A little bit of Zen (59)

 

"All problems are important; but some are urgent, and some can wait."

Anonymous spokesman for the Vietnamese Communist government, shortly after Reunification in 1975

This is a somewhat ominous line, since it appears that the official here might have been intending to refer, at least partly, to the problem of internal dissent, and the Party's evolving plans for mass internment in 're-education through labour' camps. (In the first weeks after the fall of Saigon, the feared backlash against anyone associated with the government, military, or civil service of the former South Vietnam seemed not to be materialising, or at least not at anything like the rate or scale that had been widely anticipated. They took a couple of months on their planning before getting around to it....)

The general idea, though, has a broad applicability. A lot of FPL managers rush into drastic remedial action after only two or three 'bad' weeks, or even just one such week. They don't seem to realise how valuable that Wildcard will probably be a little later in the season, how wasteful is its early use (especially right at the start of the season!). They don't realise that it's very common to have a bad start to the season, when there are so many additional unpredictabilities about form and line-ups and results. They don't realise that two or three poor gameweeks back-to-back scarcely even counts as a disappointing 'run' - and that you can have several genuinely disappointing runs in a season, and will in fact be very lucky to get away with having fewer than 3 or 4 such spells. As I said at the end of that earlier post I just linked to: "A Wildcard is for emergencies; a bad Gameweek 1 (or even a bad opening three Gameweeks) is NOT an emergency."

Unless you find yourself in the rare, horrible condition of having made several obviously bad choices in your initial squad, already have several key players who are injured, or not getting the minutes you expected, or are just playing really, really badly (or are stuck in teams which are playing really badly, which is even more frustrating...),... then you should restrict yourself to isolated, 'essential' changes for now, trying to make do with your meagre ration of Free Transfers. And if you feel you really must make more changes than that, try to limit them to one or two, and bite the bullet on accepting the 'hit' - paying the points for the additional transfer(s).  Using the first Wildcard before the end of September (which is still early; only a few weeks after the end of the transfer window and the jarring interruption of the first international break: form and line-ups still haven't fully settled down....) is a sign of desperation, and almost always self-harming. DON'T DO IT - UNLESS YOU ABOLUTELY HAVE TO!!!

[I came across the above quotation last week in Andrea Pitzer's excellent book on the history of concentration camps, One Long Night - a grim read, but an informative and thought-provoking one.]