We enter the final week of the season, and Premier League teams welcome fans back into their stadiums, and this, along with the FPLFamily show and the Fantasy Football Scoutcast, has played a key part in my decision for this week.
Whilst listening to both podcasts this morning, they mentioned the Youri Tielemans Cup winning goal on Saturday, with a theory that the addition of fans into the stadium gave more encouragement for the Belgian to shoot from distance (i think they both saw the same comment to be honest), and the guys on Scoutcast did a bit of a deeper dive into some data, suggesting that teams did tend to shoot more from distance when fans were in stadiums (They compared 2018/19 season data to this season in order to get a full season of data with fans in).
Whilst they admitted it was flawed data (teams and management will have changed, players will have developed different playing styles etc). It's something that struck a chord with me, and I've decided to target.
During the chat on Scoutcast, Joe and Seb both discussed this and mentioned players that like to shoot from outside the box, and are on set-pieces, and my mind immediately went to one man - James Ward-Prowse.
And so I set about looking at which players have scored the most from outside the box this season... Four players have scored 4... Harry Kane, Stuart Dallas (both already in my team), Matheus Pereira and that man, James Ward-Prowse.
In order to try and further look into it, I considered teams that have conceded the most shots from outside the box over the last 6 game weeks.
Highest here are Newcastle, but their fixtures are pretty favourable. The next two are the interesting teams. Villa.... They travel to Spurs where they face Harry Kane (potentially buoyed by Spurs fans, in what could potentially be his final game in front of them) and Leeds.... who travel to face... you've guessed it.... James Ward-Prowse.
With Jesse Lingards decline in form (fantasy wise - he's still playing well for West Ham), there was a slot available in my midfield which Ward-Prowse fits nicely, and could be a sneaky differential to boost my ranking in the last couple of weeks.
The only issue is that scoring versus Leeds would ruin my Meslier and Dallas clean sheets.
Captaincy, despite the stats above suggesting Harry Kane would be a great shout... I can't bring myself to turn away from Bruno Fernandes at home to Fulham. Fulhams defence has been terrible recently, and United will be looking to put on a show for their fans ahead of next weeks Europa League final.
