Blank Gameweek 29 | The cheat sheet for success.

🚨 Blank Gameweek 29’s deadline is Saturday, 15th March, 13:30 GMT.

❗️ This gameweek is a blank. Liverpool, Newcastle, Crystal Palace and Aston Villa won’t play.

🤕 Trent Alexander-Arnold is injured and will miss the Carabao Cup Final. He’s expected to be back “before the end of the season”.

🩼 Ollie Watkins asked to be substituted at half-time in the midweek UCL game. He has not been included in the England squad. He blanks this week anyway.

👌 Jean-Philippe Mateta is back in training but blanks this gameweek.

🏆 Mohamed Salah becomes the highest scoring FPL player of all time.

🎂 LazyFPL turned three years old this week. Thanks for your continued support.

Keep reading for The Professor’s most controversial move of the season.

Alright?

The season giveth and it taketh away. For every double, there must be a blank, and this weekend, comrades, we’re faced with the latter.

This newsletter is occasionally accused of including too many British culture references, so in the spirit of bucking that trend, let’s play…

But seriously, there’s managing to be done here. This isn’t one of those sit back, feet up, watch-Palmer-miss-penalties kind of gameweeks. Decisions need to be made. If nothing else, the sweaty captaincy armband that’s glued to Mohamed Salah’s arm needs to be prized away and given to some other chump.

This weekend, we’re all a bunch of blankers. Let’s join hands and blank together.

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Summary for the Lazy: This isn’t a decision you should be making now, but the Free Hit is valuable. If you can scrape through, you should.

If you’re asking whether you ought to be playing your Free Hit this week, you might need to.

We’ve been banging on about Blank Gameweek 29 for the last few weeks for a reason. It’s to give you enough notice to prepare by using Free Transfers if the Free Hit approach isn’t for you.

If you haven’t been doing that, one of two things is true:

1) You can’t field 11 players, even with Free Transfers.

2) You’ve gotten lucky, and you can field a full team without taking serious damage.

The Free Hit is valuable. It deserves proper respect. If you can field nine players - ten with a transfer - we’d recommend you save the Free Hit for a bigger blank (which, according to Ben Crellin, is looking likely in Gameweek 34).

If, however, you’re sitting on half a team, wondering where it all went wrong, you could do worse than hitting the button.

We’ve spent the best part of 30 seconds making this sophisticated graphic if you’re a visual learner:

So what’s the optimal chip strategy?

Optimal? That’s a big ask. Optimal is in the eye of the chipholder.

Still, this deserves its own section…

Summary for the Lazy: it depends on your team, but there are key variables we should all know about.

We’re lazy, so we might as well start with this cheat sheet that The Professor published in Thursday’s premium email.

Even if you disagree with this approach, it outlines the key events and variables that should enter into your thinking.

If you’re following the above approach, it means that Blank Gameweek 29 is your dead-end.

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(Quick interlude: What’s “Dead-ending”?

“Dead-ending” is an uncommon piece of FPL parlance amongst normal people. If you drop “dead-ending” into a conversation about FPL around the water cooler, expect blank faces and silent judgment.

In short, dead-ending happens the week before a Wildcard. It describes the opportunity to make moves in the knowledge that anything you do can be changed with the upcoming Wildcard. So if you’re Wildcarding in Gameweek 30, you can “dead-end” into Blank Gameweek 29, making more interesting (read: reckless) moves that you might’ve done otherwise.)

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Other approaches

As with every piece of advice we offer, there are always alternatives. Some top managers believe that a Wildcard and a Bench Boost should be paired like cheese and wine.

Playing the Wildcard in the gameweek before the Bench Boost has, historically, been a popular strategy, and it probably will be this season too.

The big variable here is when the big double happens. If it’s Gameweek 33, the case for the Wildcard before that is stronger. But if it happens in Gameweek 36, a Wildcard in Gameweek 35 feels a little late. Part of the power of the Wildcard is the medium-long term impact it can have on your team.

So, what have we learned?

We don’t know how many chips you have, or what your end-of-season aims are, or whether you’re the sort of manager who has a few glasses of wine on a Friday night, logs in to your team in the early hours of Saturday morning and makes terrible decisions.

But we know the variables. We know it’s probably not worth spaffing your Free Hit this week if you can get away with it. We know that we’ll know more by Gameweek 30.

Do you feel a bit lighter when you think about Wildcarding in Gameweek 30? Then maybe that’s the play…

Summary for the Lazy: Cole Palmer shouldn’t be the second-most transferred-out player this week.

Is it time to get rid of Cole Palmer?

That’s the question we’ll be trying to answer in this week’s Penetrative Stats. Can the sweet combination of numbers and decimal points shed any light on his status in your team? Let’s find out.

The stats

However you spin it, Cole Palmer’s stats are good. His expected goal involvement over the last four games - six games - eight games - whole season - ranges from fourth overall to second overall.

He’s had more shots than anyone over the last six gameweeks, and has created the second-most big chances of anyone this season too. He is, as he was last season, one of the most statistically impressive attackers in FPL.

But in recent games, he hasn’t converted those impressive numbers into points.

His last seven games in points: 1, 3, 2, 2, 6, 2, 2. Owning Palmer feels like going to a fancy restaurant and being served a Big Mac. It fills a hole, but it’s not what you paid for.

The fixtures

Please stand and raise a toast to Cole Palmer, who is decent enough to actually have a fixture in Blank Gameweek 29. This alone makes him a candidate for patience, at least for now.

It is against Arsenal, but after that, Spurs, Brentford and Ipswich are a decent enough run to expect some returns. Mind you, we might’ve said that about his last set of fixtures too.

Ipswich at home looks particularly appetising. The sort of fixture you might fear not owning him for.

Conclusion

There is something of a small Palmer exodus happening at the moment. To be the second-most transferred-out player (second only to the injured Lewis Hall) ahead of a Blank Gameweek in which he features is quite an achievement.

But let’s imagine he had slotted away that penalty last weekend, as he has all his other Premier League penalties. 8 points + 3 bonus. Would his Cold slab still be on the chopping block?

Statistically sound, playing this gameweek and decent enough fixtures in the near-term. It might not be the time to freeze out Cole Palmer just yet.

The best captain for Blank Gameweek 29 is Erling Haaland (home vs Brighton) if you own him, or Chris Wood (away vs Ipswich) if you don’t.

Blank Gameweeks tend to be fertile ground for differentials. You might notice that Bruno Fernandes is the most transferred-in player this week (he was before his Europa League hat-trick, too) - he’s exactly the sort of player that’ll pick up captaincy suitors away at Leicester.

One thing’s for certain: there’ll be a spread of captains this week, which means less punishment if yours blanks. If you’ve got an unshakable, unquenchable urge to captain some rando like Jørgen Strand Larsen, Blank Gameweek 29 is a much better week to do it than most.

There’s no easy way of saying this, so we’ll just out with it.

The Professor is transferring out Mohamed Salah and not bringing him back in after Blank Gameweek 29.

Why he’s doing this, and what it means for the rest of his team, is too long (and, frankly, too juicy) to reveal here.

If you’ve hovered on the fence of joining LazyFPL Premium, now feels like a great time to join. Here’s the link. You’ll get immediate access to The Prof’s team, his logic behind this decision and his chip strategy going forward.

The bad news is that Gameweek 30 isn’t until April. The good news is, it’s April 1st. We’ll be in your inbox 24 hours before, which happens to be a Monday.

For those about to Blank, we salute you.

Stay lazy.

The LazyFPL Team.