By The Numbers Week 34

Last week was, as the French say, un catastrophe. The goalkeeper system selected Hart (16 points), Howard (12 points) and Speroni (-6 points), can you guess which one I had chosen? To make it worse, I have Schmeichel on the bench for the measly price of £1m and he managed to return 22 points. Kelly, my little defensive star at £1m failed to play and I drafted in Mata, Murray and Jedinak who returned 11 points for the outlay of over £38m. Not a good week.

Then again, if there’s ever a week when you can turn it all around it’s a double game week so lets get straight into the goalkeeper choices.

Goalkeepers

The system works very effectively for single gamers but it’s hard to quantify the potential for double gamers. Therefore, the graph quite happily states that your best choices this week are Hart, Begovic and Speroni. In an effort to quantify the double game week goalkeepers I wanted to use the bookmaker’s odds to get an idea of the probability of a goalkeeper winning and keeping a clean sheet in both games – the results are:

• Chelsea 7%

• Leicester 2%

• Hull 2%

• Liverpool 10%

It’s hardly an emphatic picture is it? When we just look at keeping a clean sheet we get:

• Chelsea 14%

• Leicester 5%

• Hull 6%

• Liverpool 17%

Still not ideal to me. Chelsea and Liverpool are also away for both of their games which is a serious disadvantage. Personally I can understand a manager who picks Mignolet – he’s the obvious choice but personally I’m going for broke and bringing in Schmeichel from my bench for £1m. With just a few games left I have very little to lose and a few well thought out risks could see me make up some of the ground I lost last week.

Predictor

The first thing that stands out to me is that Hull have the biggest probability of losing across every game and even in their home game against Liverpool they’re just a 2% favourite. Similarly, Chelsea don’t look like they’ll fare well at the Emirates and Leicester are actually favourites when those two meet. Ordinarily you would jump on City at home to Villa but I’m a little concerned about how resurgent they’ve been under Sherwood. QPR and Stoke round out the field of teams that have over a 50% chance of success but if you look at the goal differences it’s not that they’re good, it’s because their opponents are really bad. Personally, I would suggest players like Aguero, Murray, Sanchez and Diouf from the single gamers and I’ll leave Nik and Steve to give you some choices for the double gamers.

The Poisson predictor is going through a little bit of an overhaul currently and will be back in a few weeks’ time I’m afraid. Whilst I know a lot of you like it’s current format, there have been plenty of suggestions for how it can be improved and I’d like to get those adjustments made before we get to the end of the season when the Poisson gives its most accurate forecast.

As a final note, I’m starting to build my ideas of what should be included in the column for next season and I’d appreciate it if any readers who have a good idea could contact me – my twitter handle is @funtasyfootball