GW 16 – Review

Going into it, Gameweek 16 had a familiar foreboding look to it, but as ‘International Weeks’ go here on TUG, that was one of the best we’ve seen! This week saw the return of the National League North and South, along with the Scottish Challenge Cup. The international break always proves to be a challenging obstacle that can disrupt a good run of points building, or for some, a chance to leap up the Global League Table through intricate knowledge of the lower leagues of the English and Scottish game. Let’s get into this week’s Ultimate Goals!

Straight to the summit of the Global League Table as always; congratulations to this week’s highest scorer, Graham Hawkes! A hattrick of 2-goal teams started Graham off at x2, x3 and x4 with Braintree Town, Maidstone Utd and Chelmsford City each scoring two. But Graham should have backed Braintree and Chelmsford’s opponents, Welling Utd (just 3 picks) and Oxford City (0 selections!), as they netted a combined TWELVE goals. Carlisle Utd found the net just once at x6, while a cracking combination of 4-goal Northampton Town, 3-goal Harrogate Town and 5-goal Brackley Town at x5, x7 and x8 returned a whopping 81 points, taking our table topper’s tally to 105 points. Well done Graham!

It was so close for Carol Atkinson however, who finished on 104 points, with Brackley Town at x5 just a single multiplier away from a table-leading score! Just the three entries to Club 100 this week, and a fairly low average score of 25, but that’s not to say the points weren’t there for the taking. We had 3 teams bag 6 goals this week with Oxford City, Welling Utd and Dagenham & Redbridge stealing the show at x6, x7 and x8. 5-goal Altrincham and Brackley Town occupied x4 and x5 while any 4-goal team at x2 and x3 would have seen you score an astounding 191 points, and go home with the ‘Perfect 7’ jackpot!

Other high-scoring games included (just twice selected) Barrow AFC scoring 3 at Notts County, a 3-1 win for Solihull Moors (20 picks), National League relegation candidates Chorley hitting 3 at Chesterfield and Northampton Town putting 4 past Crewe Alexandra. Partick Thistle (21 picks) netted 4 against Stenhousemuir in the Scottish Challenge Cup Quarter-Final, while in the Scottish League Two, the most popular selection for this week, Cove Rangers, with 92 picks, kept people waiting until the 78th minute to break the deadlock before a late flurry of action saw them win 3-0 against Brechin City, and Edinburgh City (75 selections) beat Albion Rovers 3-2. Surprisingly, well fancied Torquay United (59 picks) only managed to score once at home to relegation-threatened Sutton Utd, who picked up just their 4th win of the season with a 2-1 victory.

Now for the bad news, and considering the disruption an ‘international week’ can cause, there were just 22 minus scores. Made up of 18 minus 20s, 3 minus 40s and a single minus 60, this week’s list of minus scores shows a fantastic improvement from previous international breaks (or a lot of you got lucky with the ‘randomise’ button!).

So that’s your fill of Ultimate Goals stats and figures for another week. Next week features the return of the so called ‘big’ leagues, while north of the border there are some tempting looking ties in the third round of the Scottish Cup to go at too, so get those selections in nice and early and good luck for gameweek 17!

– Samuel Wilkinson