Thoughts on the World Cup 2nd Round

 

It has continued to be a colourful and thrilling tournament, with the underdog teams continuing to show a lot of fight, and - in at least a few cases - proving to be much better than most people had expected. (I scarcely find the time to even watch much of England's qualifying campaign, and know next to nothing about almost anyone else's - certainly not any of the teams from outside Europe. But I suppose we should assume that, now that Africa is a pretty strong footballing continent, any team that qualifies out of one of the African groups is probably fairly decent - even if it is a tiny island group with an official population of barely 500,000....)  And Round 2, though it contained more goalless encounters and slightly fewer goals overall than Round 1, still produced an average of 2.75 goals per game - including quite a few absolute belters.

Some of the most fancied contenders - Spain, Brazil, Portugal, Holland, and Switzerland - 'woke up' rather, after very subdued performances in their opening games. Turkiye, South Korea, Belgium, Senegal, Scotland, and Ecuador, alas, did not - although all could still qualify. (If I have one gripe about the new expanded format for the tournament, it is that, with only 4 of the 12 third place teams being eliminated, there's too little jeopardy in this group phase; few, if any, of the 'big names' are in any real danger of going out until the knockout games begin.) 

And England.... stumbled rather, in a frustratingly sterile goalless stalemate with Ghana. We played about 20 minutes of excellent football in the opening game against Croatia, but have looked pretty mediocre for the other 160-odd minutes. And I am finding it a bit vexing that Tuchel hasn't actually played our best eleven yet; I cannot understand why he's rotated out O'Reilly and Guehi, and given only very short minutes to Rashford and Saka. I am tempted to downgrade my expectations for us from likely semi-finalists again to.... likely to exit in the 'Round of 16'.

The star players are continuing to shine: Messi, Vinicius Jnr, Mbappe, Haaland - and even the ageing Cristiano Ronaldo this time - all produced a brace of goals again.

Yet Morocco, the USA, and Mexico are continuing to look probably the best teams so far, in terms of all-around cohesion and consistency.

And, luckily for us Fantasy managers, the unexpected closeness of most of the groups so far - with some of the bigger teams not starting strong and/or supposedly 'weaker' teams proving slightly more formidable than expected - means that we shouldn't see too many mass rotations in this 3rd Round of games. Only Mexico, the USA, Germany and Argentina have definitely secured first-place qualification already; most of the other teams could still theoretically finish as low as third, if the last batch of results goes against them. And the appeal of getting a - probably - weaker opponent in the opening knockout game is usually sufficient to make it quite a big deal even whether a team finishes in first or second place, let alone third (which could put you in a very nasty corner of the draw). So, almost everyone still has a lot to play for over these next four days of competition; and hopefully that means that we won't see the likes of Vini, Haaland, Mbappe, Kane, etc. being rested, as we have so often suffered in the past at this stage of the tournament.

This in turn means that we should be able to hang on to our Wildcards until later in the tournament. If we found that several of the top teams and players were already assured, or very nearly so, of qualifying top of their groups, we'd probably be seeing a risk of huge holes in our squads, and might feel we needed to use the Wildcard here in MatchDay 3. But with the likelihood of accumulating absences from injuries and suspensions in the later MatchDays, as well as the ever-present risk that unexpected eliminations can - probably will - put some huge dents in our squads, it is nice to be able to hang on to the Wildcard as long as possible in these tournaments, as a safety-net. Very often, it proves otiose, because of the increasingly large number of Free Transfers we're given in the later knockout rounds. But if a lot of things suddenly go very badly wrong for us, the Wildcard is very nice to have in such an emergency.

I also tend to feel that this probably isn't a great round for playing any of the 'bonus chips'. Some teams are going to be able to take it easy: we might not see Messi, Pulisic, or any of the popular German players, for example; or only for token run-outs, anyway. Most of the other games could prove to be quite nervy, with so much riding on them; the final round of the group phase tends to be quite low-scoring. And it just so happens that in quite a few of the groups, two of the strongest teams are matched together in the last game, further reducing the likelihood of a one-sided goalfest, and indeed making it difficult to anticipate some of the results altogether: Switzerland v Canada, Japan v Sweden, Norway v France, Uruguay v Spain, New Zealand v Belgium, Croatia v Ghana, and Colombia v Portugal are pretty tough to call, I think. So, I'm hanging on to my chips - even though this now means that I'll have to use one in every round of the knockout phase (as a result of a glitch in the FIFA website that wiped out my attempt to play the '12th Man' on Mbappe in the 2nd Round - gggrrrrr.....).

I noticed more maddening glitches with the web version of the FIFA Fantasy version today: it was freezing up and refusing to process transfers for a couple of hours this morning (though this was outside 'office hours' in Europe, where I imagine the game is based). All seems to be OK again now, thank heavens - a massive 12 hours before the next Round kicks off!

However, I would reiterate my warning about the vexing captaincy glitch in the FIFA game. I recently discovered that you can't switch your vice-captain directly to being your captain - you always need a third player that you can transfer the vice-captaincy to, before he becomes available to select as captain. Since the vice-captaincy is completely redundant in this game, the safest thing to do is place it on one of your players who has a game early in the MatchDay - so all of your other players will be available as potential captains, without the vice-captaincy getting in the way. (This is not a trivial problem. In MD2, I wound up with my vice-captaincy stuck on Nuno Mendes for the last few games, which meant I was unable to transfer my captaincy to him. I wouldn't have chosen to, since I'd already got good returns from Haaland and Messi, but.... he did come up with a 15-pointer, damn him!)

BEST OF LUCK, EVERYONE!!!

Another vexing flaw in the FIFA World Cup Fantasy game

 

I noted last week that among the many irritating shortcomings of the FIFA World Cup Fantasy game website is the inability to deselect your captain. However, I had thought this only a minor annoyance, since you can change your captain by selecting another player to replace the current incumbent.

But I've just discovered a further wrinkle to this - one which has the potential to be quite damaging. In fact, it is a huge bloody booby-trap in the game design!

The dratted game won't let you change your vice-captain into your captain (or vice versa).

And that is something you're quite likely to want to do. Especially if you have - reflexively, as a result of always naturally doing this in Fantasy Premier League and other such Fantasy games... - made your second-best player your vice-captain at the start of the MatchDay.

Again, it is possible to get around this. You have to appoint someone else as vice-captain, to 'free up' your current vice-captain as a potential captain selection. The problem here is that, later in the MatchDay, you might be running out of players you can transfer the vice-captaincy to (although the vice-captaincy is utterly otiose in this game, it won't let you transfer it to a player who's already played).

If Messi should have a poor game today, I find I'll have to transfer my vice-captaincy to Nuno Mendes, so that I can take a chance on Haaland with the captaincy. But if Haaland also disappoints, I won't then be able to try my luck with Nuno Mendes as well.

I'm annoyed with myself that I didn't realise this sooner. It is actually a pretty huge deal. Since the vice-captaincy is utterly irrelevant in this game (it is inactive, unless you fail to make any manual changes to your team during the course of the MatchDay - and who's going to do that??), except in this maddening obstruction that it creates in freely circulating the captain's armband, we must get it out of the way - by selecting a vice-captain who plays at the beginning of the MatchDay.

