Fantasy Premier League Gameweek 10: Hints, tips and why Nottingham Forest & Wolves strikers are crucial
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Another gameweek approaches at pace in the world of Fantasy Premier League and with a string of potential injuries piling up across the league and challenging fixtures ahead of several popular players, our resident expert Matthew Gregory is back with his regular advice column to help you navigate some potentially tricky decisions.
He’ll look at the impact of the latest setbacks on your strategy and discuss the benefits of budget strikers but before we hand you over, we’ll remind you that this week’s deadline is on Saturday morning at 11:00 GMT, ahead of Arsenal’s visit to Newcastle United.
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Hide AdDamaged defences and free-scoring forwards
This topsy-turvy season isn’t getting any easier, is it? This has been the kind of year in which plenty of good decisions have been punished, and right now it looks like injuries are fate’s beating stick of choice in the FPL, with a swarm of yellow triangles descending on key players across the league.
Son Heung-Min, Chris Wood, Dwight McNeil and many more are at risk of missing minutes, which will mean a lot of last-minute decisions and plenty of time paying attention to the pre-match press conferences (you can get a full FPL injury update every Friday afternoon right here on 3 Added Minutes, by the way) – but perhaps the biggest issues are stacking up in defence.
Gabriel Magalhães, Micky van de Ven and Joško Gvardiol all picked up injuries in their most recent matches and we’re waiting for updates, while there are already no shortage of knocks and crocks to go around elsewhere.
For my money, there are two ways to solve the issue if you need to make a change at the back this week. One is to offload Gabriel or Gvardiol as part of a larger deal which allows you to sign Trent Alexander-Arnold, and the other is to go cheap and bring in Rayan Aït-Nouri. Both have merits.
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Hide AdLiverpool don’t have a particularly gentle run of games coming up, but there’s a very good chance that Alexander-Arnold ends up as the highest-scoring defender in the game, and simply having him in for the long haul while trusting Arne Slot’s side to pick up one or two clean sheets in the coming month or so isn’t a bad plan at all.
Generally, I come down on having as many of the highest-scoring players in the game as possible, and at £7.0m Alexander-Arnold has extremely high total points to pounds potential – compare how many points he can score at his best with players like Bukayo Saka, say, who costs considerably more. Alexander-Arnold, lest we forget, has a 200-point season under his belt already.
But by that same token, if you believe that the biggest scorers will come in midfielder or up front – if you want Saka and Cole Palmer, say, which is very defensible indeed, then you need to skimp on the defence, and that means looking for diamonds in the rough like Wolverhampton Wanderers wing-back Aït-Nouri, who in recent games has been playing like an out-and-out wingers and not like a defender at all. With Wolves’ fixtures finally easing off, the Algerian looks like a fine budget enabler.
I’d say that if Alexander-Arnold is at his absolute best, then he’s a must-have – not necessarily right now, because of Liverpool’s fixture difficulty, but a player you have to get into your team at some stage if you don’t have him already. But if he doesn’t hit his absolute best and at least threaten to get close to 200 points, then that money is probably better invested in players like Saka, Palmer, Son and so on. Personal opinion will come into this, of course, but right now, with 44 points after nine games, Alexander-Arnold is on pace. The questions is whether he can maintain that pace through rougher patches of fixtures.
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Hide AdUltimately, the perfect FPL team has the handful of highest-scoring players and the best budget-friendly assets around them. That means deciding which big scorers to go for and figuring out the best ways to get there – and when injuries come and change your transfer plans, you should still be targeting an ideal end point rather than just switching to the nearest equivalent player to keep the points ticking over. Transfers should always be about moving the team towards its best possible set-up or, if you’re there already or close by, chasing short-term points streaks.
Of course, while that philosophy can inform the changes you make in defence or how you get away from Son if his injury turns out to be more severe than expected, we can also save some money up front – and that’s looking like a better move by the week.
Everything I’ve said so far should make it pretty clear that I believe Erling Haaland to be entirely essential, but having started the season by looking at players like Alexander Isak and Ollie Watkins, I’m increasingly wondering whether I have been spending too much on my strikers.
Just look at Wood, who is a doubt but will probably be on the pitch if he can stand up come Saturday. The Nottingham Forest forward has only been outscored by Haaland, while third place is Danny Welbeck. Raúl Jimenez, Matheus Cunha, Yoane Wissa, Liam Delap and more are all on great form while costing no more than £6.5m. A lot of us have one budget striker – but why not two?
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Hide AdCunha looks like a great asset with Wolves’ upcoming games, and costs £2.6m less than Watkins and £1.8m less than Isak right now. Unless one of those two starts hitting some searingly hot form, they just aren’t scoring enough points to justify spending that much more money on them. Watkins, in particular, faces three tough games in the next four weeks and almost never plays more than 70 minutes so that Jhon Durán can get some minutes. In other words, if you’re one of the lucky players who isn’t badly impacted by injuries, Watkins is a good candidate for a transfer out right now.
For those who do have a lot of fitness doubts, however, this is a week to wait until Friday evening and see what happens – and don’t forget that because we can roll transfers now, their value goes up. Don’t make a move just for the sake of having someone for a week or two while your current asset is injured. Make transfers that make long-term sense to you, one way or the other, and don’t make them if you don’t have to and aren’t sure if you have a great plan for them.
Captain picks and 3 Added Minutes FC
With all that philosophising about how to handle your transfers out of the way, let’s take a look at where to send the captain’s armband this week. Haaland is, as always, a great candidate, but Bournemouth are on good form and the Norwegian didn’t score against the Cherries last season, so this is one of those occasions where it’s excusable to send it somewhere else.
Brighton & Hove Albion do ship quite a few goals these days, including three against Liverpool in the EFL Cup on Wednesday night, so Mohamed Salah may be a good player to target for their rematch in the league this weekend. Otherwise, the gamblers’ choices are Cole Palmer and Chris Wood, assuming he’s fit and well.
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Hide AdFinally, we need our regular check-in on my example team, 3 Added Minutes FC. Last week, I discussed how to handle a bad start to the season and how to avoid making mistakes based on bad information from the first few weeks of the season, and thankfully following my own advice led to a good week, with 73 points on the board, 19 above the average. The only downside was that having been forced to make early transfers for financial reasons, I got caught on the wrong side of the Son injury after swapping him in for Saka. Such is life, sometimes.

This week, I’m waiting as long as possible before making moves. I’ve got five colourful little triangles dancing around my squad, and therefore may be forced to swap some players out – if so, I’ll be looking at moves like Cunha for Watkins and Gabriel for either Aït-Nouri or Alexander-Arnold, with that decision coming down to a bit of forward planning.
My thought process is that either I want Alexander-Arnold in and to hold the current shape of my squad in terms of where the money is, or to go cheaper in defence and attack and see if I can find a way to turn Emile Smith Rowe into a more expensive player long-term. I’ll run some numbers and do some planning before making that decision.
Anyway, that’s all for this week – may all of your transfers be carefully planned, and may all of your yellow triangles disappear by Saturday morning. Best of luck.
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