Gameweek 17: Ramble On

I have missed my ramblings of late (perhaps due to work commitments or perhaps because of my team/predictions being throughout depressing) but I am back this week to ramble around the league.

What we know so far is that none of us know anything. That said, I can throw out some interesting facts which might give us at least a chance of picking some useful players:

Clean Sheets

• Sunderland are now tied for the most clean sheets in the league with 8 to date (tied with high priced alternatives Chelsea and Man City). They have notched 7 in the past 11 weeks which equals Chelsea's phenomenal start to the season.
• Over the past five weeks Chelsea, Arsenal, Spurs, Aston Villa and Bolton have combined for 0 clean sheets.
• In that same period, only Sunderland have managed to notch 3 clean sheets, though 9 other sides have managed 2.
• Despite the apparent lack of clean sheets, we have actually had 7 more than at the same point last season. 
• During the second half of last season we saw 127 clean sheets after just 88 during the first 19 games (we have already seen 87 this year).

Team scoring

• Only 2 sides have failed to score only twice this season: Man United and Blackburn
• No sides are standing out as easy to defend, though Wigan lead the way with 7 goose eggs to their name already.
• Spurs have only been blanked once in the last 11 games and that came at Old Trafford. Do not play your defenders against Redknapp's men!
• 2 of the 3 longest scoring streaks ended this week with Everton (10 games) and Sunderland (8 games) both failing to find the net. Blackburn (9 games) now hold the longest current streak.

Player notes

• Of all the players to have quality games this week, only 6 cost more than 7m and 3 of these were defenders. No striker made the list. (Baines, Silva, Downing, Young, Vidic and Evra).
• Andy Caroll has notched at least 5 points in 9 straight games, totalling 63 points (7 PPG) over this period. This week, however, was his first double digit effort since his GW2 hattrick. 
• 4 players now lead the league with 9 quality games: Caroll, Vidic, Cahill and Hart.
• Despite this week's 1 pointer, Nasri leads all players over the past 5 weeks with 34 points, tied with Gareth Bale. They are followed up by Caroll, Etherington and Elmander.
• If you pick a team of the best possible 11 players (while adhering to formation restrictions) it would only cost you 91.1m
• The 8 players who cost 10.0m or more are averaging just 4.9 PPG to date. At least 17 players have a better average including Brunt, Adam and Odenwingie who all cost less than 6.0m.
• Odenwingie has played one less game than Gerrard and costs less than half his pricetage but has outscored the England midfielder 65-57.

I'm still working on the new rankings method (this will probably be finished during the holidays) so for now we're stuck with the same old ideas. They didn't actually fare too badly this week with both the 2nd and 4th ranked teams coming through and only Blackpool of the bottom seven got the points. I will post gameweek 18 rankings tomorrow and will hopefully be back with a few ideas before the weekend. As always thanks for reading and any follows on here or Twitter are greatly appreciated.