FPL Gameweek 32: Best Crystal Palace players to buy and triple captain advice on Newcastle’s Isak

We’re back in Fantasy Premier League action this weekend, with a double gameweek for both Newcastle and Crystal Palace and plenty of big decisions over chip strategy and transfers to make – fortunately, our resident expert is back with some hints and tips to guide you through.

Before we hand over for his thoughts on whether you want to buy in to Palace players ahead of their challenging double or whether it’s the right time to triple captain Alexander Isak, a reminder that this week’s deadline is 11:00 BST on Saturday 12 April, just ahead of Manchester City’s lunchtime kick-off against Palace. Don’t forget…

Are Crystal Palace players worth buying in a tricky double?

It’s that time of year in which double and blank gameweeks really start to stack up, and that normally means spending as many transfers as possible signing all the players who are getting extra games – but is that the right way to play with Crystal Palace assets right now?

Palace have a rare double-double coming up, with games against Manchester City and Newcastle this week, followed by Bournemouth and Arsenal in Gameweek 33. The prospect of facing off against the Cherries may not be quite so scary as it was a few weeks ago given their recent form (which is somewhere off the cliff and on the rocks below), but it’s still a seriously tough run of games.

Palace are, themselves, on brilliant form of course. They haven’t lost a game for almost two months and have been beaten just twice since the turn of the new year. Then again, they haven’t perhaps faced teams as good as City and Newcastle, with apologies to Brighton and Fulham fans.

So do we really want to max out on Palace assets? After all, if all they do is pick up four points in two defeats, they weren’t worth a transfer, especially given how precious a resource transfers are to navigate the upcoming doubles and blanks for other teams.

Let’s start with the players who are clear considerations based on popularity and form – Eberechi Eze, Jean-Philippe Mateta and IsmaÏla Sarr. All three are on form and have at least some track record of racking up the points, but which are really worth splashing out on?

Eze has the fewest points of the three over the last five games – 22, with three assists and three ‘blanks’, clean sheet bonus points notwithstanding. That’s not especially impressive, even at a modest £6.8m price point. Crucially, however, Eze is getting in good areas – over those five games, he has a combined 1.33 expected goals and 0.38 expected assists. That isn’t astonishing, but it’s very solid.

Looking back over the course of the campaign, Eze has – when fit – consistently picked up around 0.5 expected goal contributions per full match and is running at 3.4 points per game. That’s not incredible but it is solid, and had he been fit all season would amount to around 105 points total.

Under normal circumstances, then, Eze isn’t an interesting asset, but he’s passing the eye test, Palace are on form, and he’s more reliable than Sarr, even though the winger has 117 points on the season and 33 in the last five.

The problem with Sarr is that huge percentage of his points come from a handful of games. He scored three in two from an xG of 3.21 in the last five, but his combined xG for the other three games was stone dead zero. Looking back through his season, he has a smattering of huge games, and then nothing for weeks on end.

Eze, by comparison, almost always gets something going and gives himself a chance to pick up points. In other words, Sarr is the gambler’s option in the short term, Eze the safe and sensible choice. Over the course of a whole season there’s a strong argument that Sarr is a better choice, but if you want returns over a couple of gameweeks, I prefer Eze.

But the fundamental point is that neither are that great, and are only worth buying in if you strongly believe in Palace’s continued form. Mateta, however, is probably a must-buy. He’s running at 4.6 points per game, averages nearly 0.5xG per match, and his form has picked up substantially since the winter, with 9 goals in 11 Premier League games.

You just don’t pass up on that kind of form, especially not with two doubles. Palace may have tough games, but the odds suggest that Mateta will return at some point and has a very high ceiling – his stats put him right alongside players like Omar Marmoush in the ‘best of the rest’ category behind Alexander Isak, and that’s including his more subdued start to the season.

