Rumours, hearsay and idle banter go into overdrive ahead of GW27

To say that there has been some fun and games ahead of the build-up to the first double gameweek of the 2016/17 Fantasy Premier League season would be something of an under-statement. The actual double gameweek wasn’t confirmed until late on Wednesday, when Manchester City ensured that they would be in the quarter-finals of the FA Cup, by defeating Huddersfield Town 5-1 in their FA Cup replay, allowing their Premier League fixture with Stoke City to be brought forward.

Much has been written about whether this is the right time or not to play the triple captain chip, with a rejuveanted Sergio Agüero very much in the spotlight, so it was perhaps not too much of a surprise to hear rumours surfacing about a possible injury to the Argentian hitman.

Fantasy football managers will also be concerned about the number of influential players that face a race against time to prove their fitness ahead of the GW27 calendar. These include: Harry Kane, Toby Alderweireld, Mesut Özil, Jan Vertonghen, Eden Hazard, Matt Phillips and Andy Carroll. It was also announced that a warrant has been issued for the arrest of Robert Snodgrass in relation to a driving offence, effectively putting a question mark over his participation in Monday evening’s London derby with Chelsea.

Anyway, we have decided to play the triple captain chip this week, with a view to activating our wildcard later in the season. That should put us in good shape for a bench boost when there are more sides in action when another double gameweek is scheduled to take place in the subsequent week.

Getting Agüero in, would have meant having to sacrifice Kane, something we were not prepared to do. His injury scare is a concern but 2 hat-tricks in his last 3 appearances speaks for itself.

So, in what can only be described as a shock move, we’ve decided to go for Kevin de Bruyne instead, with Eden Hazard making way. The Belgian international let us down badly between gameweeks 14 and 20 but City were going through a sticky patch at the time and that is certainly not the case now. De Bruyne has picked up the same number of bonus points as Alexis Sánchez this season and on his day he can be unplayable. Agüero will no doubt be extremely popular but we’re hoping that this contrarian play can pay off big time and propel our squad up that leader board.

Bringing in Matty Phillips for Gylfi Sigurdsson in GW22 proved costly but we’re going to take a 4 point hit to reverse it, a move that is based as much on upcoming fixtures as the worry over the former’s fitness.

De Bruyne is known as ‘The Ginger Pele’ in his homeland. Let’s hope he can put in a couple of a performances that justify such high praise and our decision to give him the honour of wearing the coveted ‘triple captain’ armband!