The Friday Scramble: Grand Final Edition

It was only 23 short weeks ago that we were agonising over our starting squads. Now here we are with the last round upon us. We have seen premos dominate and premos fail, we have seen rookies make heaps of cash and we have seen some play one game and then never be seen again. Such is the life of a Fantasy footy coach. Hopefully you have made it through to the Grand Final this week and if not hopefully you are still playing to try and get the best ranking that you can. Whichever the case may be, for the last time in 2019 it is time to Scramble!!

Grand Final Strategy

The strategy this week isn’t much different from that of the previous weeks whereby your main aim is to simply get the most points you can (yes I know that is super simple) but what makes it a little different this week is that when we are looking at trade in targets we are only worrying about how they will score this week against one opponent. We don’t have to worry about how good an opponent is next week or the week after or if they will get a tag or not in the coming weeks. It is all right there in front of us.

The only variable options we really have is will there be any late outs or not and who will be in those final Sunday squads when they are finalised later on tonight.

We often talk about checking out who your opponent has and either looking to match off a unique or creating a unique by trading out a common player. This is going to depend on how you feel your match is going to go. But as Roy said on the Monday podcast we don’t really need to worry too much about that even, we just need to get the best scoring players into our side this week and they should do the rest.

Make sure that you look at Cal’s scale of Hardness as it can be important this week. We want to be bringing in those guys that have the best matchup possible.

#AskDunny

I think we can all relate to this question from David that I got during the week.

SO David Macaskill did send me a question but through the magic of Twitter I seem to have lost it somehow. But he basically said that if he had fallen in a hole on Friday last week and didn’t have his phone and wasn’t rescued until Sunday night he would have won his Cash Prelim as he wouldn’t have tinkered with his side. But he did and now he is out!

David, I hear ya mate. So many times I have made the same horrible mistake. We tinker with our teams and we end up taking out the guy that scores more and bring in a poor scorer. We have all done it, just sorry to hear that it happened to you in the Prelim week! I can assume that from your tweet you were in a form of the game that has a rolling lockout. This can make things even harder. We hold on to a trade to use it later in the weekend and then we either forget to trade or miss a game start or the guy that we really want has already played and we miss them altogether. Just look to next year mate and learn from this mistake.

So What About Maxy?

With Preuss now being named this tells me that there is still a heap of doubt over whether or not Max Gawn will play. And even if he does then with Preuss in the team he may not play as much as we would like. Based on this I am going to trade him out in AF. In the rolling lockout versions of the game I will be keeping a close eye on the late outs and saving a trade for that. Thankfully it is the first game on Saturday so if you do have trades left I wouldn’t use it until the start of that game.

Who do I go to? Well I would be looking at their opponent this week. Goldstein is in a great patch of form at the moment, and if Gawn is a late out then he should have a field day against Preuss. If not Goldy then you may want to look at Witts v Mumford or Lycett v Darcy or Stef Martin v Soldo.

Oh Toby

With Greene out you have a few options. You can do a few things but really if you don’t have Rowan Marshall up forward he would be the one that I go for. Other than that Dunkley is the man or if you can move a mid down to the forwards then grab Macrae if you don’t have him. The other option is Kelly against the Suns.

Selection Table

The last selection table for the season and as always there is a bit of everything going on this week.

Steele Sidebottom had an unfortunate incident at training so trade him out.
Heppell is having a rest now that the Bombers have secured their spot.
Zac Clarke is out so if he was your Max bench cover then look for someone else.
Preuss ALERT. Preuss has come into the side and this spells heaps of trouble. This makes Max missing now a huge risk. I have already talked about this above.
The Giants have pulled a heap of changes with the key ones being Jeremy Cameron coming back in so those that held would be happy. But it is Toby Greene out that will hurt a heap of teams. Hopefully you have trades to be able to move him out in RDT and SC.
Other than the players above the rest of the moves are really only bench cover players coming in or out.

Things to Remember

• Don’t leave anything in the tank.
• If you need to pull a unique move to get the win then go for it!
• Use the Scale of Hardness, it could make the difference in holding up the trophy or not.
• If you are a huge underdog look for someone with a great matchup and perhaps swing a unique captain.
• Don’t stress about it and have some fun. Only another 6 months until we get to right our wrongs and do it all again!

Best of luck everyone in your Grand Finals or even just your last game of the season. I hope you have had a great year and have enjoyed playing AF, RDT, SC or UF. If you haven’t tried Draft before then I would encourage you to give it a go next year. Check out the DTshiva.com.au site and join an amazing community next year that includes pretty much all of us on this site.

I do hope you have enjoyed my Scramble each Friday this season as much as I have enjoyed bringing it to you. Also thanks to everyone that comments and helps each other out, as regular readers know my work does make it hard for me to get online and reply to comments. I will try to reply to some today but I do apologise if I don’t. I do try and read them at the end of the day but it is usually too late to help you out by then.

I hope you all have a great off season and I look forward to interacting with you all over when we start our 2020 pre-season reviews.

Cheers
Dunny