Also... I'm going to have to set an early alarm tomorrow, so that I can get up in time to move the captain's armband to Haaland if Messi has delivered only modest points. Damn, this game is exhausting....

Mr Fate dons his taunting-hat again...

 

I like Mikel Oyarzabal, I rate him very highly. And Spain, despite their flakey start to the tournament, are still one of my favourites to take the trophy (though it's a three-way battle with France and Germany, I feel).

So, I made the Basque forward one of my three picks up front in my MatchDay 1 squad. 

And he had a dog of a game, fluffing a number of decent chances as Spain were held to a goalless draw by lowly Cabo Verde. Oh, woe!

So, of course, I dropped him. And in the next game, against the much more formidable-seeming Saudi Arabia, he's on fire and notches a 13-pointer (despite being withdrawn at half-time). Bugger. There is a lot to be said for sticking with players - especially forwards - through one or two disappointing performances.

Well, I swapped him for Messi. So, that might still work out for me. But I'm not confident. Luck is not my friend. If the great Leo blanks in this one - I'm sorry, everyone, it was my fault: I must have jinxed him.

Hoping for THE WORST....

With the mercurial Frenchman looking bang-in-form, and with a tempting-looking fixture (though it might turn out not to be a stroll in the park...) against Iraq up next for France, I decided I wanted to use my '12th Man' booster chip on Kylian Mbappé in MatchDay 2.

Alas and alack, that selection was not 'saved' by the game! (I already inserted a brief gripe about this into my review of MatchDay 1 a couple of days ago.) 

It might be that I was merely flummoxed by the perversely idiotic game design. Although the final 'Confirm' button on the Team screen is large and prominent - it simply shouldn't be there, and so you don't look for it, don't notice it. Activating the chips (and selecting captain or vice-captain) is carried out through a completely separate pop-up window; and that process appears to have been fully completed and confirmed when you close that window. There shouldn't be any additional step required to 're-confirm' the selection you've just made. And, if there is, there should be a bloody prominent pop-up notice on screen alerting you to this fact - and there isn't.

But... I had already run into this problem with the captaincy, so I am pretty sure - 80% to 90% confidence - that I had 'confirmed' this chip selection on the Team screen too. And I had seen Mbappé appearing as the extra man on my MD2 teamsheet. But the next morning,... this chip activation had disappeared again! And, since the new MatchDay had started, it was too late for me to try to activate it again. (This too seems harsh, unnecessary. There is no need for chip activation to be 'timed out' like this; you should be able to activate them at any time during the MatchDay - so long as the relevant player or players haven't played their game yet.)  It thus seems horribly likely that the FIFA Fantasy site is subject to the same sort of gremlins that beset the Fantasy Premier League site, that occasionally (probably when site-traffic is peaking) it will glitch.... and just 'lose' apparently saved team selections.

Now, with such an over-abundance of booster chips in this game, and since I don't really fancy the Final as an attractive option for playing any of them (except possibly... the 'Maximum Captain'?), I am faced with having to play a chip in every round from here on.

What's more, I now find myself crossing my fingers for a poor performance from Mbappé, so that I won't be left regretting how much this glitch has harmed me. (One wouldn't want to wish injury on anyone. But... perhaps a little soreness in the calf that forces him to sit out this one game???)

The awful design of this Fantasy game has strangely worked out in my favour once already. In MatchDay 1, I somehow wound up with my captaincy on Oyarzabal before Havertz - and didn't notice (because the bloody game doesn't tell you who your captain is). I was fuming when the Spaniard missed multiple chances and returned a blank. But as it turned out, that left me free to move my captaincy to Haaland - who, of course, delivered a monster 17 points. If I'd started with the armband on Havertz, as I'd intended, I would certainly have stuck with his initial return of 13 points (26, when doubled for the captaincy), and would have missed out on 4 extra points. I very rarely get conspicuously lucky with any of these Fantasy games; but there I did.

It is inconceivable that Dame Fate should rescue me from disaster like that twice in succession. A 20-pointer from M. Mbappé is surely incoming....

[Well, damn, he did manage another brace of goals for a very useful 13-point haul. Not as bad as it might have been for me, but still rather galling. I now have to hope that I can do at least nearly as well as that, if not a little better, from playing the '12th Man' chip in one of the knockout rounds. Yes, unfortunately, since I don't fancy my chances with any of the chips during the final round of the group stage, I am now left having to use a chip in every round thereafter. There are too many chips in this game!]

A little bit of Zen (99)

 

"Intuition is cosmic fishing. You feel a nibble, then you've got to hook the fish."

Richard Buckminster Fuller

"We are all following hunches. We need to develop an intuition about which hunches are actually the good ones - hunches about hunches!"

GW

Thoughts on the World Cup 1st Round

It's that man again... 

So, the big names up front all came good straight away: nice early returns from Haaland, Mbappe, and Kane - and then dear old Leo outdoes them all!

There was also a strong argument for going for Vinicius Jnr, Havertz, Oyarzabal, Isak, Gyokeres, or Lautaro Martinez; only a couple of those promising forward prospects disappointed in the first game. In Fantasy Premier League, many of these players would be classified as 'midfielders', but in the FIFA game they're all 'forwards' - so, we are rather spoiled for choice. Any of these guys might have a huge game... or a sudden misfire; and there's certainly no way to predict who's going to produce the hugest haul of all. So, it's really just a lottery. 

But it definitely appears that the forward line is the place to concentrate most of our resources. Returns from midfield so far have been fairly disappointing. Only Morocco's Ismael Saibari and New Zealand's Elijah Just - and England's own Jude Bellingham! - look more like 'forwards', or at least attacking midfielders who could get amongst the goals regularly, in that position category. Until Lamine Yamal and Nico Williams come back into the fray - and Spain start getting their shit together - there's not a lot in midfield to tempt us to spend big bucks.

And the new additional points for 'tackles' and 'chances created' seem to have had little impact thus far. None of my selections seem to have earned extra points for this, anyway! And the dreadful FIFA website does not provide any information on these 'game actions': you can't check which players have done well under these metrics. As I'd anticipated, there are some vexing obscurities of interpretation and implementation around these supplementary points awards too. Do 'shots on target' for forwards include goals actually scored?? I would have thought not; but I didn't see Haaland have four non-successful attempts on goal in his game, yet he received 2 additional points under this heading. And I was especially galled that my Marcel Sabitzer didn't get at least an assist for the goal from his corner: does FIFA not allow corners to count as 'assists'?? (Frankly, I thought he might have been credited with the goal; his vicious inswinger looked like it was bound for the net anyway, and the slight deflection off the back of the Jordanian defender's neck was not material.) As with the 'shots on target' for forwards, there's no explanation as to whether 'chances created' includes chances converted (logically, you'd think not - since that would overlap with 'assists'; but the point ought to be made clear, and it hasn't been). And almost every corner creates a chance, surely? Again, I'm bummed that my Sabitzer didn't pick up 2 or 3 extra points for this!!

Also as I predicted last week, the extra point offered for goals from a free-kick looks as if it is going to be otiose. So far, we've seen only a handful of free-kicks awarded within shooting range, and they've all been driven tamely into the wall. There is a good chance that we won't see any free-kick goals in this tournament; it's certainly pretty unlikely that we'll see more than one from any one player - so, this points rule is of absolutely zero relevance in player selection.

