Unlucky Alf revisited

Last week, I noticed one of my regular antagonists had been having a hard time of it in FPL lately, and had suffered a particularly abysmal Gameweek 10. I commented that there didn't actually seem to be anything amiss with his squad, and I hoped that he would have the fortitude to stick by his selections and not rush into a lot of panicky changes.

And look at this - he put out the same team in Gameweek 11, and enjoyed markedly different fortune. That's the way this game goes: some weeks, you're lucky, some weeks, you're not.

 

This time out, despite having again picked the 'wrong' captain, and getting disappointing returns from Calafiori and Szoboszlai (with perfect foresight, he could have had a few more points off his bench),.... he managed nearly twice the global average; that lifted him into the top 22,000 for the week, and probably put him top of most of his mini-leagues. 

That was nearly 11.5 million places higher than his miserable GW10 ranking - surely one of the biggest week-to-week swings ever recorded.

This example is a powerful illustration of the point I always try to stress about Fantasy Football: you have to avoid being too reactive, to resist being swayed by your emotions. When you have a bad week, you have to try to calmly analyse why it's gone badly for you - before you decide to make any changes. Often, there's nothing wrong with your selections at all; you just had a week where everything broke against you.

Even in a pretty good week, you usually have at least 3 or 4 of your starting eleven who will 'blank'; quite often, there may be 5 or 6 who fail to bring you a return. And - Statistics being the Cruel Mistress that she is - that means that you're occasionally going to have a week where almost everyone fails to produce any worthwhile points. It doesn't mean they're bad selections; you just had an unlucky week. Hang tough - and next week will probably be better; maybe a lot better!