The Thursday Scramble: Round 4 Final Early Bye Round

Finally, we reach the end of the byes….  what? what do you mean there are more coming in 8 weeks?  Seriously?  Well, let’s just rejoice in the fact that we have reached the end of the early bye period and that we only have two teams on the bye this week in St Kilda and the Giants.  Having said that, there are a lot of fantasy relevant players in those teams and add to that we have a couple of suspensions to deal with, so we need to Scramble!

How quickly this game can bite you!

Last week our man X-Erri was the one to trade in after a big outing and a low BE, this was no more prevalent than in SuperCoach where he scored a 199 against the Eagles.  And there in lay the key piece of information that we needed.  It was against the Eagles. This season it has been well documented that we have seen the Eagles give up at least 20 points more than average to the ruck position meaning that whilst Xerri went huge, we really should have seen that coming.  What we didn’t see was him struggling to score against the Bombers and Blakiston. Now, some say it was because he was rattled after the whole Blood Smearing incident, but really, that score wasn’t acceptable by his standards.

Add to that we are now missing him for 3 weeks which is a big blow to those that traded him in. But we can’t worry about that now, so the key is to trade him to someone of a similar scoring potential and we have seen that after three rounds, Max doesn’t seem to be too bothered by these new rules and is still scoring at will. He is the logical choice for you to bring in to the ruck department.  Especially as we are hearing whispers that ROB will get a game at some point and when that happens we will all be scrambling to replace McAndrew because after this week we can’t hide behind best 18.

The other issue we have now is Dev Robertson. He is looking to be one of the better cash cows of the season and one that everyone needed to have. He has got himself a week for a tackle on Butters and this now has us thinking what do we do with him. For me there’s only one answer and that is to Hold him. He has a BE of 0 in Fantasy and -30 in SuperCoach (remember he hasn’t had as many price rises in that game) so for one week you can cover him from your bench.

If you’ve been unlucky enough to have Gulden, Petracca, Rozee and Xerri you have spent most of your season sideways trading which has been ok through to now if you’ve been able to do some rookie fix ups along the way. However as we push into the next phase of the game in a week or so, we are going to want to be upgrading and not playing side swap with our players. This is probably the last week we want to be doing that otherwise you will fall behind the pack.

Other people I would consider trading out this week (in no particular order) would be Milera, Parish and Blakiston. All of them aren’t looking like great performers/cash cows and there are better options out there.

But I’ve already traded this rookie out once and this other rookie has already had a price rise!

These are two common things that we hear around this time of year and it depends on how stubborn you want to be as to what you do.

In the case of someone like Josh Lindsay who many people (including me) traded out a week ago when he was dropped for that game against North, you may now be looking at him and thinking, he was great against Port and has a good BE of -5 but you won’t pull the trigger as you’ve traded him out once already. yes we are a stubborn bunch, but swallow that pride. If he is the best available that is going to make you money then go for it.

Similarly, just because someone has had a price rise it doesn’t mean they are totally off limits. You need to look at what they are going to rise from now. Don’t worry about what they have already done (but you obviously use the scoring as a guide). It is all about assessing what level they can get to and how much money they can make for you. Granted, once they have had one or two price rises the amount they can make is limited, but that doesn’t mean you overlook them completely.

Things to Remember

• We won’t get teams for Hawks v Cats on Monday until Sunday Evening 6:20pm EST. So if you have someone that is a bit dicey on selection, make sure you have that emergency in place.
• Your Saints and Giants all lock out at the start of the last game of the round.
• Use this week’s trades with Round 5 in mind because after this week there is no more hiding behind best 18. You will need your full squad on field!

There we go folks, Easter Round and we have the final byes for the early season. Now it is time to focus on getting that squad in order and keeping the mid season byes in mind as you build your team from here. Have a great Easter weekend and I will see you all next Thursday as we head into Gather round and I will see some of you at the DTTalk function at the Elephant next Friday night.

Dunny

A passionate Port Adelaide Fan who simply loves footy! That is how I would describe myself. Catch my weekly article "The Thursday Scramble" with all the last minute things to think about for the weekend Follow: @pkd73.