A lot of the early leaders in World Cup Fantasy had Messi as their captain. That was utterly, utterly daft. Frankly, given the fact that he's only a week away from turning 39, and that the rest of the Argentine team doesn't really look all that good this year, and that he's been in 'semi-retirement' in the decidedly second-tier American MLS for the past three years,... there wasn't any compelling reason to take a chance on him in a Fantasy squad at all. No-one can seriously have expected that he'd be playing better than in the last World Cup! But even if you had taken that chance - out of sentiment - there was still no reason to be giving him the captain's armband.... after Havertz and Haaland and Mbappe had already delivered good double-digit scores. Everybody should have had at least one of those prime captaincy candidates playing earlier in the MatchDay; and, once they had delivered so well, they should have stuck with them. The same, of course, applies to anyone who gave the captaincy to Harry Kane. They might have got away with it this time; but to transfer the captaincy to Messi or Kane, when you already had 25 or 30 points or more in the bank from an earlier captain, was objectively idiotic.

I already commented the other day on how maddeningly badly designed the FIFA Fantasy website is, in regard to how absurdly fiddly it is to change your captaincy pick (and how nearly impossible it is to check who your captain is). I've just suffered a further huge disaster with it: I had tried to select Mbappe as my 12th Man - but the selection was 'lost'. I am tempted to just give up in a huff now.... The game design is just atrocious. There is a superfluous additional 'Confirm' button which is easily missed, because with things like the captaincy and the chips, you activate these through a separate pop-up window, and that 'action' seems to be already completed and confirmed when you exit that window. I'm not entirely sure whether the further 'Confirm' stage on the main team screen is also wonky; I was pretty sure I'd noticed that and remembered to hit it too - but the next morning, I found no Mbappe in my squad. The forums are awash with similar tales of woe.

It's also exasperating that there is no separate 'stats' page on the site. The only way to try to check stats is through the 'Transfers' page; but that, again, is incredibly fiddly and glitchy, and not built for searching. It is, for example, just about impossible to find options for the possible 'scouting bonus', because although you can select the listing to display according to the ownership percentage, you can only get a top-down or bottom-up arrangement; the best <5% men are somewhere in the middle of a list of 1,250 players - and the display (being one continuous list, with no page-breaks) will freeze, break down before you can scroll down anywhere near that far. So, the 'scouting bonus' candidates are effectively invisible, completely hidden from us. I must have a root around online to see if I can find some third-party stats resources to help with this.

Not that this would make a great deal of difference, I don't think. I observed in my World Cup Fantasy preview post last week that I thought the 'scouting bonus' was going to be too trivial, too rare and too uncertain, to be worth paying much attention to. I had 5 players who, I think, might have been eligible (I hadn't actually chosen them with this primarily in mind; I just happen to be an 'outside the box' thinker....); although 3 of them were displaying as 5.1%-owned by the end of the first MatchDay, and there is no way to check when they reached that level, and if they might have missed out on eligibility by the tightest of margins. As it happened, none of them scored enough points to earn the bonus, anyway - although I did pick up one 'scouting bonus' lift from Aaron Hickey.

The 'big news' of the tournament so far is that the 'minnow' teams are not to be lightly disregarded. Qatar, Haiti, and Saudi Arabia actually outplayed their more fancied opponents for much of their opening matches; Ivory Coast got a surprise win against Ecuador, and Congo and Cape Verde battled to well-deserved draws with two of the tournament favourites, Portugal and Spain, while two other strongly fancied sides, Holland and Brazil, very nearly got beaten by the slightly less illustrious Japan and Morocco. Even the teams that did end up taking a bit of a beating weren't completely overwhelmed, and managed to produce at least a few moments of danger themselves. Poor little Curacao too, who suffered the worst beating at the hands of Germany, at least managed to equalise in that game, and were actually on level terms for about a quarter of the match; the final scoreline was unduly harsh on them. Most of these smaller teams, I suspect, are ultimately going to be undone by a conspicuous weakness in one position (a lack of a reliable finisher upfront or a slightly flakey goalkeeper, etc...), or by shortcomings in stamina or self-belief, a little bit of a lack of nous in game-management: they are not going to be able to hang on to a result like the stronger, more experienced nations can. But they all look like they can play a bit of football: they have some technically gifted players, they can move the ball around well, and occasionally create some threat going forward. We might well get a few more 'upsets' in this tournament - at least in terms of favoured teams failing to keep an expected clean sheet, if not perhaps any surprise defeats (although that is something I'm sure we'd all love to see!).

The most exciting 'surprises', though, have been the USA and Australia - who we'd expected to be decent, but were far more than that, producing two of the best all-around team performances so far. And their young strikers, Falorin Balogun and Nestory Irankunda, look like they might be two of the tournament's breakout stars (adding to the already rather over-stocked roster of forwards we're interested in acquiring...).

The biggest disappointments of the first round have been Turkiye and Switzerland - two nations who've been fairly consistently strong for the past couple of decades or so, and, on paper, look to have enough talent to go maybe as far as the quarter-finals (they were two of my 'dark horse' tips last week); but they both started out with very flat performances that make you wonder if they'll even qualify out of their groups.

Brazil and Spain were arguably even worse; certainly the shortfall from people's hopes and expectations for them was greater! Brazil are lacking balance, and look very weak in defence and in central midfield; Vini and Cunha are always going to be dangerous, but I doubt if that's going to be enough to carry them very far unless Carlo Ancelotti can quickly sort out their numerous other deficiencies. (At the moment, I quite fancy Scotland to be able to put one over on them....) Spain, without their two talsimanic young wingers, were utterly toothless; and Oyarzabal looked woefully out of form; as did Rodri, who, after two years disrupted by injuries, currently looks a shadow of his former self (I'd be starting Zubimendi ahead of him in the next game). I think they have much more potential to turn things around than Brazil do, especially if Yamal and Williams are soon back to their best. (And the superstitious will claim that their opening-match hiccup is actually a good omen for them, since they lost to Switzerland in their first game in 2010, but went on to sweep all before them....)

Most people found Holland and Portugal and Belgium rather disappointing too; but, frankly, they were a bit better than I'd expected. These are teams whose key players are aging badly, and I don't think they have enough strength in depth to go very far in the knockouts. They might even find qualification a little bit of a struggle.

And I'm not yet getting too excited about England's promising start. Yes, it is nice to get a comfortable win over a classy opponent; and that was one of the better performances we've seen from our national team in a major tournament in a long time. It was reassuring that Tuchel was able to make tactical tweaks at half-time which galvanized us into a much more effective second-half performance. But I have misgivings about why we were so bad in the first-half, and why it took until half-time to start sorting any of that out. And even in the second-half, when, with the benefit of a huge psychological lift from Bellingham's goal out of nothing barely 90 seconds after the restart, we completely dominated for 15 or 20 minutes,... we didn't actually manage to create that many clearcut chances, and didn't score. I thought Kane, Bellingham, and Anderson were decent, but hardly outstanding; almost everyone else was frankly a little flat - and I'm concerned at how easily we gave up a couple of goals. Also, Kane and Rice appeared to be limping afterwards - which is a tad concerning.

