ONE round down and it wasn’t pretty for us AFL Fantasy Coaches! As they say, the best laid plans often go astray. More on that in a little bit though. First I want to have a look at how our Power players went and in such a high possession game it is no surprise we had six players score over 100!

Brad Ebert was outstanding with his 163 points. When I wrote about him earlier last month I told you that he averaged 99 for the last three seasons. This was one out of the box for him and should set him up nicely for the rest of the year. Hopefully this is a sign of things to come.

Based on NAB Challenge form, I was worried about Ollie Wines as he wasn’t as consistent through those games as I might have liked. Well he certainly showed me up by posting a fantastic 131 in his 50th game.

Most impressive was his kick to handball ratio that I mentioned in my fantasy focus article on him. On Sunday night he had 19 kicks to go along with his eight handballs. But more importantly he kept his tackle count up with six. This is fantastic and just what we need to bring in the big points.

Robbie Gray showed why he is the reigning Coaches MVP with his 31 quality touches and massive eight tackles which got him to his 122 points. Most notable for me here was that he reached that score without hitting the scoreboard. If he can keep that form up and also kick a goal or two a game then he should have no problems at all keeping his average up and maintain his price level.

I was worried about him preseason, but I needn’t have been! Travis Boak, Jared Polec and Chad Wingard all managed over 100 which is particularly good for Wingard as he had no pre-season and also is a bit cheaper in AFL fantasy due to his low scoring year last season.

Turning our focus to other players and your team structure, I am sure that you all have at least one fix up to do this week with guys like Tom Rockliff and Steele Sidebottom ruled out for at least the next 6 weeks each. If you have them then you need to make a trade then you could always go for someone like Brad Ebert as that would save you a heap of cash and you won’t be missing out on many points assuming he stays around the 100 mark.

If you were extremely lucky and don’t have any long term injuries you can use your two trades this week to look at fixing up some of your rookies if you didn’t jump on the right ones. The guys that you should have in your team based on round 1 form would by Kamdyn McIntosh (Rich), Adam Saad (GC), ex Power player Ben Newton (Melb) and Aaron Vandenberg (Melb).

However, you should only be looking to swap rookies. Don’t worry too much about your premiums that didn’t perform, give them another week. So guys like Dusty Martin and Gary Ablett Jnr should be given more time. One bad game doesn’t make a bad season. Other popular choices like Jack Newnes, Kade Kolodjashnij and Heritier Lumumba also let us down. However, if a score like this had happened midway through the season you wouldn’t have worried too much, so give them another couple of weeks too before pulling the trigger on them.

So if you didn’t have a great first week (like me) don’t stress yourself out, just make the necessary tweaks and perhaps change the rookies you had on the field and you should be all good for round two. As always stay tuned to twitter (you can find me @pkd73) and all other news sources and of course check the teams as they come out to make sure that your team is as strong as it can be. Good luck and catch you all next week.