When is a door not a door?
When its a jar
When is an injury not an injury?
When it’s an international injury.
As the international break comes to an end, our teams have been hit hard, and some more than others. This is a worrying time for a fantasy football manager. All of that careful planning and strategy, only for your master plan to then be scuppered by your star player getting injured in a pointless game against San Marino!
At the time of writing popular fantasy picks such as Payet, Vardy, Kompany, Koscielny & Martial are all either out or doubtful. The longer list of less popular picks includes (but is not limited to) Amavi, Gestede, Hazard, Smalling, Zouma, Benteke, Sakho, Silva, Bony, Elliott, Dembele, Morgan and the man with possibly the greatest name in the Premier League, Virgil Van Dijk.
Then there are those who only recently returned to the UK after late flights back from some of the furthest points on earth like Sanchez, Mane, Andre Ayew, Rojo, Ki, Son, Ighalo, Willian, Bentaleb, Bolasie, Mori and even everyone’s favourite Algerian, Riyad Mahrez. FFUK knows what state they have all returned in?
And so we waited with baited breath for the managers pre-match press conferences… Some managers were forthcoming with injury news, others less so. Do they not realise what is at stake in our mini leagues? The old adage that “no news is good news” was obviously said by someone who doesn’t play fantasy football.
What clouds the whole situation further is that many of these withdrawals are international injuries that will be recovered by the next domestic match. But how do we know the true extent of each injury? Years of experience, plenty of research on fantasy football websites and social media can give us more of an idea but no one can ever be certain, and in the end, and at best, it is still only educated guess work.
All this is before we even think about next week’s European games and any rest/rotation that may bring about.
Fear not though, the main man is back! Lee Cattermole has returned to training!! Daniel Sturridge is also closing in on a return, and perhaps most importantly Pellegrini has declared that Aguero is back fit again. With Bony confirmed as out the Manchester City manager’s hand may be forced into starting his number 10 this week. So do we move heaven and earth to bring Kun in now? This week? Will his price rise now or do we wait it out to see how long it takes to return to form? Aguero is perhaps the only player in the league that we can consider “essential” and I, like many others, are working out the best way to get him in for the least amount of transfers. But it can wait for a week or two, can’t it? Well, it’s going to have to as I have far more pressing concerns this week. I just hope that Aguero takes it easy on Liverpool.
These are tricky times to navigate our fantasy team through. With all these injuries and general uncertainty hits will surely be taken.
How is your squad shaping up?
Is your team ready for the GW?
To check out all of the latest injuries there are 2 great sites you can use:
http://www.premierinjuries.com/
http://www.fantasyfootballscout.co.uk/fantasy-football-injuries/
FFUK 