And how differently might that game have gone if Kane hadn't been given a second chance with that early penalty??  This was a vivid example of how one refereeing decision - a VAR decision! - can have a huge impact on the momentum of a match, and produce a huge swing in the Fantasy points allocations. Big Harry was on that knife-edge between 2-goal hero and penalty-missing chump. And, frankly, the decision felt somewhat unjust: it wasn't one of Harry's better penalties, and Livakovic pulled off a very good save. I suppose it was the 'correct' decision, because Gvardiol had encroached very slightly - and that encroachment was actually of material consequence, since he reached the rebound first to clear it. However, Nico O'Reilly also looked like he was encroaching very slightly on the other side of the box. And ordinarily, such small incursions are ignored - otherwise we'd probably see almost every penalty getting retaken multiple times. And the decision that Livakovic was 'off his line', I just don't get: all the stills I've seen show the back of his right heel still clearly in contact with the goal-line - which is good enough. I think our Harry got very, very lucky with that call. But maybe that's going to be a good omen for England in this tournament....

FIFA World Cup Fantasy is already starting to piss me off...

Is Haaland captain? It's anybody's guess! 

The tournament itself is shaping up just fine. Some of the 'minnows' have proved to be quite formidable after all. Some of the more fancied teams - Brazil, Switzerland, Holland, Spain - have stumbled embarrassingly out of the starting-blocks (and I'd bet that at least one or two from France, Argentina, England, and Portugal may do likewise!). Some of the more 'mid-tier' contenders like Morocco, the USA, and Australia have produced the kind of performances that make you start wondering how far they could go in the competition. And we've already seen some absolutely cracking goals. These first five days have really given us everything we could have wished for.

It's just a pity that visiting the FIFA website to check how we're getting on in the Fantasy game is such an utter pain-in-the-arse.

The UI design is beyond-awful, really some of the most perverse and inadequate I've ever seen. Why is the 'business area' of the display - where you're actually going to view your team and make changes to it - restricted to this tiny 'letterbox' that's only about 25=30% of the total screen area? And why is even that extensively cluttered and obscured with overlarge action buttons and annoying pop-ups? Because it was designed by cretins, seems to be the only possible answer.

Also, although order of appearance during the MatchDay is crucial for deciding who to put in the original starting eleven and when you might want to make substitutions, you lose the ability to select this as the main 'player attribute' to display when the MatchDay is in progress; it's there when you're making selections for the next round, but disappears when showing you the current MatchDay - so, you're left having to scroll through the fixtures at the bottom of the page to remind yourself who's playing when. Here, the default 'player attribute' is 'scheduled opponent': that I think I can remember; but the exact order and kick-off times of the games I need to constantly double-check. Why would anyone do something this daft and annoying???

The thing that's vexing me most is how bloody fiddly it is to select your captain (and vice-captain). Instead of having a small pop-up screen with just that option available on a right-click over the player, you get a huge, screen-filling pop-up that initially shows you almost nothing beyond the player's name. You have to scroll down to find the options. And often the scrolling function seems to freeze; so, you have to refresh the page in order to be able to do anything. And even worse, there's no reassuring confirmation of the choice that you've made; the pop-up screen promptly disappears again.

That fiddliness in the selection procedure is, in fact, only the second most annoying thing about this UI. The most annoying thing is that it's impossible to see who your captain is. For some unfathomable reason, the designers of this UI have chosen to make the 'captain' (and 'vice-captain') symbol into one of a plethora of tiny, almost featureless grey discs denoting various aspects of player status: a collection of obscure symbols, picked out against a light grey background in thin lines that are only a slightly darker grey. Even with the display size on my laptop screen ramped up to 200%, all of these symbols are utterly indistinguishable from each other. Again, it is a basic rule of UI design that icons conveying important information like this should be large enough to see and recognise easily, and clearly differentiated from each other by having distinctive shapes and/or distinctive colours and/or being placed in different parts of the relevant display frame. These bastards are all tiny and round and grey, and all in the bottom left of the player panels. It is utterly fucking ridiculous.

And oh, it does get even a little worse than that: when you click on a player to view his large pop-up details panel, it doesn't actually tell you whether you currently have him selected as captain or vice-captain; you just have to infer that from the fact that these action buttons are now 'faded out', presumably indicating that these options are not available to you. (But that could be because the player has already played his game, and thus can't have the captaincy transferred to him, rather than because you've already placed the armband with him. God help you if you've forgotten who your captain and vice-captain are - because there really doesn't seem to be any way to find out, other than by making the selection all over again.) And.... you don't seem to be able to deselect a captain by clicking on the player; you can only do that by appointing another captain in his place. Could they have thought of any way of making this more clunky and user-unfriendly???

I've been particularly annoyed about this over the past 24 hours, because I thought I had my captaincy on Havertz - who'd returned a very nice 13 points in the demolition of Curacao. But it seems the armband was with Oyarzabal - who had a dog of a game the next day. It would be very unlike me to make a mistake with the order of matches (I am quite sure I had planned to move my captaincy, if necessary, from Havertz to Oyarzabal, and then from Oyarzabal to Haaland); so, I am now worrying if this FIFA website is prone to the same sort of glitches we occasionally find in FPL, where team data suddenly gets lost or scrambled. I hope not; it is conceivable, I think, that I blundered because of the fiddliness of making the selection, and the near-impossibility of checking what selection I'd made.

And yes, oh dear, the next mistake definitely was my own fault. This morning, having reached the point where my original eleven starters had all played, I could cast out the low returners to make way for my subs. Yesterday, of course, I had been fuming to discover that Oyarzabal was - unexpectedly and unwelcomely - my captain; but acting in haste this morning, that unhappy fact again slipped my mind: I moved out all of my 2-point and 3-point players - not realising that bloody Oyarzabal was one of them; his total was displaying as 4 points, because of the phantom captaincy.

Hopefully, I can redeem myself with a decent captaincy return from Erling Haaland (or Marcel Sabitzer or Nuno Mendes...). But I've thrown away a least 1 point with this unfortunate Oyarzabal cock-up - and possibly a lot more through missing the expected captaincy return on Havertz. (Despite all this woe, I'm actually having a very decent MatchDay 1. I usually get off to a terrible start in Fantasy competitions, and often fail to make up the lost ground despite a much stronger performance from there on. This time.... it's looking like I could actually do pretty well overall, if I can keep this early form going. Mustn't get the hopes up too much! This is a game that punishes hope!)

[It looks as though some of these unfortunate UI problems might have been addressed already. The 'letterboxing' issue seems to have disappeared now. And the captain/vice-captain symbols are now a little more distinct, and displaying at the top right of the player box rather than the bottom left. And I have found that by cranking my display size up to the max 250%, I can just about make them out now; but only these two symbols, not the welter of other ones, they're still an indistinguishable mystery to me.]

A little bit of Zen (98)

 

"Every beginning contains the seed of its own ending. Enjoy the things that are, when they are. Do not regret them, when they are not."

GW

The World Cup will be over before we know it, it will go by in a flash. We must try to give it our full attention while it lasts, try to sup every possible drop of joy out of it.

