Guest Blogger For Fantasy Football

A good good friend of Back Of The Net Boy has written this week's blog. Even though he works for the company known as anti-beamish, he's a good guy and knows his stuff

Here you go, edit away if you like.

Fixtures

A key aspect of the game is playing according to fixtures and is essential if you want to top your private leagues. If you pay no attention to fixtures other than to pick your captain, you will fall behind. I tend to look for a run of 3/4 good fixtures for a team and load up on their players according to how good the fixtures are. I also keep an eye on all the future fixtures so i can have a vague plan for gradually bringing in these players in time for the good run without having to take precious points hits. Chelsea undoubtedly had the best starting run of fixtures and people that had drogba, malouda, etc. were duly rewarded. Arsenal's starting fixtures are also great and people with arshavin, walcott (now injured) will be pleased. At the moment i have loaded up on spurs players bale, crouch (now that defoe is injured) and dawson (also injured :( ) and am hoping for big returns from west brom, wolves and west ham. of course home advantage is also a huge factor, any look at stats will show you how better teams perform at home. A run of 3 home fixtures is always tempting, especially for defenders. A common tactic with keepers is to pick them according to fixtures that "match" i.e. when one plays away, the other home and you can play a home keeper every week. There's a thorough keeper combo analysis on this page: http://totalfpl.com/ under community articles, check it out.

It's quite painful trying to look at all the fixtures in one go, to spot good runs with the regular fixture tables, but luckily there's plenty of FF nerds that have done the hard work for you and made season tickers that plot the seasons fixtures and grade according to difficulty, check this before you make any changes to your team and plan early.

http://www.fiso.co.uk/forum/fpl-fixtures-and-results-grid-2010-11-t74462.html (updated weekly with new difficulty gradings based on current table standings)

Also essential to keep abreast of are the sacred double gameweeks where a team will play two matches in one gameweek. These tend to become more frequent after christmas when fixture schedules get complicated with FA cup, etc. and weather starts to cancel a few matches (remember the chaos last year?) if you spot a nice double gameweek coming up like two home matches against weaker opposition then of course try to get to that gameweek with 3 of those players. The earlier you know about it, the easier you can get these players in without points hits.

so final picks from me for good runs: Fulham up to GW11, spurs for the next few weeks, arsenal have westham (H), Newcastle (H) and wolves (A) starting in GW10 so load up on them and finally man city have decent fixtures for the next 7 weeks apart from arsenal and chelsea, but they are both at home so not that bad either.