GW 2 – Review

We have lift off, well and truly!! After a fairly sedate opening weekend, where caution was the order of the day, it hasn’t taken long for the fireworks to be discharged! An absolute cascade of goals from several big-hitters handed a delightful boost to a large number of players, with no less than 27 of you reaching Club 100. However, as is so often the case in TUG, where there is ecstasy there will always be agony too, and there was plenty of despair around – particularly for the numerous players who chose some/all of those high scoring sides, but sadly placed their trust in eventual non-scorers! Ultimately that outcome often tends to yield little in the way of points, or worse still minus points for the most unfortunate, which is exactly where you don’t want to be on such a high scoring weekend!

This was no problem for our top scorer of gameweek two however. A massive well done to Lee Thacker, who picked up a phenomenal 156 points this weekend!! All 7 multipliers were hammered, with five of them producing double figure returns! A superb combination of 5 goal Raith Rovers & 6 goal Falkirk in the x7 and x8 positions rounded off a mouth-watering selection of teams that also included the highly popular, 5 goal Celtic and Manchester City teams, with 4 goal Cove Rangers in there for good measure. Cove, incidentally, were high scorers for the second week running and trusted by 21 players to do the business here; despite being new to league football you have to think that the number of people selecting them is only going to increase on the evidence of what we have seen so far!

Lee’s delight was shared by a host of other players, chiefly Duncan Elliott and Gordan Spowage who each pulled 150 scores of their own, a huge points haul at any time of the season never mind only two weeks in! However, as is the nature of TUG, high scoring teams definitely does not guarantee high scores across the board! While 42% of players achieved more than this week’s average of 44, we also saw 17 minus returns – including 3 disheartening minus 60’s, meaning we’ve already had five of those in the first couple of weekends! Many of the minus and lowly scores can be attributed to the controversial events at the University of Bolton Stadium, where Coventry City incredibly had three goals ruled out for offside…….two of which were seemingly legitimate, or so City manager Mark Robins vehemently believes! If you were to add up the number of points that Coventry alone cost players in GW 2, you’d be talking thousands rather than hundreds!! Watford, Derby County, Middlesbrough and Salford City were other notable blanks on the list of letdowns.

With another chaotic weekend of goal scoring at an end and a bit of goal-scoring form now emerging, it may start to become easier to see where the big points can be found in the coming weeks.  Will Celtic push aside Dunfermline as easily as they have St Johnstone and Motherwell? Almost certainly! Will Premier League hot shots Manchester City and Liverpool continue with their irrepressible thirst for goals? Probably! Will Cove Rangers be somewhat of a surprise package, if we can still consider them as that, for a third week running? Possibly! Good luck and happy scoring!

– Samuel Wilkinson