GW 6 – Review

Well what a wildly unpredictable weekend that was……not that we didn’t expect it! With no top division ‘big-hitters’ to rely on and non-league fixtures next to impossible to call – the addition of the National North and South Leagues bringing their usual dose of perilousness – plus the inclusion of the Scottish Challenge Cup, gameweek 6 had a rather unsurprising air of chaos about it!

With no departure from tradition we’ll open with this week’s top scorer. Congratulations James Hulton on topping the table in GW 6. James will be probably be a tad annoyed he didn’t put 4 goal Cheltenham Town higher than x5, as he missed out on Club 100 by just 9 points. Smart picks of Coventry City and Exeter City (each scoring 3), as well as solid choices of 2 goal Blackpool and Plymouth Argyle (The Pilgrims a popular pick all round – picked 54 times) propelled James to the top on 91 points. That’s right, there were NO members of Club 100 this week, quite possibly down to the madness of non-league football taking hold, so well done to the 47% of you who managed to beat this week’s rather disheartening average score of 23, the joint lowest average this season!

‘International weeks’, as we call them here at TUG, have historically been known to cause carnage and many of you (myself included!) will be glad to see the back of this one! Roll on the reintroduction of the higher divisions to the fold, as the international break proved to be fairly disastrous for no shortage of players. With 28 minus scores, including 7 brutal -40s, this was a gameweek to forget for many! Picking teams from the top six of the table can often be a reliable strategy for the higher divisions, but there was no such safety blanket this week – lower league football was at its untameable best! A prime example of this madness was Stockport, 5th in the National League and picked by 41 of you, falling to a 3-0 defeat at Chorley, who started the day rock bottom!!

Despite the doom and gloom there were certainly some big scorelines to be taken advantage of, most notably Altrincham’s 5-0 thumping of Leamington…..if only more than two of you had taken a punt on The Robins, we may have had a much higher average score! With non-league football viewed by some as intimidating and difficult to crack, there were a large variety of picks from the usual leagues that were still available; Bristol Rovers (15 picks), Coventry City (18) and Fleetwood Town (20) all fairly popular, as players tried to tackle this tough gameweek by whatever means possible. In addition to all of this, there were also chaotic scenes in the Scottish Challenge Cup, particularly for the 25 of you backing goalless Cove Rangers – a team who had been finding the net with consummate ease up until now! Some of the bigger scores in the competition included Aidrieonians and Clyde, each coming away on the right end of 5 goal thrillers against Bohemians and Queen of the South respectively, but those of you who backed Dundee United after their impressive recent goalscoring form were left most disheartened, as they succumbed to a surprise 1-0 home defeat by Arbroath.

Despite the struggle for big points, it was quite refreshing to see both the huge variety of sides selected and the teams with the highest number of picks – the aforementioned Plymouth Argyle leading the way (and netting 2 goals), followed by Alfreton Town (42 picks, 3 goals).

The Ultimate Goals returns in full this coming weekend, with all nine of our usual leagues available……and a lot of you will be most thankful of that after GW 6’s shenanigans!

– Samuel Wilkinson