The Thursday Scramble: Round 5

Whilst our focus this week should be all about Gather Round and starting to look at who we can upgrade, we all knew that this wouldn’t happen and that there would be some sort of carnage to deal with. It wouldn’t be Fantasy Footy if there weren’t any issues!  So Let’s Scramble!

Defender Disasters!

It isn’t often that we lose a keeper and we are actually ok with it. Let’s be serious here, many of us were looking at Docherty and wondering if we should trade him out or not as he just hasn’t been delivering for us. So by him now being out for up to 6 weeks with injury we can make that call with no guilt attached.  The big question is what to do with him!

And just as we were starting to think about what we will do with Doc we were then dealt the news of Day being out for 2 weeks suspended. Now this was quite the opposite to the issue with Doc as we all wanted to keep Day as he has been putting up some great scores and making some good cash.

So, do you have both?  Or just one of them. Now I know that there has been a ton of different podcasts and column’s giving advice and I am going to try and summarise most of them here is a few lines to make it a bit easy and then give you my thoughts on those plans.

Just have Doc? – This is the easiest of all the boats to be in. If you didn’t have Daicos then this is just the ticket you needed. Get the Pie youngster in and just go from there. Simple. If you are already a Daicos owner, then you are going to be annoyed that everyone else that didn’t have him can just bring him in, but don’t take it that way, now take it as … “who can I bring in that will be better than the players the other teams have” So if you want to take a risk and go a bit unique you could. But for me, the top selections are Daicos, Dawson and Stewart. Ideally we would wait a week or two for Stewart given he will drop in price but when opportunity knocks you just have to open the door.

Just have Day? – A bit tougher here given he doesn’t have the top value that Doc had so you here we have a couple of choices and that is you can take him down to a rookie so that you can upgrade one of your mid pricers like Worpel up to a premium (or as close as you can get). Or if you have cash then you can just put it on his head and get up to the best you can.
Don’t discount plan B for Day though. If you have faith in your rookies then you can hold Day for the two weeks. By doing this you can set about upgrading over the next couple of weeks and possibly sacrifice a few points but then you will in theory be ahead of those that traded him out.

Got Both? – Not ideal but thankfully you do have two trades to use this week so you can get yourself out of a hole. One of the options you have here is to go for a bit of a cheaper option from Doc and then use that money to bring Day up a bit higher. However this may result in bringing in two guys that you have to also ultimately upgrade later. Personally I would be getting in one premium and then one rookie or someone at a similar price to Day so you aren’t in a worse position of upgrade cadence than you would have otherwise been (remembering we didn’t really have too much upgrading that would have happened this week). But let’s be honest there are multiple ways you can go in this situation, including as I mentioned above Holding Day.

Whatever you do, just make sure that you don’t just bring in anyone and make sure you are making your team better and that you are minimising the number of moves that you will need to make later, particularly if you have Doc. He was a keeper for you and you now don’t want to go behind all other teams in terms of your upgrade cadence.

POINT TO NOTE!! Remember if you have Docherty you MUST make your trade before tonight’s game starts. He will be Locked at the start of the Blues v Crows game, so no time to waste.  Do it NOW so you don’t forget later on.

Other Stuff…

There are a few odd timeslots this weekend so just make sure you are across it. The key one being that we have a Friday Afternoon game starting at 5:10pm EST (4:40pm Local time in Adelaide) between Fremantle and Gold Coast so just make sure your team is all set up ready for that.

Whilst we have 6 games at the Adelaide oval we also have Two at Norwood Oval which is a narrower ground (with a brick wall on one side) and the other is in Mt Barker at what is a very new ground that is effectively in an open paddock type area so if the wind gets up on Saturday afternoon it is going to be a very tricky ground. Throw into all of that the weather forecast for Friday and Saturday in Adelaide is for a heap of rain! So this will definitely make Norwood Oval very muddy by the time the Sunday game there happens and also it will mean that Adelaide Oval may get a bit heavy under foot by the Saturday afternoon games too.  So just keep all those things in mind when selecting your team and your Captains (but I am sure that Calvin has taken all those things into account).

Things to Remember

• As mentioned above. Get that Doc trade done ASAP before you forget and it is too late.
• Two games on Friday! Don’t get caught out.
• This is our last week with a Thursday night game until the byes start so make the most of it!
• This is probably our absolute last week before we need to start doing upgrades as a lot of BE’s are starting to get very close to potential scores from our mid pricers and rookies.

Enjoy the weekend of footy if you are here in Adelaide this weekend, I am sure it will be fantastic and hopefully this is going to be a permanent fixture on the calendar with the AFL taking this concept to other states and rotating it around as it is a great idea (stolen from the NRL, but hey, who cares if it is good right?).  Sorry for the shorter one this week, been a bit busy but hope to be back bigger and better next week for you all.