2011 AFL Dream Team preview

The cyclical rhythm that is the AFL season kicks off this week, and for a lot of its modern fans, a strong highlight of this return, is the beginning of another season of fantasy football.

The AFL Dream team competition enters its 20th and perhaps most challenging year, with coaches being faced with byes, and a new set of challenging rules.

For those unfamiliar with the online juggernaut that is the AFL Dream Team, it is an online fantasy sport, which allows users to become coaches and managers of a salary cap strict squad of AFL players, and allows the coaches to monitor, interact and edit any aspect of their team throughout the year.

I will look at the tantalising players from each position, in separate posts, but allow this to act as an introduction and overall guide, to succeed at AFL Dream Team in 2011.

Possibly the most problematic addition to 2011, is the inclusion of team byes, meaning that our teams will be severely short-handed and very rarely full strength each week.

The best way to combat the bye, is to make your team as diverse as possible, which simply means picking players from a wide range of teams.

We would all love Jimmy Bartel, Joel Selwood and Paul Chapman in the midfield of our Dream Team, but when Geelong have a bye in rounds 6 and 22, your team could be in serious trouble.

As a rule of thumb, try to limit the number of players you have from a certain club, to no more than four, and try prevent having any club players in the same position.

Another key tool to ensure your team isn’t affected by byes, is to include as many dual position players (players that play in more than one position) in your team, to allow for increased flexibility.

For example, having Paul Chapman in your midfield and Adam Goodes in your forward line will allow you to swap these two players between midfield and forward, to accommodate for any byes or injury.

Following these simple guidelines will allow you to adapt to this new rule change far better than any of your opponents, and give you a heads up in your league or overall ranking.

The other key rule change is the widely debated inclusion of substitutes into games, and although it may not seem likely, this will have a strong bearing on all our dream teams this season.

If we get caught with a “regular” substitute in our dream teams, then it is likely that he will at best play 50 per cent of game time, thus producing far lower scores and off-setting the player price mechanism that occurs to all players.

Unfortunately there is no quick fix for the substitute rule, except that all coaches be aware of each clubs intentions of usage for the substitute rule, and avoid any of these players like the plague.

Take whatever steps necessary to ensure that you don’t have a player in your team that is likely or ideal to be used as a substitute.

The best possible the best advice when selecting your team is to select it with the end of the season in mind. Select the most amounts of players that you intend to keep as possible within the salary cap. Acknowledging monetary value is the key of making a good team.

A good way of measuring this is to look at your initial starting 22, and highlight players that ideally, you hope will be in your team all year. This is referred to as your number of “keepers” and should be maximised.

Then it’s simply a matter of tinkering and editing your team until you can stretch this number as high as possible, and still have a team that you are confident will score well. I currently have 16 keepers in my side.

The other main key would be when selecting your bench players, select players that you are confident will play regular games, and be able to cover any nasty injuries or byes that are dealt to your starting 22.

To make your team now, head over to AFL Dream Team website and stay tuned to this account for in depth analysis of key players to consider for selection.