'All over' already??

Well, it feels very much like it, doesn't it?

Nearly 5 million FPL managers owned Bruno Fernandes going into last weekend, and it seems around 1.8 million of them put the captain's armband on him. Although no official figure has been released yet, it seems likely that perhaps half of those played their Triple Captain chip on him.

So, those of us who didn't have Fernandes as our captain - or perhaps didn't own him at all - may have fallen behind the early leaders by as much as 50 or 60 points in a single gameweek, thanks to Bruno's improbably huge haul against Ipswich on Sunday.

And that is a massive, massive blow. Against good players, who are not making many blunders, and mostly achieving pretty consistent weekly returns, it will probably take us until the New Year to chip away at that kind of deficit (at least, in our normal week-by-week returns: if we could pull off a similarly huge coup with our Triple Captain play, or one of the other bonus chips - that would be a big help in getting back on terms rather more quickly). And we might not manage it even across the whole of the remainder of the season (amongst the handful of consistently strong managers I regularly compare myself against, there's often no more than 50 or so points between all of us through most of the season).

But this is a hard, cruel, frustrating game. We must accept that this is so - and keep trying to do the best we can with it, however much early setbacks may appear to have killed our hopes of achieving many of our original goals for the season.

I have two sources of consolation that may help. One is that one of my chief antagonists is wildly inconsistent, tends to start hot but... go walkabout in the second half of the season - and often contrives to piss away a 200 or even a 300-point lead in a matter of months. (He's not in a commanding position at the moment, and is probably not going to be my main threat this year. But at least this reassures me that weaker managers can allow you to make up even a very big gap on them.)  The second is that in the two mini-leagues I have the strongest personal investment in, only two managers own Bruno Fernandes (and they hadn't made him captain this week!). 

So, fortuitously enough, even though I might now struggle to finish in the top half million overall, my mini-league positions are still fine.

I recommend that everyone who has been wiped out by the Bruno Landslide should look for similar consolations. Even if the top spot in your most highly contested leagues looks out of sight at the moment,... it may not be. And, well, even if it is, there must be at least one key rival who shared your no-Bruno misery and is thus still within reach. 

Concentrate on the goals which still seem achievable, and forget - at least for now - about the ones that seem to have slipped away from you already.