Fantasy Premier League Gameweek 6: The perfect wildcard with a cunning Arsenal pick

Welcome back to my weekly Fantasy Premier League hints and tips column – and before we get down to business with Gameweek 6 on the horizon, I owe a bit of an apology.

As 3 Added Minutes’ resident FPL expert, I present my ideas for the coming gameweek every Thursday so they’ve got some time to percolate through players’ brains and be accepted or rejected with time to spare ahead of the deadline, but I’m late to the party this week having been put out of action by a dose of the blasted coronavirus. So if you read anything which seems especially nonsensical or egregious this week, I’m blaming it on the brain fog that comes from waking up with a hacking cough at 4am every morning. Such is life.

Anyway, I’m alive and if not quite well, I am at least able to fulfil last week’s promise to put together my templates for a GW6 wildcard, which a lot of people will want to go for thanks to a shift in fixture difficulty and the fact that the picture of which players are hot which are not is slowly becoming a little bit clearer.

I’ll talk you through my template and thought process below but before we get to that, a reminder that this week’s deadline is once again 11:00 BST on Saturday, ahead of the juicy lunchtime fixture between Newcastle United and Manchester City.

A wild, wild wildcard

Before getting into the meat of my GW6 wildcard, I wanted to reiterate some advice from previous incarnations of this column – while there is indeed a shift in fixture difficulty this week which is worth paying attention to, there is also a shift in GW9 which is just as good a chance for a wildcard if your team already looks quite good for the next few weeks. There’s no need to drop a key chip just because everyone else is, and if you can get through the next few weeks with a few transfers and nothing more, then you can probably just do that and… ignore the rest of this column, I suppose? Not that I’d ever advise anyone to stop reading my work. It’s good for the soul.

In any case, when I was rolling through possible team set-ups for the coming week, I realised that one player’s fitness will have an outsize impact on the best possible team – David Raya. Since he picked up an injury against Manchester City last week, there has been no word on how severe it is, and that makes a big difference going forward for FPL players using a wildcard.

Partly that’s because if the Spaniard is out for a few weeks then his deputy, £4.3m goalkeeper Neto, suddenly becomes the clear-cut best stopper in the game, at least for a little while. But if Raya’s only out for the short term, or even back to face Leicester City this weekend, we may need to plan for a very different set-up, because Raya is a great asset to have and one of three goalkeepers (other than Neto) that I would consider.

The others, depending on how you structure things, are Emi Martínez from Aston Villa (at £5.0m) and Mats Selz from Nottingham Forest (at £4.5m). I can make an argument for Robert Sánchez, although I’m not totally sold on his being worth more than Selz.

Either way, he’s a starting point for a team which goes for a cheap goalkeeper – and if Neto is likely to be the starter for a few weeks at least, then this is my shout for the best possible wildcard team. Of course, you may or may not be able to afford this exact set-up, depending on your financial situation, but you can make adjustments based off this template:

If Neto isn’t likely to play for more than a game or two, then I would switch Trent Alexander-Arnold out for William Saliba, then pick one of the alternative goalkeepers mentioned earlier and spend the extra money elsewhere. I mentioned it last week but I don’t really think there’s a £1m gap between Alexander-Arnold and the best Arsenal defenders, and the only reason he’s even in my ‘ideal’ wildcard is because Neto is suddenly a massive potential bargain. But Arteta’s press conference will be key.

To talk through a few of the other specific decisions I’ve made briefly – firstly, Ollie Watkins has the best combination of form and fixtures of the semi-premium strikers for my money. Alexander Isak looks off the boil, as do Newcastle United more generally, and while Dominic Solanke looks good I’m not a fan of Tottenham Hotspur’s fixtures for the next few weeks. I also don’t like João Pedro or Danny Welbeck right now due to fitness concerns and some horrible Brighton & Hove Albion fixtures, and think Chris Wood looks like the best budget striker for the coming month or two. I’m surprised by how high I am on Nottingham Forest in general.

In midfield, I think Jarrod Bowen versus Diogo Jota is a toss-up and would prefer Luis Díaz if I could afford him. I’m moving away from Anthony Gordon due to recent form but suspect he’ll be a brilliant bargain pick-up after his price drops somewhere down the line. Morgan Rogers isn’t that great but he’s cheap, Bryan Mbeumo is on great form at an affordable price point, and Bukayo Saka and Emile Smith Rowe look like absolute staples to me.

I’m obviously tilting at a three-man defence (which I think is right to do 99% of the time) but I do genuinely think Taylor Harwood-Bellis and Jacob Greaves will be worth points on occasion, and I’m happy to double up on £4.0m defenders when they’re playing and will actually pick up the odd clean sheet. I like Ola Aina, but I also had some drafts with Lewis Hall in at £4.4m – I don’t love Newcastle too much right now but he looks like a good long-term set-and-forget defender and if I wouldn’t be surprised if he replaced a £4.0m defender down the line once some funds get freed up.

Regardless of whether you’re wildcarding or not, hopefully that template gives you some ideas for setting up your team going forward. There’s definitely tweaks that can be made and the chances that I’m right on every close call aren’t very high, but this look adjacent to the best possible team to me. The only absolute rule for me is: Erling Haaland. Just sign him, keep him, whatever. His cost is the reason Mohamed Salah doesn’t appear in any of my template discussions here – Bukayo Saka will score a similar number of points and there’s nowhere else I can find that extra £2.7m without it hurting too much.

Captain picks & 3 Added Minutes FC

Whatever the GW6 plan is, you’ll need a captain, and for me there are three sane options – Saka, who is my preference given Leicester’s indifferent defensive record, Salah, given that Wolves aren’t keeping many clean sheets either, and Haaland, because he can’t stop scoring. At this point, there’s a strong argument that you should just keep giving the armband to the Norwegian until proven otherwise. He is simply scoring so reliably that it’s hard to make the case against, although I think Saka is a strong shout this time around.

As is tradition, I’ll also provide a quick update on my team from last week, which looked like this and racked up a steady 64 points. As you can see, a few off-kilter decisions have more or less forced me into the arms of a wildcard. Incidentally, I’m fine selling Antonee Robinson. A good player for the start of the season, a nice profit in the transfer market, and I don’t think he’ll score enough going forward to be worth clinging to.

That’s all for this week – best of luck to all of you wildcarding, and I’m off for another Lemsip and a lie down. See you next week.