GW 8 Review

Matt: Fairly tough week that, as anticipated. The fact that not a single ton was registered (from the 167 entries we had in GW 8) is quite telling, but hardly surprising. Not only did it have the feel of an awkward set of fixtures, but three figure scores in general have been sorely lacking so far this season. Perhaps that’ll start to alter as we enter our third month of the campaign and players begin to find their feet a little more.

With Club 100 seeing no business again, scores of mid 80 were the order of the day; just a single point separated the top four (once again proving that every goal really can be crucial). A meagre seven players managed to go beyond 80 points, as the goals continue to dry up for many. Still, selecting teams who ‘only’ score once or twice is clearly more preferable than teams who don’t score at all and GW 8 threw yet another grenade into the mix as, for the second week running, a certain team by the name of Livingston caused havoc! Following on from their 0-0 draw at heavily backed Hearts in GW 7, Livi rubbed salt into the wound by going one better and defeating Rangers 1-0! I certainly didn’t see that result coming, given Rangers’ recent sharpness and accuracy in front of goal (15 goals in their previous four games, including a brace in their last away match at Villarreal in the Europa League!), but it’s another classic case of nothing being guaranteed in TUG! One thing is for sure, most players will be giving Livi’s opponents this coming weekend a very wide berth indeed!!

GW 9 will surely provide a bit more opportunity to score big; i’m all for tricky gameweeks as it’s definitely a leveller and requires a bit more thought, but when only six teams in total (across the nine available) score more than 3 goals, then it does make it extremely difficult to piece together a score worth getting genuinely jubilant about. We’re long overdue a week of tons, tons and more tons so let’s hope that’s what GW 9 brings!

Ally: As Matt says, it was another tough week, the fourth out of the eight gameweeks we’ve had so far where no competitor has broken through the magical 100 point barrier. A look through the classified results from Saturday and Sunday tells you all you need to know. While there were plenty fixtures with goals in across the board, there was a dearth of high scoring teams, particularly in England; indeed there were only three teams in all five eligible English leagues that managed to score more than 3 goals, and of those teams both Newport and Mansfield had only bagged 10 goals apiece in the lead up to Saturday, at a ratio barely better than one per game.

It was a similar story in Scotland, with only three teams scoring more than 3 goals, each one recording a 5-1 away victory strangely enough. Again the form book didn’t exactly scream goals, particularly in the Championship where second placed Ross County (averaging a goal per game) were at fourth placed Dundee United (conceding an average one goal per game), while leaders Ayr United were at Morton, whose frugal defence had also conceded an average one goal per game ahead of the tie.

Good luck for gameweek 9!