The midweek round saw some old reliables and some new faces score big, but Gareth Bale was the man to have the armband.
Choosing your captain can often take longer than any other decision in Fantasy Football. You can look at opposition, form, potential injuries, how the manager will deploy them and a host of other statistical metrics. Or you can flip a coin between Gareth Bale and everybody else.
Put Bale on the pitch against a shoddy defence and he is a Fantasy points machine. And defences don’t come much shoddier than Wigan’s. The doubts over Bale’s fitness caused many, including myself, to move the armband elsewhere this round, but if you stuck with the Welsh winger you ended the week with 30 points from him alone.
A few other bankable stars came up with the goods too. Tim Krul’s penalty save made the Newcastle man the top stopper with 12 points and two of his defensive colleagues, Fabricio Coloccini and Ryan Taylor, also came good with nine points each. Taylor is now the top scoring defender in the game overall with 100 points this season.
We have already sung Bale’s praises but his team-mate Luka Modric chipped in with 12 points of his own to be the second best midfielder to have. Liverpool’s Dirk Kuyt is still not worth £9.4m but he did score his first Premier League goal of the season to nab 11 points.
Here’s a sentence we never thought we would write; Darron Gibson may be a good Fantasy buy. He also nabbed 11 points and with Everton in top form, his £5.3 million looks a bit of a bargain.
Up front potential Irish striker Frazier Campbell was the top man with 12 points while Djibril Cisse returned to the Premier League with a bang and eight Fantasy points.
Champion J-League
We have a new leader as Conor Sheehy’s A Great Bunch’a Lads romped to the top with 80 ponts. If he had chosen Bale ahead of Robin Van Persie as captain he would have a very comfortable lead this week.
Instead he is just six ahead of former top man Neil Kelly, whose Wet Bandits were harmed by Wayne Rooney’s no-show and Shay Given’s bad night for Aston Villa.
The rest of the top five has a familiar look with Matt Light’s Mamelodi Sundowns, Brian Duffy’s Fergie’s Fledglings and Joe Culloty’s Stopfeedingtheyak all within spitting distance of the top.
Interestingly, none of our top five had Bale as skipper, so if you did, you are smarter than our leaders. Or luckier.
Champion J-League Top 5:
1 A Great Bunch’a Lads – Conor Sheehy 1,372
2 The Wet Bandits – Neil Kelly 1,366
3 Mamelodi Sundowns – Matt Light 1,366
4 Fergie’s Fledglings – Brian Duffy 1,365
5 Stopfeedingtheyak – Joe Culloty 1,361
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