Fantasy World Cup - a lightning guide

 

The rapid onset of the World Cup this year (so soon after the conclusion of the domestic European season...) has caught me rather on the hop.

But here are a few - hopefully useful - pointers on the official FIFA Fantasy game for the tournament (not well promoted: only a few hundred thousand sign-ups so far!), which you can enter here.

As usual, the best free resources seem to be on Fantasy Football Scout, which has both a concise summary of the rules (much clearer and more accessible than those on the actual FIFA site, which you really have to dig around for!), and also line-up predictions (though, take these with a grain of salt - I suspect they're going to be well off the mark with some of them; but it's always impossible to know what selections a coach will make for the opening game). And this is the best injury update resource I've found so far, on Rotowire.

The scoring system is similar to, but crucially a little different from what we're used to with the Fantasy Premier League game. Most notably, all positions get an additional point for a goal, one more than FPL gives us.. There are also additional points for midfielders for every 3 tackles made (successfully, I assume - although the wording of the rule omits to specify this: this is yet another area where there's going to be a lot of obscurity around how Opta is choosing to interpret certain 'game actions') and every 2 chances created (again, no specificity on whether this only applies to 'potential assists' or can include earlier contributions to a move than culminates in an attempt on goal) - so, 'busy' midfielders could well rack up more points than we usually see in FPL; but it will often be something of a mystery how they earned them! Forwards get an extra point for every 2 shots on target - which should be a bit more obvious and straightforward to keep track of. It might be worth keeping an eye out for eager strikers who have a pop every time they get anywhere near the goal, even if their conversion rate isn't great. But there are no points here for 'defensive contributions' - the unwelcome innovation we've had to wrap our heads around in FPL this year. So, it's probably going to make sense to prioritise attacking players, midfielders especially, rather than defenders.

Oh, also, we're spared the vexing randomness of FPL's 'bonus points': none of that nonsense in the FIFA game.

There's also an additional point for a goal scored from a direct free-kick. This is a nice bonus, but probably not something that makes it worth targeting set-piece specialists - unless they're already worth having for their all-around game contributions. It just won't happen often enough to have any significant impact.

I have a similar feeling about the so-called 'scouting bonus': the possibility of 2 extra points if a player of yours scores >4 points in a match while he is owned by less than 5% of managers in the game. This was an intriguing new idea trialled in last summer's Club World Cup fantasy game. And it worked better in that, because although there were fewer teams, there was a generally higher level of quality - so, even some of the low-owned players were still pretty good. In this tournament, I doubt if any of the sub-5% players will be worth much, and it's almost certainly going to be more valuable to concentrate on players who give you a high chance of a big return - rather than players who give you only the modest chance of a fortuitous bonus. Also, of course, it's just so bloody obscure; it's very difficult to check up on a player's current level of ownership, and even more difficult to anticipate how that might change before the next Matchday deadline. If you obsess over trying to find these 'scouting bonus' opportunities, I suspect you're often going to be frustrated in bringing in a player at 4.5% ownership and finding that he's apparently nudged above 5% in the last hour before the deadline. [I think that happened to me with THREE of my 1st Round selections! I wasn't even targeting players at this level of ownership particularly; it was just fortuitous that I was looking for some slightly outside the box prospects, and happened to pick a few that had been ignored by the masses.... I'm pretty sure they were all down between 4.5% and 5% ownership when I picked them, but by early in the MatchDay had all risen to 5.1% or 5.2%; I don't know if that rendered them 'ineligible' for the bonus - because they didn't score enough points to qualify for it anyway!]

And, of course, we again have what has become a standard feature in FIFA and EUFA Fantasy games, 'active substitutions' - and a switchable captaincy. You can manually swap out a player who's given you a disappointing return - or transfer the captain's armband to another player - after each batch of games in the 'MatchDay' (a 'MatchDay' being all the games in one Round of the competition), so long as the new player you select hasn't yet played his game in that 'MatchDay'. (Actually, in this tournament, it appears that you can make such changes continuously, at any time, not just between the end of one day's games and the beginning of the next's; in past FIFA Fantasy games, such changes were 'locked out' while each batch of daily games was in progress.)  [And you'd think that this attitude should extend to allowing you to transfer in and out players who haven't yet played during the course of the MatchDay; but alas NO, there is a deadline of the first MatchDay kickoff for finalising your squad for the entire Matchday. Boo!]

I'm always saying that, even in FPL, you can't afford to go light on your Bench; but in international tournaments like this, with these 'active substitutions' as part of the gameplay, the Bench is part of your playing squad every time, and ideally your Bench players should be just as strong - or even stronger than - your original 'starting eleven'. You are going to have make use of at least 1 or 2 of those Bench players in every MatchDay, and usually - quite often, anyway - you'll need all of them.

The great dilemma with this 'active substitutions' rule, of course, occurs when you have a player who's made a decent score - 4, or 5, or 6, say - and you have to decide whether to 'stick or twist', whether to take the chance on dropping him for a substitute who could do better, but might well do worse. What makes this conundrum all the more challenging, especially in the first round or two, when we're still figuring out how the slightly unfamiliar scoring system is going to skew things from what we're more used to in FPL, and we don't know which teams and which players are most in form, and we don't know if it's shaping up to be a high-scoring tournament or not,... is that we have little idea what we should be satisfied with, what a decent 'above average' score for a player in each position is likely to be; even assessing that is a bit of a shot in the dark, at first. 

The key impact of this unusual rule in international tournament fantasy games is that: a) you have to try to spread your squad out over as many of the days in each MatchDay as possible; and b) you have to remember to arrange the starting eleven not in terms of what you imagine the strength of their points prospects is (as you would in Fantasy Premier League) but simply according to the date of their next game (you can select this as the key feature of your squad players to display under their names when reviewing your MatchDay seleections): the players playing last should be on the Bench, so that you'll be free to bring them in for any of the starting eleven who gave a disappointing return; and it's nice to have all four bench players having games later than any of the original starters, so you can wait to see which of them did worst for you.

A final - cruel, unnecessary - quirk of this rule is that regular automatic substitutions do in theory exist; but in practice, they don't, because the facility is suspended if you make any of these 'active' changes during a MatchDay. This is particularly galling if you forget to - or are unable to - swap out a captain who unexpectedly didn't play; if you made any active substitutions, your vice-captain pick won't automatically take his place, and you will be left without any double points from the captaincy for that round. Don't get caught out by this!

IMPORTANT ADDENDUM: Yikes, I've only just noticed, half-way through the group phase that there is also a maddening wrinkle in the captaincy selection. You can't deselect your captain or vice-captain (you can only those selections by transferring the nomination to another player to take the place of one of them); and thus you can't readily swap your captain and vice-captain around; you have to move the vice-captaincy to a third player, to free up your current vice-captain for promotion to the captaincy. This could become problematic towards the end of the MatchDay, when you might run out of players you could still move your vice-captaincy to - or you would at least be left with your final player saddled with the vice-captaincy, unable to assume the captaincy for you (which would be galling if all your previous captaincy selections had all let you down, and your remaining player would have been your last chance for a decent haul from the armband). The only way to avoid this hassle is to select a vice-captain who will play right at the start of the MatchDay - so he won't be restricting your options of who you can make captain later on.

