Fantasy Football Captain Picks

Captain Picks Fantasy Football Game-week 10 – Fantasy Premier League 2015/16 Greetings from Australia, home of the most feared species on the planet: the Wallaby. In fact, I could be excused for thinking we were in July, being the time of year when the Southern Hemisphere’s Rugby Championship is played. I thought this was a World Cup? Anyhow, when I last presented to you (Gameweek 3), the earth stood on the precipice. Fantasy Football was in meltdown. FF247 was on its knees. Cookie Monsters and chickens (and other strange species) seemed destined to end up back at Sesame Street. The only remaining sensible approach to Fantasy Football was to delete your team, create a new profile, hit “autocomplete”, and sit back and watch the bargain basement likes of Mahrez, Ighalo, Vardy, Wilson e...[Read More]

Captain Picks Fantasy Football Game-week 9 – Fantasy Premier League 2015/16 Well Aguero went and did me a solid by removing himself from the reckoning this GW; at home to injury-ravaged Bournemouth on the back of smashing 5 past McClaren’s sorry bunch, he’d have made this a very short article indeed. All tipping one player. Him. The fantasy Gods had other plans though, and us mere mortals just along for the ride must look elsewhere for our double or triple points, and I get to write a few more paragraphs. Meanwhile normal service has at last returned to FPL Land, with pricey players banging the goals in, managers being replaced, multiple injuries plaguing fantasy managers’ teams, and England both acing a qualifying group and being dumped out of a World Cup in the ro...[Read More]

Captain Picks Fantasy Football Game-week 8 – Fantasy Premier League 2015/16 Let’s talk numbers. 12% of managers were happy this week. 1.7% of managers were ecstatic this week. 88% of managers looked at how they could transfer Sanchez in this week. 1.7% of managers laughed at 88% of managers and toasted themselves with a celebratory glass or two on Saturday evening… A captain often makes or breaks a game-week. Nail it and you are usually looking at a 20+ point haul. Fail it and you spend the week staring blankly / maniacally at your team with a 2 point captain trying desperately not to meet your gaze for fear of being axed or worse. Once in a while you not only nail it, you bloody well drill it in, industrial wall plug’s ‘an all. To illustrate the impact it can...[Read More]

Captain Picks Fantasy Football Game-week 7 – Fantasy Premier League 2015/16 After an upsetting start to the season, most experienced fantasy managers had expected things to return to normal by now, but that hope got quickly thrown out the window when West Ham ended City’s winning streak last round. In other news, Mahrez and Wilson are the top scorers of the Premier League with 5 goals each so far, while Aguero and Hazard have only scored once, with Sanchez not scoring at all. Frustrated fantasy managers continue to have low ranks while noobs and newbies ride on the top, hence some of you might be thinking about captaining some of these upstarts rather than relying on big names. Good luck then that I have several captain picks for you, covering both big names as well as some upstarts.

Captain Picks Fantasy Football Game-week 6 – Fantasy Premier League 2015/16 In literary terms, there is a device that is often used called the “unreliable narrator”. You’re probably familiar with it — the person giving the view in the story tells you everything they think you need to know, and they tell it with absolute confidence. As the reader though, you quickly start to get the feel that the narrator can tend to exaggerate — or even not know when he’s wrong — but through it all, the narrator believes his story as being true. And so, due to his earnestness, the reader believes the story as well. I tell you this because my captain picks have been correct each and every week. You should know that right off the bat. The fact that my captains failed me during their m...[Read More]

Captain Picks Fantasy Football Game-week 5 – Fantasy Premier League 2015/16 This break needs to end! It’s hard to imagine life without our beloved FPL. Four gameweeks. Four 2-point captains. Four fails. Unless you captained Coutinho last gameweek – or triple captained him for that matter – you can’t be faring much worse than I am when it comes to choosing an FPL captain. So here’s a great idea! Take a glance at 5 of my recommendations. Try not to become too absorbed in it all though: reading my captaincy advice is arguably similar to sitting around in second-hand smoke (anyone seen Tekno lately? This ain’t fag smoke…) and probably won’t do your league rankings any favours. Then, preferably quite a while afterwards, go ahead and choose from the pool of players that I...[Read More]

