A little bit of Zen (92)

 

“We must learn to accept the impermanence of all things, and find peace in the midst of change.”

Kosho Uchiyama

A little bit of Zen (91)

 

"When you find someone else's intelligence offensive, in fact it's your own stupidity that's upsetting you; you're just looking for external targets to vent your frustration and self-loathing against."

GW

I wish commenters in the social-media-sphere were more aware of this. It is dispiriting how many of them will get all snarky and grumpy at people for having the effrontery to use complete sentences or 'big words'...

A little bit of Zen (90)

 

“A wise man proportions his belief to the evidence.”

David Hume

"A foolish man magnifies - or invents - the evidence according to his belief."

GW

An inspiration

 

In my meanderings around Youtube the other day, I stumbled upon this - an engaging profile of self-taught wood-carver Ray Kinman, who became one of the leading practitioners in his field and landed a prestigious job sculpting many of the signs for attractions at the Disney theme parks. Still active at 70, he is now a beloved teacher of his craft.

A little nugget of peace and beauty in a turbulent world...

And he has a few inspiring lessons we all might seek to use:

Be passionate about everything you do.

Your greatest asset is persistence.

Cultivate mastery through repetition.

Mistakes are where the great learning and growth comes.

Always try to push yourself a little bit harder.

Lose yourself in the process.

These, at any rate, are principles that I have tried to follow in my life, and which I try to promote in my online writings. They can even have some useful application in our FPL endeavours, I believe.

A little bit of Zen (89)

 

“By three methods may we learn wisdom:

First, by reflection which is the noblest;

Second, by imitation, which is the easiest;

Third, by experience, which is the bitterest.”

Kong Qiu ('Confucius')

παθήματα μαθήματα:  'Pathemata, mathemata' - "Learning, suffering - same thing."  

(Ancient Greek proverb)

Avid readers (if there be any; traffic stats seem to suggest I have a few regular lurkers, at any rate) may have noticed that my main purpose on this blog is to try to promote the first of Confucius's paths to wisdom - while also celebrating the third, but strongly discouraging the second (which is, unfortunately, by far the most common approach among the FPL hordes...).

A little bit of Zen (88)

 

"Never express yourself more clearly than you are able to think."

Niels Bohr

A little bit of Zen (87)

"Where is the wisdom that we have lost in knowledge? Where is the knowledge we have lost in information?"

T.S. Eliot

“Where is the insight to be found in endless statistics?”

GW

Which is not to say that there is nothing useful to be found in statistics. But you have to be smart about where you look.

A LONG 'vacation'

 

Good gracious, what is this??

Thanks to the odd scheduling quirk that we have an international break this week, followed by the Quarter-Finals of the FA Cup on the first weekend of April, we're now faced with nearly three weeks without any Premier League football!

Since the quarter-finals of the European competitions don't kick off until 7th/9th April (and only 5 of our 9 participating clubs are still involved there, after a disastrous 'Round of 16' in the Champions League), I imagine the 14 Premier League sides no longer in the FA Cup will be taking a nice warm weather break somewhere around the Mediterranean as soon as everyone's back from the internationals. (Spurs and Newcastle, out of Europe and the Cup, can take a proper holiday....)

I can't recall such a long interruption to the League schedule ever happening before. It's really a bit too long of a break, I fear - too disruptive of regular fitness and tactical preparation routines, likely to lead to some odd hiccups in form when the League resumes. But... time enough to worry about all of that next month!

After the relentless FPL onslaught of the last few months - often two games a week since early December, and endless injury problems as a result - it will be NICE to have a little bit of a rest from it all.

I feel like a song to celebrate this welcome 'time off'. Here's an old favourite from my childhood, Bing Crosby and the cast performing 'Busy Doing Nothing' from the charming 1949 film adaptation of 'A Connecticut Yankee At King Arthur's Court'. This upload to Youtube has combined the song with a montage of clips from classic comedy duo Laurel & Hardy.

That's better. I feel quite jolly now!

And, darn it, that chorus punchline might be the most Zen thing I've ever posted on here:

We'd like to be unhappy,

But we simply don't have the time.