In many ways, a tournament fantasy game like this is even more of a lottery than one based on a full domestic league season; especially in this biggest of all football tournaments. There are just far more outstanding players to choose from - and any of them might have a stunning tournament,.... or an absolute stinker. And, of course, over a long season, we have plenty of opportunity to evaluate everyone's form and gradually improve our squads. Over this much shorter run of games, it's going to be difficult to recover from some 'bad' early choices and disappointing early returns.

In the group stages, I think it's likely to be better to concentrate on teams that enjoy the most mismatched fixtures, rather than on the biggest teams and the star players. With all due respect to Iran, Iraq, Haiti, Cape Verde, Curacao, Panama, Jordan, Qatar, Saudi Arabia, and Uzbekistan (they at least have quite a decent defence; but I doubt if that can save them from a last-place finish),.... they ought to be pushovers for most of their opponents; and it is worth targeting players drawn against them in the group stage, rather than just focusing on the big-name players. [OK, I take that back - well, partly. Qatar and Haiti actually look more than half-decent. And that is the magic of the World Cup, that some of the small teams will prove capable of the occasional surprise performance or result. You can't expect that sort of resilience from all of them, though: I doubt if Panama, Jordan, Curacao and Cape Verde will have much in their locker.]

Once we get to the knockout stages, the bigger names may start to shine; and we should have a little more idea about how well they and their teams are performing. While some teams come hot out of the blocks at a tournament (especially if they've got an easy first opponent!), most take at least one game to start finding their feet, and some only start to build momentum as they progress into the knockout stages. (For this reason, I'd be very wary of playing any of the bonus chips on Matchday 1.) But also, after the group stage, the level of competition takes a massive step up, and the results of games become far more unpredictable. (I was just playing around with the bracket, and found that even in the 'Round of 16', almost every match-up I expected to eventuate was looking like a bit of a toss-up! And quite a few of the 'Round of 32' games were looking like they might not be entirely straightforward, either.)  Although the number of transfers increases significantly for each later round, you do have to be very careful to 'hedge your bets' - to avoid taking too many players from a small number of teams; you have to try to ensure that even if you bet wrong on the outcome of every game in a knockout round, you won't need to take 'hits' to rebuild a full squad for the next round. (You do that by taking players from both sides in as many games as possible, especially the games whose results are looking harder to call.)

And of course, just as with FPL and any Fantasy game of this kind, you must avoid getting sentimental about your favourite players, or your home country. Haaland might be the best striker in the world, but Norway are not a very good team all around and might struggle to get the ball to him enough for him to be very productive. England and Portugal don't look - to me - to have quite enough strength in depth to be serious contenders; and they have quite tough opening groups - so, I wouldn't be taking any of their players just yet.

For the chips, as I just said above, I would avoid risking any of them in Matchday 1, as there is just too much uncertainty about who's going to be playing, and how well. I'd say the final round is also probably best avoided, and perhaps also the semi-final round, as these tend to be quite closely matched and cagey affairs, often quite low-scoring. There is a strong case for playing the powerful 'bonus chips' - Maximum Captain (which gives you the captain's double points for whoever is your highest scoring player) and 12th man (an additional player added to your squad for one Matchday, without any of the usual restrictions on budget or country quota) for one of the group games, in which we're likely to see the biggest scorelines - and you might want to hazard one of them in Matchday 1. I think the 'Round of 32' could also work; as indeed could Matchday 3, at the end of the group stage, where the Maximum Captain might be particularly useful, given the unfortunate uncertainties about how motivated teams will be, and how many of their top players will even get minutes if qualification is already assured.

If all the top nations are safely qualified after two games, and thus likely to field their 'B teams' for the final match, that could be a prime occasion to resort to the Wildcard chip. But, of course, it can also be useful to hang on to that for dealing with a possible emergency later in the tournament - if you suddenly get a lot of injuries or suspensions, as well as having wrongly predicted which teams were going to survive into the subsequent round. This could be a further reason for avoiding the big-name players in the early rounds; if you focus on players from more mid-level nations, those nations are quite likely to have qualification still in doubt going into MatchDay 3, and thus will still probably field a full-strength team in the last game - while Kane, Mbappe, Ronaldo etc. are likely to get the day off.

The Qualification Bonus chip (2 additional points for every player who plays in a winning knockout game - even if only for 1 minute!) is probably best used in the Round of 32, because the outcomes at that point should be mostly more predictable, and you'll have been able to optimise your team for the fixtures with unlimited transfers after the group stage, and you can hedge to some extent by spreading your selections across more teams (even if you suffer one or two nasty surprises in the results, it won't make too much of a dent in your overall return from the chip).

The unfortunate complication FIFA is foisting on us is that there is also going to be a 'Mystery Booster' - an additional bonus chip which will only become available for the knockout rounds; and they're not telling us what it is yet. Having 5 chips to cram into 8 Matchdays - in effect, only 5 or 6, as the beginning and end of the tournament are much less promising for them - is already bothersomely cluttered, without the additional aggravation of not even knowing what one of those chips is. Many managers in the game, I'm sure, are going to feel overwhelmed by too much choice, and will end up playing most of these chips more or less randomly. But careful planning in how to deploy these chips could afford a significant advantage; so, don't let irritation at FIFA's muddled game design lead you into rash choices with this.

As for the tournament itself....

Switzerland (who have been blessed with by far the easiest-looking group), the USA (who are a pretty decent team, and should get something of a lift from playing on home soil), Turkiye, Morocco, Japan and Senegal are my 'dark horse' picks - not prospects to win the tournament, but capable of going a lot deeper into it than most people have imagined.

I am anticipating a win for Spain, although it could be a very close-run battle with France - and I fear we might have a 'premature final' if they meet in the same half of the draw. Brazil, Argentina, and Germany can never be discounted, but I feel they don't look quite strong enough this year, and will need a few breaks to go their way. Belgium and the Netherlands (and perhaps England and Portugal too), I expect to crash out quite early this year.

BEST OF LUCK, EVERYONE!!!!

Even if the FIFA Fantasy game is a bit of a mess in some ways, we should be in for a feast of football. Enjoy!!!

Well, that was QUICK....

 

The advent of the World Cup nearly took me by surprise this year!

With the expanded format, I suppose it's starting about a week earlier than usual - after our domestic season, with its many 'international break' interruptions, now lingers a week or so longer than it generally did in the past... and we have European Finals extending into the week beyond that. We've had less than two weeks' break from football: barely any time for the participating teams to get in any warm-up friendlies (England's second one isn't until the day before the tournament officially begins!).

And yes, the opening games are kicking off on a Thursday this year (for the first time ever??) - what's up with that??!!

So, damn, we're barely more than two days away from the greatest sporting event in the world getting under way again. And we Fantasy Football enthusiasts have really had next-to-no-time to get ready for this. I am in a frantic rush today to put together my initial squad for the official FIFA World Cup Fantasy Game.

I am excited, yes - but also a little trepidatious. Trying to follow the unfolding drama from a timezone where most of the games take place in the middle of the night is going to be a royal pain-in-the-behind.

How will England play?

