GW 14 – Review

Now that spooky season is officially over (and let’s be honest, there were some seriously spine-chilling scores over the past couple of weeks!), we’re quickly moving towards that intense Christmas period that can make or break your season. It’s a testing time in terms of quantity of fixtures and gameweeks to be crammed in and any given teams’ fortunes can drastically improve or quickly deteriorate in a short space of time. What’s certain though is that with our multitude of leagues and teams to choose from, it will be as engrossing and absorbing as ever here in TUG! For now though, let’s get into November’s first gameweek!

As ever, we’ll begin by looking to our table topper for gameweek 14. A massive well done to Tam Bruce for reaching the summit of this week’s Global League! Reliable choices of Manchester City (an incredible 123 selections, although should we really be surprised?!), Liverpool (81 picks) and Chelsea (50) bagged Tam 30 points, with Edinburgh City (20 picks) providing 3 goals and 6 points on x2. 4 goal Ayr Utd (21 picks) gave the week’s top scorer 20 points from x5, while 5 goal Celtic (78) and 3 goal Rangers (72), both playing in the Scottish League Cup Semi-Finals, returned a combined 51 points from x6 and x7 to give Tam a lovely score of 107 and a pass to Club 100. It was close call for him though, and for the 82 of you who picked the Premier League leaders Liverpool, who left it too close for comfort at Villa Park on Saturday, with very late goals from Robertson and Mane ensuring a big upset was avoided. Plenty of nail-biting going on in that fixture, just how we like it in this game!

This week’s table at Club 100 is a fairly sparse one, indeed Christopher Whitelegge was the only other player to get past the bouncers! His score of 106 was agonisingly close to top score, but a fine effort all the same. Despite the lack of big scores, GW 14’s average was a worthy 34 points, with 40% of you surpassing that mark. The highest possible score, the ‘Perfect 7’ (the dreamland for Ultimate Goals players!) proved to be as elusive as ever, with no one getting close to the 148 points required to secure a cool £1,300 reward. Head to the ‘Perfect 7’ tab to find out more about our jackpot prize.

There were plenty of high scoring games to take advantage of as usual; Celtic’s 5-2 Scottish League Cup Semi-Final victory over Hibernian the standout scoreline and stationing The Bhoys firmly in the x8 slot of the aforementioned Perfect 7. In the Championship, Cardiff City (only 4 picks) put 4 past Birmingham City, while League One Blackpool edged Peterborough Utd in a 7-goal thriller. 21 of you backed Ayr Utd to do the business against Partick Thistle and were rewarded with a 4-1 win, while Eastleigh and Torquay Utd each hit 4 in the National League. The Scottish League Two was a hive of activity too, with each game providing 3.8 goals on average. Whether it be Stirling Albion and Queen’s Park, who both netted 3, Elgin City who thumped Annan Athletic 4-0, or perhaps the always popular Cove Rangers (16 picks) and ever improving Edinburgh City (20), who won 3-1 and 3-2 respectively, the Scottish fourth tier was an absolute goal(d)-mine at the weekend!

However as is the norm, there were some surprising results that let many of you down. The most harmful result was Raith Rovers failing to score, much to the disappointment of 33 of you. 7 players were let down by Manchester Utd’s failure to score at Bournemouth (a slightly curious choice given The Red Devils’ current woes!) and 15 selections were wasted on Fulham, who fell to a startling 3-0 home defeat to a rapidly rising Hull City side. All of this contributed to 17 minus scores, made up of 15 -20s, a -40 and a calamitous -60!

That’s it for this week’s review. Don’t forget to get those selections sorted in time for next week’s early fixtures if you’re planning on trying to secure some points at the earliest opportunity;  two lunchtime derbies are on offer as Chelsea take on Crystal Palace in the capital, while Derby County travel to the City Ground where Nottingham Forest lie in wait for an always tasty East Midlands clash! The Reds produced 3 goals against The Rams in a Carabao Cup fixture earlier this season, will this match cough up more of the same this time? Leave a prediction in the comments below, and as ever, happy scoring!

– Samuel Wilkinson