Blurrton Albion had a good week in Fantasy Football, scoring the second highest number of points in the office league and moving up one place in the rankings to 5th. Brandon, Week 1 leader, has dropped off significantly in recent weeks and was the player overtaken by our crowd-sourced team; he’s now sliding towards Ali and Joe at the foot of the table. Blurrton Albion, meanwhile, are maintaining their early season mid-table form and seem to be making some progress using the crowd-sourced selection process. Here’s the Blurrton Albion Week 5 Fantasy Football update.
Week 5 Points
From back to front, Blurrton Albion had a solid day. 60 points was a good return in a week when Romelu Lukaku was one of very few expensive strikers to score. Harry Kane and Alvaro Morata both failed to find the scoresheet as Spurs and Chelsea both drew 0-0, whilst Blurrton Albion’s very own Alexandre Lacazette also only managed to score 2 points after drawing a blank in one of the aforementioned 0-0 draws (the one with Chelsea). Tomer Hemed also scored 2 points, but Lukaku was the undoubted star of the the Blurrton Albion show, scoring 12 points before his captaincy bonus doubled that. Over one third of the team’s points were scored by Lukaku, who will remain as captain after he was also the most talked about player on social media with 48,138 tweets sent about him during the game week. Lacazette also stays on as vice-captain after being the fourth most talked about player on match day 5 with 21,533 tweets.
The midfield had an average weekend; all three midfielders scored 3 points, with none of them providing any assists or goals but all of them being involved in clean sheets. In defence, Ahmed Hegazy and Marcos Alonso both picked up 6 points thanks to West Brom keeping a clean sheet against West Ham and Chelsea keeping out Arsenal. Goalkeeper David de Gea scored 7 points after he got his clean sheet bonus and an extra point thanks to the 3 saves he made. James Milner and Tim Fosu-Mensah both only scored 2 points after playing the full match but conceding one goal each. Milner was part of the Liverpool defence which could only manage a 1-1 draw at home to Burnley, whilst Fosu-Mensah was on the wrong end of Palace’s 1-0 defeat to Southampton.
Who’s Out?
After none of our subs played this week, all three were up for the chop. The player to be subbed out would therefore be decided based on volume of conversation. Alberto Moreno, Mousa Dembele and Mesut Ozil all failed to play a single minute as Liverpool, Spurs and Arsenal respectively all failed to win. Ozil was the most talked about player of the three, being tweeted about 3,634 times as Arsenal drew 0-0 with Chelsea. Moreno was second (only just…!) as he was tweeted about 141 times during Liverpool’s match. Our player to be substituted out will therefore be Dembele, who was only tweeted about 110 times as Spurs drew 0-0 with Swansea on Saturday evening.
Dembele, valued at 5 million, will be replaced by the most talked about player with a value of 5.4 million or less (thanks to our spare money from previous weeks). The highest scoring player available for that price is Watford’s Abdoulaye Doucoure at 5.2 million, with 27 points, whilst Newcastle’ Christian Atsu or Liverpool’s Emre Can were also potential options. The most talked about player within our price range was actually Nemanja Matic, but the rules state that only three players from one club may be signed and we already have our three Manchester United players. Next on the most talked about list was Tiemoue Bakayoko, Chelsea’s holding midfielder who was signed over the summer from French champions AS Monaco. Bakayoko is available for 5 million and will therefore become the newest member of Blurrton Albion, becoming our third and final Chelsea player. Bakayoko was tweeted about 5,252 times during Chelsea’s match with Arsenal, meaning he was actually in the top 10 of most talked about midfielders over the weekend.
Team Management
Bakayoko goes straight into the team alongside “most talked about midfielder” Marouane Fellaini, who was tweeted about 11,371 times. Willian was tweeted about 7,996 times and Dele Alli received 803 tweets. This means that all 5 midfielders will start next week, after they received higher levels of conversation than the defenders and third choice striker. Moreno, Alonso and Milner will start next week, with Fosu-Mensah and Hegazy on the bench. Tomer Hemed drops down to the bench after only being tweeted about 73 times, much lower than the fifth lowest midfielder.
Here’s the full starting line-up for Week 6:
Check back next week to see how the social media experiment is progressing!
All of the data we used to create and manage our crowd-sourced fantasy team can be found in the incredible Blurrt Sports Hub. To find out how it can generate content for you, contact Ali at alistair@blurrt.co.uk