Given the squad we now have, the formation and 'best lineup' seem fairly obvious, incontrovertible: the side picks itself. Pretty much everyone is expecting England to look something like the team above during this World Cup. 

But... Tuchel likes 'surprises'; and I think - I fear - he may have a few in store for us.

This wouldn't be a bad team, by any means. If it works, it should be well capable of progressing far into the tournament, maybe even winning it. It has good balance, good pace, and a fair amount of experience - despite the low average age.

Reece James can readily invert into a holding role in the middle, as he so often has for Chelsea this year (although Tuchel, in the past, has scoffed at the idea of him being a 'midfielder'; I hope he's been convinced otherwise now), which would allow Declan Rice to move further forward to support the attack. Harry Kane is likely to drop back into the '10' space, or even a bit deeper (though I doubt if he'll retreat all the way back to his defensive line, in the manner of the later Toni Kroos, as we've often seen from him at Bayern this year), allowing Jude Bellingham to play a little ahead of him as a 'false 9', or to roam freely wherever he will to pick up the ball and encouraging Rashford or Saka to drift into the central space. In theory, I think that could work very nicely.

However, Morgan Rogers is such a 'golden boy' of Tuchel's that I think he will be shoehorned into the starting eleven somehow. Letting him come in off the left-wing, in place of Rashford, would perhaps make the most sense, as that is how he's mostly played at Villa this season. But I think Tuchel may fancy him in the No. 10 slot, and keep Bellingham in reserve as a 'super-sub' (and I'm not sure how well Jude will take that; he does have a bit of an ego on him!). There is also a possibility that John Stones may be favoured over Ezri Konsa, for his experience. Again, I think that's non-ideal. Konsa has played well enough to have earned a regular start, and I feel we ought to be concentrating on building up his partnership with Guehi (they have played remarkably little together as yet). And I suppose there's an outside chance that Gordon might be preferred to Rashford on the left, though this seems very unlikely to me; Rashford's recent form should guarantee him the start (while Gordon's club form this year frankly makes his inclusion in the squad at all highly questionable).

There is one further possible variation, which I'd approve of, but which I fear Tuchel may consider 'too risky'. That would be to designate Kane openly as the 'No. 10' and play Ollie Watkins ahead of him as the central striker. I think that might work even better; although I'd be loathe to sacrifice Bellingham to facilitate this.

This is pretty much the formation and approach I would have favoured. I have been saying for a decade now that Harry Kane is really more of a 'No. 10' than he is a 'No. 9' (we are spoiled that he's so good in both roles), and that we need to play him deeper to get the most out of his exquisite passing. And I really like the idea of playing another forward ahead of him, to give him more freedom to wander around the pitch. And I'd like to try playing Bellingham deeper also, alongside the pivot (I'd happily sacrifice Declan Rice for that; great though he is for Arsenal, I think he's entirely expendable for England). Bellingham is a capo carismatico, an inspirational figure who lifts all those around him; and he has that magical ability to come up with a game-changing moment out of nothing. We need him on the pitch.

I would have fancied playing narrower wide attackers: Eze and Palmer flanking Bellingham or Kane. The amount of rotation and creative passing you could have got from that combination of front players might have been breathtaking. 

But I can see that this is a team built for Harry Kane. And the one asset our Harry has always lacked is pace; so, he needs to be supported by very quick wide players who can break down the flanks to try to produce crosses or cutbacks for him, or run through the middle on to the long through-balls he can play from deeper in the midfield.

[Just before the tournament started, Conor McAinsh of Football Meta, one of the best analysis channels on Youtube, dropped this video that goes into a bit more detail about how Tuchel wants England to operate - but essentially affirms my outline above.]

This, I fear, may be the set-up's most dangerous weakness as well as its main strength. This system could work so well with Harry Kane; but I'm not sure how it will function without him. And we really need Harry at his best to get the most out of this. And there is a danger that, after such a long season with Bayern, he may be a bit rundown physically and mentally - a bit knackered. Harry, alas, has never really 'turned up' for us in a major tournament yet. (Yes, he's banged in a decent number of goals against very soft group opponents. But he's looked increasingly anonymous as the tournaments have progressed - often leading to calls in the press for him to be dropped. And this time.... we don't have a soft group.) If that happens again, if he's operating substantially below his peak - or he picks up an injury and isn't available at all - I don't know who else can step up and lead this team. I rather fear things might all unravel rather quickly if Big H isn't on top of his game. So,.... let's hope that he is.

Come on, England!

A little bit of Zen (97)

 

“If the doors of perception were cleansed, every thing would appear to man as it is, Infinite. For man has closed himself up, till he sees all things thro' narrow chinks of his cavern.”

William Blake  -  'The Marriage of Heaven and Hell"

The story of MY season - 2025/26

 

A couple of days ago, I did a rather full review of the season as a whole, as it panned out for FPL. But I suppose I should attempt some sort of summary of how things went for me as well, as I did last year. Of course, my season was actually derailed right at the start, when FPL's cranky website decided to 'forget' my password and lock me out of my account in Gameweek 2 (not the first time this has happened; actually, I think it's now at least the third time in 7 or 8 years...). But I continued to follow the game closely and to make weekly selections; and from about Gameweek 10 onwards, I actually kept a strict record of what my team would have been, and how many points it would have been getting. And I've already done waypoint analyses of how things were going for me at about the one-third and two-thirds points of the season.

To try to keep this a bit more concise than it was last year, I'll frame this review in terms of my recent analysis of what really makes the difference in FPL performance - just as I did a week or so ago with my survey of the performance of this year's global champion, Erik Ibsen.

Did I get off to a 'flying start'?  No, emphatically not (although I did have a slightly less awful opening gameweek than Erik Ibsen!). I very rarely do. I tend to take a few too many chances with my initial selection, and am usually made to suffer for it. I have observed that, if you are to have any hope of finishing the season near the top of the global rankings, you really need to be in the top 500,000, or at least getting pretty close to that, by about Gameweek 5 or 6. Erik Ibsen managed that, despite his dreadful start. I was getting there... but then had a really dreadful Gameweek 5 as well; and that pretty much killed my season, in terms of having any chance of a really high rank finish.

Was I lucky with my captaincy picks?  Not especially; fairly average, I would say: 420 points in total (including the Triple Caps) - 191 less than Erik Ibsen! I did pretty well backing Haaland early on; and got a very nice 28-point return from Daniel Munoz in Gameweek 12. I also picked up a few big returns from Harry Wilson, Bruno Fernandes, Jeremy Doku, and Casemiro. But I also suffered an awful lot of blanks; I seemed to fall into a bad rut of backing Igor Thiago, Antoine Semenyo or Bryan Mbeumo in all the weeks in which they did nothing!

Was I heavily hit by injuries?  Well, not as much as in some previous years, but... I still ended up having to use 13 hits over the season. And, given that we got given an extra 4 Free Transfers for AFCON in December, that in effect equates to 17 in a normal season - which is on the high side. A few of those extra transfers were purely elective, tactical gambles on better players; but the great majority of them were forced by injury. (Again, Erik bloody Ibsen managed to sail through the season without needing to spend points for a single additional transfer!)

