S4 Ep23: Off The Bench: Coping with the Blank Gameweek
FPL Pod
Premier League
4.6 • 749 Ratings
🗓️ 28 April 2026
⏱️ 50 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
Despite it being a Blank Gameweek, it was a huge weekend for FPL as over 1.5 million managers played a Chip to deal with the reduction in fixtures 🤑🍟🤑
FPL experts Sam Bonfield and Harry Daniels discuss the Arsenal backline, cheap options at Man Utd, and what to do with Aston Villa assets.
LISTEN 👇
* Focus on Arsenal defence (04m 02s)
* Liverpool conundrum (10m 59s)
* Villa assets (18m 41s)
* Case for Casemiro (29m 56s)
* Forest fixtures (37m 20s)
* Backing Porro (45m 10s)
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Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | Welcome back to this week's off the bench podcast from the Premier League. I'm FPL Harry. |
| 0:21.4 | And I'm Sam from FPL family. Now, it was a slightly smaller game week in terms of number of |
| 0:26.3 | pictures. Of course, we had a blank for a few teams with the FA Cup semi-finals. And as Chelsea |
| 0:31.3 | fan, quite happy with how that went over the weekend. But it was also a very big weekend for |
| 0:36.0 | FPL outside of the fixtures with a lot |
| 0:37.9 | of chips being played with over one million managers activating their free hit, and then a further |
| 0:44.3 | $415,000 playing their wild card as well. So a slightly lower number of fixtures, but one of the |
| 0:50.6 | biggest weeks of the season for a number of chips. Now, I played my free hit this |
| 0:55.0 | week and we'll talk about that. But first of all, I'm with Sam. How are you doing? I'm all right. Yeah, |
| 0:59.4 | I also had my free hit active this week. It went okay. I made a really last minute decision |
| 1:05.5 | to swap Morgan gives white for Tiago and that immediately became a problem. As soon as the Friday night game kicked off, |
| 1:13.1 | I thought, oh, I've done the wrong thing here. I just found that Friday night game really |
| 1:16.9 | difficult to call because sometimes Sunderland can be defensively super solid. Nottingham Forest |
| 1:22.4 | have been really good in recent weeks, but they always have this one weird game in them where they just |
| 1:28.5 | don't really turn up. And I wasn't sure how that might play out ahead of the midweek European |
| 1:32.7 | action. So I just kind of thought, well, maybe I'll stay out of that one. And maybe I'll just play |
| 1:37.1 | a little bit safe because I got quite a few differentials in my team anyway. I was part of my free |
| 1:41.4 | hit. So I thought, well, maybe I'll play it safe and have Tiago on Monday night, as it happens. I really, really wish I hadn't made that decision. It was one of those moments where I wish the Wi-Fi had been down and it hadn't saved, but alas, it did. But it was a 59 point out. I was on for 60 until Pedro Porro lost his bonus at the end of the game week. So that was a bit frustrating. But generally speaking, |
| 2:02.8 | it went quite well. The defence holding me up massively, obviously, Vara and Gabriel both |
| 2:06.6 | doing really well for Arsenal. And then as I mentioned, Pedro Porro, Bruno was my captain. |
| 2:12.5 | Bit disappointed, I think, to only get an assist out of him. It felt like they should have been |
| 2:17.1 | more in that game for him. |
... |
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