Deadline brinksmanship - DON'T try to cut it too close!

I mentioned the other day in my short post on the consequences of the Merseyside derby postponement this weekend that many managers who'd lost more than 1 or 2 players in that fixture scrambled to try to plug the gaps just before the weekly deadline. And it was this flurry of late transfer activity which enabled so many of us to start the Gameweek on a short-lived high, as our rank surged upwards on the number-of-transfers tiebreak rule.

I ddi subsequently see a few complaints on online FPL forums about managers being unable to complete their desired transfers, espcially if they were attempting to do so via Wildcard or Free Hit chiips, because the FPL website seemed to freeze up or crash on them, not letting them confirm or save their changes.

Now, this is not a problem that I've encountered myself for a few years - because I just don't take chances with the deadline any more. In my early years playing the game, though, (and in my first few times playing the sister games for the World Cup or the European Championship) I ran into such bothersome glitches a lot.

And it's not really surprising - with a game of this magnitude (typically well over 10 million user accounts each season nowadays). However good the overal server capacity for the game is, it's bound to get a bit overstretched if a significant proportion of the game's players are all trying to make changes to their accounts at the same time. - and, in extreme cases, that may lead to the user-interface becoming slow, glitchy, unreliable.... or perhaps even to it breaking down altogether. And  I suspect this problem is likely to be exacerbated by any local shortcomings you may be suffering with the Internet architecture; if your connection to the Web is already a little bit slow or unstable, then the chances of your connection to the FPL servers breaking down are going to be even higher during times of peak demand on them.

And of course, the FPL site traffic tends to be highest just before the deadline for team changes each gameweek. So, if you try leaving your team changes until the very last minute.... you are always running the risk of having a 'technical issue' prevent you from completing them. I really don't think it's SAFE to leave your team changes to the last half-hour before the deadline. And I don't usually even try to do them any later than 1 hour before.

And yet many managers persist in this crazy brinksmanship - kidding themselves that there may be late, late 'team leaks' that might give a better clue to a manager's selections for the upcoming game.... perhaps a rumour that this or that player is a late dropout because he woke up with a cold or stubbed his toe in the shower...

Frankly, I can't remember the last time a piece of news like that broke (that was actually reliable or useful). And if it doesn't emerge until the last couple of hours before the first kick-off, there's really not much you can do about it anyway - unless, like FPL's vapid anonymous pundit 'The Scout', you are prepared to use  unlimited transfers to optimise your squad each week, regardless of the cost in points. This is why it's IMPORTANT to always have a proper bench: so that 1 or 2 - or perhaps even 3! - last-minute dropouts from your starting eleven can be readily replaced. 

And if you lose even more than that, because of some strange circumstance.... well, that's just a disaster there's really no way to deal with; you just have to suck it up. As I counselled in regard to this weekend's postponement, if you did lose a lot of Merseyside players, and you had no decent back-up on your bench, it was probably better to just accept your ill fortune for this one gameweek... rather than resorting to a bunch of transfers, possibly at a cost of valuable points, and then face the prospect of wanting to undo most of those transfers the very next week, and have to spend even more points to do so. [Some people apparently thought their Free Hit might be the answer to their troubles on this. But that is a topic for another time, I think. In brief, it was impossible to be missing more than 5 or 6 players as a result of this lost fixture; there will be at least one gameweek later in the season when we will all, almost certainly, lose at least 1.5x to 2x that many players; and that is when you will NEED your Free Hit. Playing it now might have saved you some points this weekend; but it will cost you far more further down the line - when you no longer have it available when a far more needful occasion for it arises.]