GW 44 – Review

Welcome to the penultimate Ultimate Goals weekly review of the season. The weekend’s fixtures promised plenty of goals and we got them! Let’s get going!

As is customary, we’ll go straight to the top of the weekly Global League Table, where six players managed to notch up 100 points or more – nice going! Top of the pile was Terence Glenn, who conjured up a cracking 121 points, and yet despite this he may well be kicking himself – it could’ve been so much more! 5 goal sides Fulham (8 picks) and the increasingly unpopular Barcelona (who finally produced the good!) sat on x2 and x3, while AC Milan’s (36 picks) 5 goals yielded the most points for Terence on x6. Young Boys (23) were the only other side to net 5 across the weekend, contributing to a sizeable Perfect 7 score of 166. Just one more gameweek to try and secure that £1000 jackpot!

There were several 4 goal teams that would have padded out a lot of scores this week, albeit most of them deemed unlikely or unfancied to do so! Blackburn Rovers (3 picks) and QPR (2) did just this in the English Championship, with Villarreal and Granada both scoring four without response in La Liga. We’re at that strange point in the season where mid-table sides playing for nothing but pride can end up producing basketball scorelines (although drab nil-nils must never be discounted!!) and the Blackburn v Reading and QPR v Millwall scorelines reflect just that! Speaking of The Championship, the most popular sides were always likely to be newly crowned champions Leeds Utd (13), who put 3 past Derby County at Pride Park, and the usually free-scoring Brentford (28), who surprisingly failed to net at Stoke City (bad luck for the 6 of you who put them at x2!) and subsequently blew the chance to leave automatic promotion in their own hands heading into the final weekend.

Who did you back most to do the business in front of goal then? Well Bodo Glimt (the most selected side this week at 57 picks) and Atalanta (52) have been popular ever since their introduction to the game last month, but Manchester City’s goalless loss to Arsenal in the FA Cup left 56 players (myself included!) disappointed, especially the 17 of you who selected them on x2! In fact City were the most selected side on x2 and x3, while Bodo/Glimt and Atalanta were most chosen in the remaining positions on the multiplier ladder. It’s been a while since we last had just three teams filling the ‘most popular matrix’! Your selections left us with a disappointing 27 minus scores, mainly caused by that shock result for Manchester City, but a not terrible average of 24, with 39% of you beating that. Well done if that was you!

That’s it from me this week, just one more gameweek left! So let’s make it a good one, get those selections in nice and early, sit back and watch your chosen teams turn you into a bag of nerves, frustrate the life out of you or (hopefully) smash goals in from start to finish for last time this season! Good luck!

-Sam Wilkinson