Burnley play Newcastle (A) and Luton (A)
Luton play Everton (A) and Burnley (H)
I haven't thought about things a great deal since the announcement, but still, I'm almost certain to now wildcard GW6 and bench boost in GW7. This doesn't seem especially popular, no doubt for very sensible reasons, however, the idea has appealed to me since the fixture was originally cancelled at the start of the season.
There are a few reasons why I like the idea..
Firstly, it gets it out of the way.
That doesn't sound like a compelling reason, but I always find the bench boost annoying as we move into the second half of the season. It completely ruins the natural flow for me. Uprooting your team just to bench boost in that one week - usually for sub par results. On top of that the need to have fifteen nailed on players that week to make sure it doesn't go to waste. It turns the sprint to the finish into the hundred meter hurdles.
In fact, this is one of my theories about fpl (I may have mentioned this on here before). I think the first half of the season favours people with more of a herd mentality, whereas the second half favours those that go it alone. I'm definitely the latter, so I tend to start badly (getting hammered by the template), then recover ground in the second half as the template dissolves.
It's a bit silly (from a logic point of view) to go against the template early on. After all, it's the sum total knowledge of the whole fpl community, including the very, very good managers with great track records (who naturally have a disproportionate, but deserved influence). Plus, these days: AI.
So, if you're someone that tends to follow the crowd, you can follow that template - effectively copy the general team the big fpl faces are going with - and get a fairly decent start relative to casual players that have no idea what the template is, and idiots like me, that see it, know it well, but still choose to avoid it.
Over time however the template breaks down. There'll still be a weekly template in essence, but it becomes impossible for everyone to follow it, as all those little differences over the course of the season accumulate. The different bench picks, the different team values, etc. So you can see the template (or other people's teams), but it's a struggle to get there. Plus, by this point all the really, really good managers - the big faces and talking heads - will also have teams that have diverged from each other, so if you are just copying other people you're faced with the dilemma of who to copy.
So at this point some people get lost in the sea of opinion. Perhaps taking hits, etc, just to get the player everyone's going for this particular week, instead of doing what's best for their own particular team, which by this point is naturally unique.
Contrariwise, if you're happy doing your own thing, it now gets easier, as you're just solely focused on piloting your own course. The template becomes irrelevant, as you can't reach it anyway.
I should really do a season where I follow the template for the first half, then use my own judgement from Christmas onwards, to see if I improve. Perhaps that can be my experiment for next year.
Secondly, and back to the point at hand..
..I can bench boost with a normal bench if I take this opportunity. It's not often we have so many cheap playing defenders. The fact that these defenders also have a double making it even more of a novelty. So potentially I can just have a bench of two 4.0m defenders, a cheapish attacker (probably Morris) and a cheap goalkeeper.
Meaning when I wildcard I can still have my choice first eleven, with Morris being a handy first-off-my-bench player going forward.
That I can have a cheap playing bench that's boostable is essentially something of a bonus. Born of circumstance.
The downsides..
The major obvious downside is that it's not a great week to wildcard. Son and Maddison in particular are players I want to bring in, however, they face Arsenal and Liverpool in GW6 & 7. I could bring them in and ride those weeks out, or I could just hope that I don't need the free transfer to fix anything in GW7, and then use the two frees to bring them in for GW8. It's always a bit risky planning transfers though.
One of the benefits of the wildcard is that you get a chance to fix minor problems, so I don't like the idea of wildcarding to then just allow new issues to go unsolved because of planned moves. So I imagine I'll bring at least one of those two players in for GW6. Again though, as at the start, I really haven't thought about the actual team all that much yet.
Wildcarding in GW6 will also mean I have a luxury transfer in GW5, and I don't even know what I'm doing with that yet either. It's fun though. At the moment I really don't feel like too many players are essential, so the entire wildcard feels like a luxury.
I'll end it there.
My current rank after GW4 is 1,364,935. Not brilliant, but I don't feel it's too bad as a starting point. It feels like the season's starting now.
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