Throughout the 2022/23 Fantasy Premier League (FPL) season, our stellar team of Pro Pundits, Hall of Famers and guest contributors will be sharing their thoughts and own transfer plans.

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Here, seven-time top 10k finisher Zophar tackles some FPL hot topics and reveals his team plans for Gameweek 11.

It’s getting closer to the World Cup and it seems that my FPL team is already in the spirit of the tournament with all the flags I’m seeing. In this piece, I will be discussing the injury issues around Reece James (£6.1m) and Aleksandar Mitrovic (£6.8m) while also diving into the Liverpool dilemma ahead of their amazing run of fixtures from Gameweek 12 on.

LIVERPOOL

I won’t go too much into the scheduling as Neale has already discussed it in this article but just in case you missed it, I’ve included the graph from the piece that shows that not only do Liverpool have the shortest lead-up time to Gameweek 12, they also have the shortest turnaround time ahead of Gameweek 13. 

A lot of the reaction when Luis Diaz (£8.0m) got injured was that it would make the Liverpool front four of Diogo Jota (£8.9m), Roberto Firmino (£8.0m), Darwin Nunez (£8.8m) and Mohamed Salah (£12.7m) ‘nailed’ due to lack of options but we have seen in the past that Jurgen Klopp is big on sports science and with this schedule in mind, there will be rotation over these three matches. Sunday’s game against Manchester City will no doubt feature their first-choice XI but we could see some players drop in and out for the West Ham United and Nottingham Forest fixtures.

Liverpool stuck with their 4-4-2/4-2-3-1 system against Rangers in the Champions League midweek and benched both Jota and Salah, with Fabio Carvalho (£5.4m) and Harvey Elliott (£5.0m) featuring in their place. Salah came on in the second half in the centre-forward role with Jota stationed behind him and got a hat-trick in under 6.5 minutes.

Klopp said after the game : 

“Yeah, different position, Mo inside (forward). An outstanding player we all know that, today he showed that.”

Salah is likely to return to his role on the right wing against Manchester City but having how had his rest, coupled with the early substitution against Arsenal, I think he is one of their most nailed attackers for the Gameweek 11-13 run. There is a chance that Nunez gets benched or gets managed minutes in either the West Ham or Forest matches, which could see the Egyptian feature up top – and that would increase his goal threat significantly. 

We should be cautious about reading too much into a match against Rangers but personally, I am keeping the Salah option for Gameweek 12 open now. I was thinking earlier this week about moving further away from FPL’s most expensive player, downgrading Kevin De Bruyne (£12.4m) to perhaps Leandro Trossard (£6.8m) and upgrading Mitrovic to Harry Kane (£11.4m), but I don’t think I will be doing that now. I’d rather wait and see how the Reds fare in Gameweek 11. If I was a Salah owner, I would definitely hold him for now. 

For all that’s been said about Liverpool’s malaise, I still see them scoring goals against West Ham and in particular against Forest, Leeds United and Southampton. I definitely want a piece of that attack and if not Salah, I will likely plump for Nunez, who looks to be the focal point of the attack in this set-up. But I am now leaning towards leaving this decision to Gameweek 12.

While we are discussing Liverpool, Andrew Robertson (£6.7m) was on the bench last night. In this current system, the left-back has been given significantly more license to bomb forward due to the more defensive-minded Joe Gomez (£4.5m) being stationed at right-back, so the Scot could be a good pick to replace Reece James. The obvious concern is rotation: having just returned from injury, he could feature against Man City but then may miss either West Ham or Forest. 

While on the subject of James replacements, I think Gomez is worth a shout if you need someone just for the short term and you don’t mind benching him this week. There are potential clean sheets against West Ham, Forest and Leeds and he did get an assist last night in open play.

Mitrovic: Sell or keep?

We will be discussing all these issues and more on this week’s episode of The FPL Wire. Check it out here from 2.30pm BST on Thursday.

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