The Offside Fantasy League: Fight for Survival

For most of the season, you’re best off avoiding relegation fodder in your Offside Fantasy League team. Players on teams towards the bottom obviously tend to pick up less points, so why waste perfectly good pretend money on them?

But as we enter the closing stages of the 2007/8 English Premier League season (four games to go, fyi) those bottom clubs are worth a look. With the exception of Derby, it’s fight or die, and teams that are fighting pick up points. For example, imagine if you’d had Carlos Tevez in your fantasy team as he scored a hatful of goals and secured West Ham’s Premiership survival?

The revivals seemed to get underway last weekend when Bolton and Fulham both claimed much needed wins. So Now we seem to have a four way fight to avoid the last two drop-spots between Fulham (19th) Bolton (18th) Birmingham (17th) and Reading (16th.) Here are four players (one from each team) who could score you some fantasy points as they scrap for their Premiership survival.

Brian McBride (Fulham) £7m
The Fulham captain (and 2006/7 Player of the Year) was out of action for a long time after getting injured while scoring early this year. With a dislocated kneecap at the age of 35, you’d have forgiven McBride for retiring. But he’s back, and he scored against Reading last week.

El-Hadji Diouf (Bolton) £9.5m
No one likes him, especially not the Middlesbrough fans he’ll be visiting this weekend since he once spat drink at one of them. And he annoys me because I always forget where to put the hyphen in his name. But Diouf has still got bags of talent, and is always capable of pulling something out of the bag.

Olivier Kapo (Birmingham) £5.8m
The French international attacking mid has got all kinds of skill. Check him out at the 1:25 mark of today’s showboating video. Kapo has missed Birmingham’s last seven games with a hamstring tear, but will be back to face Aston Villa in the Birmingham derby this weekend. Bargain price for so much talent too.

Andre Bikey (Reading) £5m
I won’t lie to you, Reading are not in good form. They haven’t even scored in three games. But last time they did score it was the big Cameroonian defender who headed home not once, but twice. He may have an irrational hatred of Ghanaian medics, but if Reading survive then Andre Bikey will be a big part of it.

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Category: English Premier League