Week 5 - Sunday

A post about yesterday's games as we await Yahoo to fully update the Week 5 team totals/rankings. Once things are finalised I'll be able to calculate the 1st Round results of the Blog Cup to see who made it through to the second knock-out stage!

Sunday started with a marvellous performance from Dimitar Berbatov in the early kick-off, as his hat-trick (including a quite spectacular 2nd goal) gave Manchester United a deserved victory over Liverpool at Old Trafford. People may point to the John O'Shea incident as the turning point, but the facts are Liverpool mustered only two attempts on target in the entire game - Gerrard's penalty and free-kick that brought their two goals - so I feel the result was fair given the overall performance of both teams.

I'm yet to see any highlights of Wigan v Man City, but it sounded like a comfortable 2-0 victory for Mancini's men with Tevez running the show. Adam Johnson was unexpectedly left on the bench to annoy many fantasy managers and apparently Wigan failed to threaten Joe Hart's goal. City up to 4th.

The final game was Chelsea's 4-0 canter over Blackpool. Malouda (2), Drogba and Kalou chipped in with the goals, but had they been more ruthless it could easily have been double figures as they cut Blackpool apart at will - Drogba and Malouda both wasteful on numerous occasions. Chelsea extend their lead at the top to 4 points but their first real test comes next weekend.

Calculating my own total, my three Sunday performers (including another handy 5.5 from Adam) more than doubled my Saturday total to bring me up to 103 points for Week 5. It's going to prove an average score with many other people having Berbatov/Tevez & City/Chelsea clean sheets, but seeing as I took another negative keeper score and no clean sheets from my defence I'm happy to break the 100 mark. Whether it's enough to secure a place in the next round of the cup we shall have to wait and see!

In terms of the barndoor I had a bit of a manic Sunday. I initially dropped Malouda to get Gerrard in but had to do some major barndoor shuffling as I quickly realised that Malouda @ 13 really is a season-keeper in his current form, so brought him back in (at an annoying loss of £0.5m). I've kept Gerrard too, so downgraded Foster to Kirkland to allow for this move, which meant dumping Dembele. To be honest it was all a bit of a shambles and I feel some of my impulses could back-fire, but I guess that's what happens when there's so many good options.

Current team: Kirkland, Salcido, Koscielny, Bale, Adam, Barton, Van Der Vaart, Malouda, Gerrard, Chamakh, Drogba.

As I said, Malouda stays but I'm still undecided on whether I keep Drogba. I know Man City away is a tougher game, but I haven't been overly impressed by City so far and I still think Chelsea will win well. However, moving Drogba to someone like Cameron Jerome would give me the funds to move Kirk (I don't want a zero) back to Foster and upgrade Koscielny if he loses his place to the returning Vermaelen. I went Gerrard over Berbatov on a personal hunch but I'm obviously missing an Arsenal midfielder which is a concern, so I'll have to re-evaluate this later in the week - loads and loads to think about for Week 6.

One final note to the anonymous poster moaning in the comments section that I stated Van Der Vaart was "definitely" out, telling me that I should "check my sources" because "how did other players in my league know he was going to play?". I usually try not to comment on this sort of thing...but on this occasion I will as it's completely unfounded.

Van Der Vaart picked up a calf injury on Tuesday and was subbed after 50 minutes. I mentioned this in my Wednesday Player Picks post, and in my Friday Update post I confirmed that he was doubtful and linked to a source in the Daily Mail. The news that he was unlikely to feature vs Wolves came from Harry Redknapp's own press conference on Friday morning. BBC Sport, Sky Sports, Football365 and every other media outlet in existence reported the same thing. For this reason I stated that I had decided not to risk him in my team - I guess other people used the information available and made a decision based on that. Sensible people do this and 99 times out of 100 it pays off (and you don't get a big fat zero for one of your players).

If people in your league kept him they either (1) decided to take the risk that VDV would play, (2) wanted to keep his discount OR (3) don't spend that much time watching football/doing research/on their fantasy team so were not aware of the injury doubt. I'll take a guess that number (3) is the more likely, as the same thing happened for a couple of people in my own private league...lucky buggers!

Rant over :)

Please let me know how you got on in Week 5! Who came in on the barndoor? Once the scores are updated keep checking back here for the Blog Cup results! Do you think you made it through?

Cheers,
AM