Cruel Fate - you have surpassed yourself!

 

My best buddy - and principal FPL antagonist - and I have long consoled ourselves with a humorous 'superstition' that there is a balance in the Cosmos: that ill fortune in one area of our lives will inevitably be soon balanced out by some unexpected good fortune in another.

Hence, if things go very ill for us in the current FPL Gameweek, we seek to cheer ourselves up with the reflection that we must be about due for something nice to happen to us in the real world. You know, we'll find some money in the street, or have a friend finally return that favourite book of ours they borrowed five years ago, or at least have an uncommonly pretty girl flash us an uncommonly flirty smile at the supermarket checkout on Thursday evening... One of those little things that make life worth living.

And vice versa: if the real world hasn't been terribly kind to us recently, we become robustly confident that we're about to experience our best Gameweek in months.

And it is uncanny how often this crackpot 'belief' seems to be borne out by events. (I suppose it's our old friend, the 'confirmation bias': we have a low threshold of proof for things we really want to believe in.)  The toilet springs a leak, but Patrick Kluivert scores a hattrick of penalties! I lose my phone, but my highest-scoring player of the week gets auto-subbed into the starting eleven because of a warm-up injury to Cole Palmer! Somebody steals $500 from my hotel room, but I get a ton-up weekly score... in a Single Gameweek, and without playing a chip!

I swear, these are things that have happened; this is my life.

But of course, this is not a reliable rule. I'd like to think it's more of a guideline - but in truth, it's not even that.

I've just had one of the worst months of my life (well, the worst three months or so, actually - but who's counting?), so.... I was kind of looking forward to a compensating upswing in my FPL fortunes.

But oh no, I just had one of my worst weeks of the season, one of my worst weeks ever. Even a modest success for a 'bold' captaincy punt on Nordi Mukiele in the final game couldn't drag me up to the minimum respectability of the 'global average'!!

And this was the first week in a long time - certainly the first one this season - in which I've suffered the triple whammy of losing three key players to injury in quick succession.

To be fair, though, I have quite often in the past suffered a quadruple- and even a quintuple-whammy of injuries - so maybe it's not really all that bad.

When Cosmic Justice breaks down as a consoling principle, at least we still have Perspective.