Avoiding the Casualties

I'm sure most Fantasy teams have been stuck with an injured guy on their roster over the past few weeks. A number of top performers have had the injury bug recently and while you don't want to carry an injured player if you can at all avoid it when they are potential fantasy studs who may have a chance to play it can be a tough call to drop them. A few big names that have given me fits recently are Tony Brown, Andrew Blowers, Adrian Cashmore, David Giffen and Justin Harrison.

Being keen to keep on top of the bargins and shuffle my lineup from week to week I don't have a lot of transfers to play with. I burned all of my initial transfers early on and use all 4 of my transfers each week very easily. Where I got burned was using some of my transfers early in the week (on Friday afternoon generally!) to grab guys who are back from a BYE. Then when the Friday deadline approaches and the starting teams are named I find that I am stuck with two guys who are injured and only one free transfer. Doh!!! (And to make matters worse I dumped Tony Brown and kept Adrian Cashmore and Brown actually played and Cashmore didn't!)

Having learnt the hard way my advice would be to steer well clear of any player under an injury cloud if you can (give them a weekend back from injury before grabbing them) and don't drop a healthly player, to pick up another guy who you think might perform better, until late in the week when you are sure that you aren't carrying any injured guys into the weekend.

(Of course if we could work out a way to buy more transfers then everything would be sweet!!)

Matchups of the Round
(applying our own past advice)

The two most one-sided matches of the round should be the Crusaders at home to the miserable Bulls and the red-hot Brumbies visting the woeful Chiefs. You can't go too far wrong grabbing the outside backs, locks and goalkickers for the Crusaders and the Brumbies and some of the loose forward tackling machines for the Chiefs and Bulls.

All the other matches this weekend should be much closer contests, the Highlanders and Blues should win in SA, but not easily and the Reds might struggle (like the Crusaders did) to topple the Cats at home.

Bargins of the Round
(applying our own past advice)

With the Waratahs and the Stormers coming back from their BYEs they offer the best bargins for the round. Grab goal kicking stars Matt Burke and Braam Van Straten if you can before their value goes back up.