With four of the league’s top five teams enjoying a future date with a double Gameweek, flexibility is going to be key in the next month; finding room for a budget option or two becomes as important as ever.
With Raheem Sterling now “rested” to make way for more senior heads at Anfield and Jason Puncheon dropped for two of the last three Gameweeks, the pool of cheap midfielders has taken a hit of late, giving us every incentive to go on the hunt for new options.
One name that has quietly re-emerged of late is Wigan’s Shaun Maloney – a promising option who looked set to find himself in these pages earlier in the year, only to be inexplicably benched for Jordi Gomez after his hattrick in Gameweek 13 (Gomez followed that ICT index score of 33 with a total of 37 over the next 15 weeks).

