss to Norwich City last Friday proved to be the final straw for the trigger-happy board, who dispensed with Ranieri’s services less than four months after appointing him.

The well-travelled Italian oversaw only 13 league matches in the Watford hotseat, losing 10 of them.

Conceding 30 goals and registering zero clean sheets in that time, it was at the back where the Ranieri-led Hornets really struggled; no club had a worse defensive record.

At the other end, a decent enough total of 16 goals scored at a rate of 1.23 per game was the 12th-best among Premier League clubs.

In the last hour or so, Roy Hodgson has emerged as the clear front-runner to succeed his fellow veteran, plummeting to an odds-on 1/5 with the bookmakers.

A bit of that dour pragmatism is probably just what Watford need in a bid to stem the flow of goals at the back and boost their survival hopes, and it’ll be interesting to see what Hodgson’s appointment, should it materialise, means for the likes of more attack-minded assets like Emmanuel Dennis (£6.2m) and Joshua King (£5.9m).

Be it Hodgson or someone else who comes on board in the next few days, we Fantasy managers will get to see the new head coach lead out their charges before we can do anything about it, as Watford still have the second match in their Double Gameweek 23 to come against Burnley in a fortnight’s time.

COVID CASES FALLING

Can medium-term transfer and chip planning in FPL now restart in earnest?

Not really until we get the news of the rescheduled fixtures and future Double Gameweeks but at least the threat of postponements is diminishing by the week, meaning that some sort of normality can replace the firefighting brand of FPL management most of us have adopted over recent months.

The Premier League said in a statement on Monday that there were only 16 new positive Covid-19 cases in the week leading up to Sunday 23 January, the lowest number of positive results in a week since the beginning of December:

22-28 Nov: 3,379 tests; seven positive
29 Nov-5 Dec: 3,154 tests; 12 positive
6-12 Dec: 3,805 tests; 42 positive
13-19 Dec: 12,345 tests; 90 positive
20-26 Dec: 15,186 tests; 103 positive
27 Dec-2 Jan: 14,250 tests; 94 positive
3 Jan-9 Jan: 12,973 tests; 72 positive
10-17 Jan: 13,625 tests; 33 positive
18-24 Jan: 6,221 tests; 16 positive