⏰ DGW35 | How to prep for the run-in ⚽️

The Stuff You Should Know.

⏰ Double Gameweek 35’s deadline is Saturday 27th April, 11:00 BST.

👀 It’s a Double Gameweek. Spurs and Chelsea play twice.

🙃 Haaland’s absence “not a big issue” says Pep.

❄️ Palmer was ill but is now back in training.

🤦 Jota out for two weeks.

🔵 Gusto targeting a Gameweek 36 return.

Keep reading for not one but two Wildcard drafts.

Alright?

Ooo look we’ve had a makeover. Stop staring at us like that, it’s no big deal. We’re still the same old shit rag we were before, but it turns out that despite what conventional wisdom claims, you really can polish a turd.

Now then, dust off your quarter zip and have a flick through your dictionary of crap acronyms: it’s the business end of the season.

There are four gameweeks remaining. Two of them are doubles. It could be brilliant. It’ll probably be painful. At the very least, it’ll certainly be interesting.

Plenty of you will be on your Wildcards this week, but regardless of your chip preference, there’s lots to get through.

So let’s circle back and synergise our ideation strategies to leverage the data points presently available ahead of Double Gameweek 35.

It’s business time.

Double Gameweek 35’s fixtures.

Chelsea and Spurs will play twice.

Chelsea: Aston Villa (A) and Spurs (H)

Spurs: Arsenal (H) and Chelsea (A)

Wildcard strategy.

Let’s talk strategy for a moment.

Plenty of top FPL managers are wildcarding with a Bench Boost in Double Gameweek 37 in mind, which means the typical Wildcard draft is so red, white and blue that you could hang it outside a Texan church and the locals wouldn’t bat an eyelid.

As a reminder, Man United, Man City, Brighton, Newcastle, Chelsea and Spurs will play twice in Double Gameweek 37.

But there are two gameweeks sandwiched between now and then, and that means two free transfers (one prior to Gameweek 36 and one prior to Double Gameweek 37) to play with too. Given the likelihood of suspensions, injuries and the perverse wrath of tactical rotation, your current team probably won’t look the same by DGW37.

Two Wildcard pitfalls

1) Cannibalisation

Technically speaking, cannibalisation is when one human eats another human, which feels like a strong word to describe the mild inconvenience of your FPL assets playing one another.

Still, it’s a legitimate concern. In building your optimal 15-man squad of doublers, you’re going to have to embrace an uncomfortable truth: that most of your players will cross paths in Double Gameweek 37.

You can’t avoid this if you’re picking 15 doublers, but you can at least be mindful of who faces who and how those conflicts might lower your potential points ceiling.

2) The single-gameweek stars

Don’t be seduced by the heavy-hitters of Double Gameweek 34: ordinarily the team of the week after a big Double Gameweek is a grotesque cocktail of obscure defenders from crap doubling teams and expensive single-gameweek players who you probably shouldn’t have sold in the first place.

We were asked last week to discuss the optimal strategy around selecting single-gameweek players during a double. Our approach is to almost always favour the doubler over the single-gameweek asset, regardless of who the single-gameweek asset might be. Statistically it’s the sensible move and it’s also the fun way to play.

It’s a no-brainer in DGW37 because none of the good single-fixture teams have particularly juicy fixtures anyway. Arsenal and Liverpool are both away to Man United and Aston Villa respectively.

Team-by-team highlights.

Long time readers will know that we rarely like to get our hands dirty, but today we’re going to go through every team that doubles between now and the end of the season. For each, we’ll pick the decent stalwarts and the fruity differentials. It’s going to get clammy.

Manchester City

Fixtures: nfo, WOL, ful+tot, WHU

Decent stalwarts: Phil Foden, Erling Haaland, Kevin De Bruyne

Fruity differentials: Any of their defenders.

Man City’s attacking triumvirate are hard to look past at the moment. Intriguingly, Haaland is arguably the most dispensible.

Manchester United

Fixtures: BUR, cpa, ARS+NEW, bha

Decent stalwarts: Bruno Fernandes, Alejandro Garnacho

Fruity differentials: Harry Maguire, Rasmus Hojlund

Maguire’s six attacking returns this season is a decent tally for a £4.2m defender, and Hojlund has purple-patch potential.

Chelsea

Fixtures: avl+TOT, WHU, nfo+bha, BOU

Decent stalwarts: Cole Palmer (if fit)

Fruity differentials: Nicolas Jackson, Malo Gusto (if fit)

Jackson is sort of like the Darwin Nunez of Chelsea, but occasionally he actually scores.

Newcastle

Fixtures: SHU, bur, BHA+mun, bre

Decent stalwarts: Anthony Gordon, Alexander Isak, Fabian Schar

Fruity differentials: Dan Burn, Harvey Barnes

Barnes is a minutes-risk, but he’s demonstrated in recent weeks that he can score FPL points. Burn is the sort of gangly target man you want in a defender.

