Topic of the Fortnight: The Next Derby

I guess nobody can ever forget about Derby County Football Club do you? They produced a record that is as great as Usain Bolt's 9.58s run -THE LOWEST POINTS OF ANY PREMIER LEAGUE SEASON SO FAR!

So what does it have to do with fantasy premier league? Now I will introduce to you the Derby theory. Lets see Derby statistics when they were last in the premier league:

Club History
	LC	GP	W	L	D	PT	GD	POS
2007/2008	P	38	1	29	8	11	-69	20

You see it don't you? Least wins, most losses, least goals scored, most goals conceded, least points - basically a feeder club. So the best tactics of FPL on that season was to buy the key players of the team who play against Derby on that gameweek, and most of the time it would be rewarding. An example was Liverpool's 6-0 against them where Torres scored a hattrick. Obvious isn't it? Note that they ate 6 goals for four times, 5 goals twice and 4 goals thrice in that single season.

Of course it's a rare case to find clubs like Derby to gain advantage of, but this season I see a Derby-wannabe.I guess you all can see it as well don't you? Yes, yes, yes. It's Portsmouth aka Pompey aka Your Perfect Dessert!

Just a year ago, Pompey was a promising squad capable of breaking into the Europa Cup with the likes like Lassana Diarra, Jermaine Defoe, Peter Crouch, Glen Johnson, Niko Kranjcar etc, led by a great coach Harry Redknapp. Indeed they had a relishing start last season, but an incident changed the destiny of the club - Redknapp went to Spurs to cover up the terrible start of the team! Ever since then disasters came. They just finished 14, players gone one by one, from Defoe the first to Kranjcar the last. The squad was totally different now, even though it's not even a year.

As you can see, 90% of Pompey players are strangers for us, and the rest like Finnan and Kanu are those aging uncles who are at big disadvantages in the fast pace EPL. So I can't really expect this team to do anything big this year.

So as a smart FPL player you should apply the Derby theory and take in any important players in offense and defense to gain the points advantage, especially when Portsmouth are fighting big and ambitious clubs, and this can be continuously applied until Paul Hart was sacked and replaced by manager by good calibre or Al-Fahim opened up his chequebook to bring in some big players, whichever occurs first.

Hope that you got something here. Good luck.

... and hope that he won't get a heart attack when he is sacked...