In short, Mateta is a must-have, Eze is a reasonable but non-essential inclusion, and Sarr is a good gamble if you need a differential but no more. I’m less fussed about their defenders for now. Palace have one of the best overall defensive records in the league (only Arsenal and Liverpool have conceded fewer) but generally don’t keep clean sheets against bigger teams. Daniel Muñoz has scored and set up a few, but is comfortably outpacing his expected goal contributions of late and won’t always score heavily deflected goals.

The long and short of it is that I don’t hate having a player like Muñoz in my squad, but I’m not spending a transfer to get there. His average of 4.2 points per game is excellent, but he’s unlikely to average 8.4 in a double against Manchester City and Newcastle, both away from home. None of the other Palace defenders (or goalkeepers) seem like serious considerations.

Basically, Palace players are solid speculative buys but their fixture difficulty and relatively limited assets caps their ceiling. Mateta is the only absolutely essential purchase for the coming doubles, and with my own team (which has Mateta and Eze) I plan to stand pat without signing a third Palace player.

Should you triple captain Alexander Isak this week?

On the other side of that double gameweek coin, Newcastle United also have a double, with home games against Palace and a frankly dreadful Manchester United side. That’s a double I definitely want to triple up on.

Alexander Isak is a must, while two from Anthony Gordon, Jacob Murphy, Dan Burn, Valentino Livramento and Kieran Trippier should be in every squad this gameweek. Even if you want to argue that Eze or Sarr is a better season-long asset than a Gordon or a Murphy (debatable), Newcastle assets have a far better chance of hitting or exceeding their averages with their fixtures than Palace do. I’m taking Newcastle’s three games in two weeks over Palace’s four, even on the Eagles’ form.

The real question, though, is whether to triple captain Isak this week if you still have that chip available, which nearly 40% of players do. It’s a slightly trickier question that may appear to be the case at first blush.

On the one hand, there will probably not be a better double gameweek to target with any individual player. Isak is one of the biggest scorers in the league (6.6 points per game), the fixtures are pretty good, and I can’t argue with the idea that there won’t be a better single chance to triple captain for the rest of the season.

Where things get complicated, however, is if you have access to your bench boost, too. For a while, I proselytised for using triple captain on Isak in Gameweek 32 and bench boost in Gameweek 33 to make use of the incoming doubles, but I’m now leaning to the reverse – because if you’re hovering near the template team, you get a better bench boost, which is the more valuable of the two chips.

Let’s take the example of a team whose defence is based around Newcastle, Nottingham Forest and maybe Arsenal and Manchester City players, which is a pretty standard model right now. This week, your benched defenders are playing Everton, Brentford and Palace. Next week, they’re probably playing Aston Villa and Spurs away.

Remember that triple captain is the equivalent of getting one extra player’s worth of points, while bench boost gets you four. They’re four worse players, sure, but even with a double gameweek, you can expect them to outscore Isak most of the time. So if your team has a strong bench this week, bench boosting is likely to be the profitable play even if it means passing on Isak as triple captain – under one circumstance.

That is having Bukayo Saka in your squad next week. Arsenal double against Ipswich away and Palace at home, and Saka is one of very few players who scores at the same rate as Isak – 6.4 points per game, just a tiny bit lower. He’s looked exceptionally dangerous since coming back from injury, even if he didn’t start the first couple of matches back, and the knock he picked up against Real Madrid doesn’t seem to be a major issue.

In other words, moving to triple captain Saka in Gameweek 33 is worth around half a point less than putting the chip on Isak on average, while most teams will get more juice out of their bench boost this week. If you have both chips and can get Saka in your squad next week, that’s surely the right play by the numbers.

Either way, you should have Isak in your side this week and should give him the armband, unless you’re truly desperate for a differential to make up some mini-league points – that being the case, go for Mateta.

That’s all for this week – hopefully that’s helpful, and may all of the Crystal Palace players you do sign live up to expectations, and if you don’t triple captain Isak, I hope it doesn’t bite you too hard. After all, it would bite me, too.