A couple of days ago, I did a rather full review of the season as a whole, as it panned out for FPL. But I suppose I should attempt some sort of summary of how things went for me as well, as I did last year. Of course, my season was actually derailed right at the start, when FPL's cranky website decided to 'forget' my password and lock me out of my account in Gameweek 2 (not the first time this has happened; actually, I think it's now at least the third time in 7 or 8 years...). But I continued to follow the game closely and to make weekly selections; and from about Gameweek 10 onwards, I actually kept a strict record of what my team would have been, and how many points it would have been getting. And I've already done waypoint analyses of how things were going for me at about the one-third and two-thirds points of the season.
To try to keep this a bit more concise than it was last year, I'll frame this review in terms of my recent analysis of what really makes the difference in FPL performance - just as I did a week or so ago with my survey of the performance of this year's global champion, Erik Ibsen.
Did I get off to a 'flying start'? No, emphatically not (although I did have a slightly less awful opening gameweek than Erik Ibsen!). I very rarely do. I tend to take a few too many chances with my initial selection, and am usually made to suffer for it. I have observed that, if you are to have any hope of finishing the season near the top of the global rankings, you really need to be in the top 500,000, or at least getting pretty close to that, by about Gameweek 5 or 6. Erik Ibsen managed that, despite his dreadful start. I was getting there... but then had a really dreadful Gameweek 5 as well; and that pretty much killed my season, in terms of having any chance of a really high rank finish.
Was I lucky with my captaincy picks? Not especially; fairly average, I would say: 420 points in total (including the Triple Caps) - 191 less than Erik Ibsen! I did pretty well backing Haaland early on; and got a very nice 28-point return from Daniel Munoz in Gameweek 12. I also picked up a few big returns from Harry Wilson, Bruno Fernandes, Jeremy Doku, and Casemiro. But I also suffered an awful lot of blanks; I seemed to fall into a bad rut of backing Igor Thiago, Antoine Semenyo or Bryan Mbeumo in all the weeks in which they did nothing!
Was I heavily hit by injuries? Well, not as much as in some previous years, but... I still ended up having to use 13 hits over the season. And, given that we got given an extra 4 Free Transfers for AFCON in December, that in effect equates to 17 in a normal season - which is on the high side. A few of those extra transfers were purely elective, tactical gambles on better players; but the great majority of them were forced by injury. (Again, Erik bloody Ibsen managed to sail through the season without needing to spend points for a single additional transfer!)
Did I luck into any players who happened to produce just a few really huge scores? Not really. I missed out on Phil Foden's brief bonanza! I give myself some credit for promptly getting on Patrick Dorgu, Harry Wilson, Jeremy Doku, Casemiro, and Rayan Cherki when they hit hot streaks (but, apart from Wilson, those were all very short-lived); I was mostly on Semenyo at the right times too; and I think I was right to keep the faith with Igor Thiago (he was actually my second-highest returning player across the season; and I think possibly the only one I hung on to all the way through). But I was very slow to get on Bruno Fernandes, and missed out entirely on the hot spells from Bruno Guimaraes and Joao Pedro. I also failed to bring Gabriel back in after his spell of injury, which probably cost me quite dearly. And - although I am an habitual sceptic about David Raya as an FPL prospect (or any keeper from a top club), I should probably have brought him in for the last part of the season. (I just wasn't anticipating - who was, really?? - that Arsenal would grind out that series of back-to-back clean sheets on the final run-in!!)
Did I get good returns from my chips? Er, NO. This was probably my biggest disaster of the season. My Triple Captain picks were both a complete bust: I went for Haaland in GW13, when he notoriously blanked against struggling Leeds (leading FPL conspiracy theorists to speculate that he'd gone soft on this opponent because his dad used to play for them). I punted the second on Jurrien Timber in Double Gameweek 26, but he blanked in both games and picked up a booking in the second!
My first Bench Boost, which I couldn't find a suitable opportunity to use until very late in the window, Gameweek 18, was an absolute disaster: I had two non-starters, and a bunch of players who returned very disappointingly, so I got almost nothing from it at all. The second in Double Gameweek 33 went only very slightly better; I was again undone by a surprise no-show from Joao Pedro and a few blanks among the 'starting eleven' - and I came up frustratingly just shy of a ton for the week.
My Free Hits at least went reasonably well. The first, in Gameweek 17, yielded me a modest but worthwhile 12 points above the global average. The second one saw me nicely through the speedbump of Blank Gameweek 34 with a pretty decent score, 28 points above the wretched global average.
But yes, it was kind of a solid, plodding performance. No big weekly scores, no long runs of form from any player, rather too many hopeful bets that didn't work out; a very mixed bag from my captaincy picks, and bugger-all from most of my chips. I would have ended up with something in the low to mid-2.100s, I think: my worst season ever! But, since everyone seems to have been 250-300 points below their typical level this year (and I suspect that the 'global average' might have been down by even more than that: if you subtract the free extra points we all got from the new 'defensive points' rule - about 160, in my case - it was the lowest-scoring FPL season in about 15 years!!), that's really a pretty respectable total.
You need some fat slices of luck to do much better than that; and I didn't get any of those this year!!
Oh well - maybe next season will be kinder to me....
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