Did I luck into any players who happened to produce just a few really huge scores?  Not really. I missed out on Phil Foden's brief bonanza! I give myself some credit for promptly getting on Patrick Dorgu, Harry Wilson, Jeremy Doku, Casemiro, and Rayan Cherki when they hit hot streaks (but, apart from Wilson, those were all very short-lived); I was mostly on Semenyo at the right times too; and I think I was right to keep the faith with Igor Thiago (he was actually my second-highest returning player across the season; and I think possibly the only one I hung on to all the way through). But I was very slow to get on Bruno Fernandes, and missed out entirely on the hot spells from Bruno Guimaraes and Joao Pedro. I also failed to bring Gabriel back in after his spell of injury, which probably cost me quite dearly. And - although I am an habitual sceptic about David Raya as an FPL prospect (or any keeper from a top club), I should probably have brought him in for the last part of the season. (I just wasn't anticipating - who was, really?? - that Arsenal would grind out that series of back-to-back clean sheets on the final run-in!!)

Did I get good returns from my chips?  Er, NO. This was probably my biggest disaster of the season. My Triple Captain picks were both a complete bust: I went for Haaland in GW13, when he notoriously blanked against struggling Leeds (leading FPL conspiracy theorists to speculate that he'd gone soft on this opponent because his dad used to play for them). I punted the second on Jurrien Timber in Double Gameweek 26, but he blanked in both games and picked up a booking in the second!

My first Bench Boost, which I couldn't find a suitable opportunity to use until very late in the window, Gameweek 18, was an absolute disaster: I had two non-starters, and a bunch of players who returned very disappointingly, so I got almost nothing from it at all. The second in Double Gameweek 33 went only very slightly better; I was again undone by a surprise no-show from Joao Pedro and a few blanks among the 'starting eleven' - and I came up frustratingly just shy of a ton for the week.

My Free Hits at least went reasonably well. The first, in Gameweek 17, yielded me a modest but worthwhile 12 points above the global average. The second one saw me nicely through the speedbump of Blank Gameweek 34 with a pretty decent score, 28 points above the wretched global average.

But yes, it was kind of a solid, plodding performance. No big weekly scores, no long runs of form from any player, rather too many hopeful bets that didn't work out; a very mixed bag from my captaincy picks, and bugger-all from most of my chips. I would have ended up with something in the low to mid-2.100s, I think: my worst season ever! But, since everyone seems to have been 250-300 points below their typical level this year (and I suspect that the 'global average' might have been down by even more than that: if you subtract the free extra points we all got from the new 'defensive points' rule - about 160, in my case - it was the lowest-scoring FPL season in about 15 years!!), that's really a pretty respectable total.

You need some fat slices of luck to do much better than that; and I didn't get any of those this year!!

Oh well - maybe next season will be kinder to me....

Worthy winners?

Arsenal, I would say, came out as worthy but dull winners of the Premier League title this year. 

And I'm not at all an Arsenal 'hater'. In fact, I have quite a soft spot for the club - primarily because they often played such lovely football during the peak Wenger era. I suspect that a large part of the widespread antipathy - or at least, lack of enthusiasm - for Arsenal's win this year stems from the starkness of that contrast. Arsenal suffered a long period without major 'success' in Wenger's later years; but they still played some of the most attractive football in the Premier League. This year they've returned to the top of the heap - without entertaining anyone. Compared to the great Wenger teams - heck, even compared to this team two or three years ago - this year's Arsenal were often just painful to watch.

And also, frankly, they did win the title somewhat by default. Their final total of 85 points is the lowest for the champions since Leicester's surprise everyone-else-was-crap-that-year win in 2016; in some recent years that might not even have been good enough for second place. And their haul of just 71 goals - barely two-thirds of the record total City set in 2018 - is really pitiful. All of their expected rivals - City, Liverpool, and Chelsea - had severely disappointing seasons; that was a huge factor in their success.

These are introvertible facts. But I don't want to be completely dismissive of their achievement. They have deserved their success. They have shown tremendous organisation, determination, team spirit. It has been impressive to see how often they were able to doggedly grind out results, even in games where they hadn't played that well; that kind of resilience is a true hallmark of champions. (And they did often seem to play much brighter, more adventurous football in their Champions League games!)

But there have been a lot of negative aspects to the way Arsenal have played this season, which have alienated most neutral football fans from them, and rather taken the gloss off their triumph. For me, it's not the over-reliance on mauling at set-pieces (or the undue tolerance referees have been showing them in regard to this), or the numerous other 'dark arts' they've cultivated to try to eat time off the clock, or the fact that in general the officiating breaks seem to have been almost all going their way this year - irksome as these things have been, I do not think these are most people's main 'problem' with the Arsenal title win; they're not my main gripe, anyway. Rather, it's the general style of play, the Arteta philosophy that's so unsatisfying about this year's Arsenal - the excessive prioritization of 'control' which seems to stifle individual creativity. 

Odegaard - when he has played - has increasingly been getting stick from his own fans for passing the ball sideways too often and not producing as many attacking contributions as in the past; but that's obviously how he's been told to play. Saka has suffered the same sort of drop-off in his attacking output; and when he, or Trossard or Eze or Martinelli, do occasionally cut inside and have a pop at goal from around the edge of the box,.... you sense that they're impulsively 'going off script', and that Mikel doesn't really like it,... even if it's saved him the game.

It is alarming to me, too, that the Champions tend to set the zeitgeist that will mould the rest of the league's attitudes in coming seasons. In a year in which defences have mostly been decisively on top, and attacking returns constrained (it didn't help that so many of the best creative talents were missing for most of the season), almost every club has moved more towards prioritizing set-piece routines as the likeliest source of goals; and, with PGMOL being so lax about curbing the amount of wrestling that this leads to in and around the six-yard box, most of them have lapsed into this sort of cheating and thuggery on occasion too. All this isn't entirely Arsenal's fault; but it is to a significant extent - they have set the tone, set the example, and they've now proven that it can be a key to success. There is now a danger that we will see even more of this sort of thing next season, as a result. These misgivings about the possible future impact of the manner of Arsenal's title win has rather tarnished the achievement. 

I hope that these issues can be sorted out next season. We need a few more players like Cherki (and Palmer and Wirtz... and Eze!) to prove that defence-defence-defence is not the way forward, to open our game up again to more end-to-end attacking play. [The problem with the primacy of defensive play at the moment is threefold. First, teams have got so good at implementing 'hybrid marking' systems, and defending in a low block around the edge of their own penalty areas that it is very difficult for opponents who enjoy a lot of possession to create open-play chances against them. Second, this is leading many teams to almost 'give up' on pursuing traditional creativity, and to cultivate long-ball football and set-piece shenanigans as the likelier route to goals. And third, some of the more dominant teams may be tempted to follow Arsenal's example and give more priority to 'defending with the ball', concentrating on not making mistakes and hanging on to possession for long periods - rather than attacking.]

Arsenal have shown formidable tenacity, consistency, and defensive solidity this year - and that's what won them the title. But they won it with a notable lack of flair. And the possible legacy of this win, in terms of how it may shape Premier League football over the next year or two, is a cause for concern.

 That is why, Arsenal fans, the majority of neutral supporters feel unable to join in your celebrations; it's not because we hate you, it's because we love football.