Spurs

Fixtures: ARS+che, liv, BUR+MCI, shu

Decent stalwarts: Heung-min Son, James Maddison, Pedro Porro (if fit)

Fruity differentials: Brennan Johnson, Timo Werner, Cristian Romero

Brighton

Fixtures: bou, AVL, new+CHE, MUN

Decent stalwarts: Lewis Dunk.

Fruity differentials: Pascal Gross, Joao Pedro, Jan Paul van Hecke.

I don’t love any Brighton assets, but both of the Wildcard drafts below feature one of the above.

If you’re Wildcarding, your team likely resembles a greatest hits compilation of the decent stalwarts listed above.

But to what extent should you be backing the fruity differentials?

Well, that’ll mostly depend on where you are at the moment and where you wanna be by the time that chorus of final whistles sounds at the end of Gameweek 38. If you’re happy with your position and just want to maintain it, stick to the template.

But if you need to make up ground, now’s the time to show everyone your Gross Burn.

The happy coincidence of Double Gameweek 35.

Double Gameweek 35 must be really pissed off.

It waits patiently for 34 gameweeks for its time in the limelight. It even gets Chelsea and Spurs playing twice - a decent enough double at any other point in the season.

And yet, by a cruel twist of fate, nobody seems to give a toss about it. Everyone is focusing on the better looking, musclier cousin of DGW35: DGW37.

Luckily for us, it doesn’t really matter, because if you’re planning for Double Gameweek 37, you’re probably inadvertently building a belter of a Double Gameweek 35 team too.

Chelsea and Spurs double in both gameweeks.

Man City have Nottingham Forest this week.

Man United host Burnley.

Newcastle host Sheffield United.

For wildcarders, the biggest issue this week is going to be deciding who to bench.

The Best Captain for Double Gameweek 35.

It’s Cole Palmer who plays Villa away and Spurs at home.

They’re hardly the Financial Times, but ChelseaFanTV posted this pic of Palmer back in training on Thursday:

I’m no doctor, but he is looking incredibly peaky.

If he walked into the office after a few days off sick, you’d tell him to go back home, make himself a lemsip and get some rest. Wouldn’t you?

Alas, he’s in training, the murmurs are promising.

A few will be tempted by Heung-min Son, who is the next-most viable option, but Palmer’s form (26, 5, 20, 15, 13 in his last five) is too exceptional to ignore unless you’re really desperate.

Now sitting at 265k, The Professor is on the precipice of finishing a season outside of the top 100k for the first time ever.

But if he’s going down, he’s going down swinging. The plan is to do as many are doing: Wildcard this week, Bench Boost in Double Gameweek 37, hide behind the sofa and keep everything crossed.

His current team below is built with Fantasy Football Hub’s AI-powered MyTeam tool. Try it here and you’ll be helping us out too.

LazyFPL premium members get a position-by-position breakdown of the Prof’s team. If you’re not premium, you’ll just have to trust that it’s been put together with a precision that’d make Michelangelo envious.

A bonus team reveal.

We invited FPLMate, one of those cool Youtuber types with nearly 200,000 subscribers, to share his Wildcard draft with you. Whether it was our lazy charm or the gun we pointed at his knees, he kindly agreed.

Get this - Dan (that’s his real name) likes to have fun whilst playing FPL. It’s a novel method, but one that has seen him hit the dizzying heights of 12th in the world before.

Here’s his current Wildcard draft, also built with Fantasy Football Hub’s MyTeam.

Here he explains some of his cheekier picks:

Ederson:

He offers a nailed route into the Man City defence. It allows me to dodge the inevitable pain of Gvardiol, Walker, Akanji or whatever other Man City defender you think is nailed - hint: they’re not.

Burn instead of Schär:

Yes, Schär has scored more points this season, but Burn is still the main target man from set pieces. This is backed up by the underlying data.

Jackson:

Say what you want. I don’t care. He has 5 fixtures in the next 3 gameweeks, and gets about a million chances per game. I’d be shocked if he doesn’t bury a few of them.

Fernandes:

Fernandes has been in red (devil) hot form, and I don’t mind adding another penalty taker to my team. You gotta be in it to win it.

Haaland (benched):

Haaland makes the squad, and I’m happy to bench him for this gameweek only. Apparently the injury is not serious, and we should see him return to action soon. One thing I like about a strong bench is that it can easily cover for him in the short-term. I could go for Álvarez instead, but it would just cause a new benching headache and would require a transfer out later down the line.

If you want to see the team that Dan settles on, subscribe to his Youtube channel here.

The key stats for Double Gameweek 35.

Other Stuff We Found Interesting

• Mateta’s 29 points was the third-highest haul in a Gameweek in FPL history, bested only by Rooney (32 points) and Kane (31 points).
  

• Sheffield United have conceded more goals in a single season than any other Premier League team.
  

• One of our premium members scored 187 points in Double Gameweek 34. Did anyone beat that?

Final words.

Right, Gameweek 36 starts on a Friday evening, which means we’ll be back in your inbox on Thursday night. I’m thinking some scented candles and one of those dine-in deals from M&S, but let me know.

Stay lazy.

The LazyFPL Team.

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