Captain Picks Fantasy Football Game-week 4 – Fantasy Premier League 2015/16 If you captained Yaya Toure in Gameweek 1, Romelu Lukaku in Gameweek 2, Callum Wilson in Gameweek 3 or Riyad Mahrez in any of these weeks, congratulations! You are succeeding more than most. Some of us are holding on to Rooney’s “assist” in Gameweek 1 as the only time we got it sort of right. So on to the next chance we have – and I’m writing this off the back of two 4 point captain shows – so you may want to look away now, stick your fingers in your ears and pretend you never caught sight of this. I jest. Like the most optimistic (or sadistic) FPL players, I’m back for more. And this week I’m going to crack it.

Captains Picks Fantasy Football Game-week 2 – Fantasy Premier League 2015/16 Lewis Hamilton’s first lap demise from pole to fourth in Hungary; Channel 5’s shoestring ‘Football League highlights’ debut; a calamitous $26.2m box-office opening for ‘Fantastic Four’… No-one is immune from a bad start. Not you, certainly not I (please don’t ask), and not even Arsenal. A cursory look at last week’s Captain Poll reminds us how badly the mainstream choices let everyone down. Hazard, Walcott, Benteke, Aguero, Sterling, Costa, Memphis… the list goes on, and on. With 5 points, Rooney was a comparative saviour for many; while those willing to look past Sterling at Silva and Yaya were left purring smugly at the carnage below. But like a S...[Read More]

Captain Picks Fantasy Football Game-week 3 – Fantasy Premier League 2015/16 zzzzzzzzzzzz….. After having my sleep rudely interrupted by a chicken, c0ck-a-d00dle-doing about a looming FF247 deadline, I could have been forgiven for thinking we were still awaiting the kick-off to season 2015/16. So imagine my shock when I was summonsed to select the captaincy contenders for Gameweek 3! Anyhow, I’ve resisted the temptation to defer to the “snooze” function, and I stand before you under a false pretense that this is indeed GW3… Makes you wonder why we even bothered playing from GW1. I mean, look no further than the chap who topped the GW2 rankings. While the rest of us toiled over the pre-season, Johnny-come-lately swoons in and pulls the rug from under our f...[Read More]

Captains Picks Fantasy Football Game-week 1 – Fantasy Premier League 2015/16 Welcome to the first captains article of the season! The Premier League has finally returned, and while many of you have probably come pretty close to a settled squad by now, you also need to select a captain to help you start off your season with a good score. Well, that’s what we are here for. Whether that’s double points or treble will depend on whether you take advantage of the new ‘Triple Captain’ chip but more on that later. So without further ado, let’s get right to it and look at the best captaincy options for Game-week 1.

Captains Picks Fantasy Football Gameweek 38 – Fantasy Premier League 2014/15 Ah, the unpredictability of a meaningless fixture. As West Brom’s confident dismantling of the champions reminded us, teams with nothing to chase have respect for neither form nor logic. Romelu Lukaku’s hat-trick in 2012/13’s loopy 5-5 finale with Man Utd is burned permanently onto the retinas of FPL managers across the land (Most infamously, costing runner-up Kelvin Travers the title that year). There hasn’t been a goalless draw on the last day of the Premier League since Hull and Liverpool meekly closed their 2009/10 campaigns; therefore clean sheets could be at a premium, and some games may resemble a Harlem Globetrotter exhibition. All of this is great news for us, of course. In a...[Read More]

Captains Picks Fantasy Football Gameweek 37 – Fantasy Premier League 2014/15 “One more double for the road . . . .” Two weeks and the English Fantasy Football will be over for another season. But as a famous philosopher once posed, Why Do All Good Things Come To An End?*. Fear not people, we do have the Copa America in the summer and there is bound to be a fantasy game for that. If not, I have a South American correspondent who can knock a game up for us. Mito mate, on an unrelated matter, can you drop me a line? Also some crickety thing apparently . . . *It was Nelly Furtado in fact. The last time I wrote a captains article (when I was supposed to!) I was slaughtered for selecting ten players and it was suggested by a few that I was covering my posterior somewhat. I’ll go for fewer ...[Read More]