My greatest WEAKNESS

 

Although I generally do pretty well at this game of FPL,.... I never do quite as well as I'd like.

Many of the factors that clip my performance are external handicaps which I can't do much about. [I live in a distant timezone, with limited availability of coverage of the games (often none with English commentary); and usually a slow and unreliable Internet connection, to boot! Also, I spend a lot of time travelling, which throws all attempts to maintain any regular routines out of the window, and occasionally even makes me miss an FPL deadline altogether. And I really think it's a huge disadvantage simply to be living anywhere outside the UK; there is such a rich immersion environment over there - it's almost impossible not to be aware of every little snippet of breaking football-related news, by a simple osmosis. Anywhere overseas, trying to root out that sort of information can be very effortful.]

But, yes, of course, there are occasional faults in my decision-making too. 

And I think the worst of them is that I tend to take a few too many chances in my initial squad.

I almost always have a pretty poor start to the season; and often, a very, very, very poor - 'Might as well give up now...' - kind of start!

 

And while a large part of that can be attributed to simple BAD LUCK, I do acknowledge that often I'm partly bringing it on myself. 

I like to take chances on players that I rate highly, but are perhaps not yet fully established in their team set-up - only recently elevated to the first team from the reserves or youth ranks, or just joined a bigger club,... perhaps haven't previously shown any sustained FPL form.

Now, I think one of my greatest strengths in the game is that I am in fact a very astute judge of a player. Almost always these more speculative picks of mine do come good in the end; just not quite as emphatically, and almost never quite as promptly as I'd hoped.

I think probably the core of the 'problem' here - the reason why this innocent little foible of mine seems to have become more and more damaging to my results in recent years - is that modern football managers are usually far more conservative than they were in the past; most of them do not like to 'take risks' on emerging talents,... when they know exactly what they're going to get from their veteran warhorses. (Pep Guardiola didn't think Cole Palmer was going to cut it in the Premier League??!! Ethan Nwaneri will probably be in his mid-20s before Mikel Arteta will give him more than 1,000 minutes in a season...)

And perhaps that excess of caution is partly driven by the extraordinary physical demands of the modern game. Selections now are often made for reasons which are completely opaque to the outside world - reasons that probably have far more to do with 'fitness' than a player's raw talent or game intelligence. 

Not that many years ago, my assessments of young players' ability usually accorded very closely with when they were about to break through on the big stage. These days, they rarely do. And it's not just the disappointment of my FPL hopes that saddens me about that....

So, I probably should try to curtail my predilection for including two or three such optimistic selections in my opening-week squad.

Or should I???

This game of ours is essentially a kind of gambling. Each week with our selections we are placing bets on unknown - and unknowable - outcomes. And sometimes you have to bet big to win big.

One day, perhaps, all of my 'emerging star' punts will play in the first game, and will all have blinders!! And I'll be off to a scorching-hot start for once!!

Maybe you have to be prepared to endure several years of mediocre starts, in order to enjoy one really good one? And maybe you have to endure several mediocre seasons, before you get a really successful one?

Maybe.  I'm not sure about this...  Ask me in another ten years or so!

[And, yes, my other great weakness is Vietnamese coconut coffee. Whenever I spend a month in Vietnam, I pile on a couple of kilogrammes through overindulging in these bad boys! It's really a blessing-in-disguise that this is still almost impossible to find anywhere else in Asia.]