Keeping oneself occupied is the secret to a contented and fulfilled life. That might be just that little bit harder for the next two-and-a-half weeks...

A little bit of Zen (86)

"Only dead fish swim with the stream."

Malcolm Muggeridge

This quotation, or sometimes a slight variation of it, seems to get attributed to all sorts of people online, including.... Ernest Hemingway (I'm not sure he was ever that funny; not often, anyway). But it seems to be most commonly and convincingly credited to Muggeridge. He was a journalist, essayist, and satirist of some repute in his middle years, but by the '70s and '80s (the time of my childhood), in his dotage, he had declined into an endlessly parodiable - and possibly, to some extent, consciously self-parodying - bombastic social commentator on late-night discussion programmes on the television, a cantankerous grouch-for-hire.

Rediscovering this old gem of a line has got me wondering if I should rename my 'Sheep Picks' series on here (lampooning the foolishness that the 'herd instinct' in FPL so often leads people into),... or at least start illustrating it occasionally with some dead fish photos.

Going with the flow

Here's a funny thing: although I have a great fondness for the late Shane MacGowan and his songwriting,.... most of my favourite Pogues songs are in fact written by other members of the band. This one, a rather beautiful love song by banjo-player Jem Finer, is actually from their later era in the '90s, after the band had finally been worn out by Shane's looney escapades and had to sack him.

The Pogues have a special place in my heart because they rose to prominence - indeed they were, somehow, one of the biggest bands in the world for a while back then! - during the 1980s, the period when I was transitioning from high school to university, and then from university to 'the world of work' (ha!), that age when we tend to listen to music most, and be most affected by it.

Although this song was released on their penultimate album, Waiting For Herb, in the mid-90s, I always associate it with a rather earlier moment in my life (funny how the mind works!). Back at the end of the '80s, I was doing a teacher-training course in the north of England, and was attempting a long-distance relationship for the first time, with a devastatingly beautiful young woman I'd just met who was at art college in London. (I always seem to fall for creative types: actresses, dancers, writers, musicians...) And although she never stood me up at a bus station, as in the scenario of the song, there were a number of  times when hoped-for visits were cancelled, or when we had awkward conversations from a payphone at a bus station (one of the most readily available to me at the time, since I was living in a small village some way outside of my university town, and having to take a bus home almost every evening). Because of these associations, several years later, this became for me, retroactively, 'our song'.

The song is notable musically for being an instance of the use of 'Infinite Guitar' - a feedback effect that allows a note to be sustained indefinitely at constant volume, here producing a melancholy and haunting background. The device was apparently invented by a Canadian guitarist called Michael Brook in the 1980s, but it is most associated with his countryman, Daniel Lanois, who did a lot to develop, or at least 'popularise' the innovation. Also a talented musician and songwriter, Lanois became best-known as a producer, particularly for his work on a number of U2's most successful albums. He introduced the 'infinite guitar' gizmo to The Edge, who was quite besotted with it for a while, and used it most memorably on the hit single With Or Without You - which probably creates some additional resonance with this song. (I'd never been much of a fan of U2 or The Edge, but I got to meet him and hear him perform at a private music biz party in the '90s, and found myself very impressed: he is a rather cool dude, and a much better player than I'd realised.)

I particularly like the opening lines, repeated as chorus:

Listen to me, baby: Once upon a time....

My heart, it was an ocean,

But you swam against the tide.

It's a song about acceptance, about moving on - without enmity or regret. How many of those are there?? It might be unique.

It's a good lesson, for life - and for FPL. Sometimes - often, most of the time - things don't work out the way we want them to. We have to try to understand how these setbacks happen, without apportioning blame - to ourselves or others. And we have to learn to bear these disappointments with good grace - and summon the will to keep moving forward.

And yet, of course, I can't escape the conviction on occasions that the girl was wrong, that life is often wrong; that the tide of my feelings was 'right', and that the girl - and the world - would have done better to have gone along with my flow, rather than opposing it.

Yes, EVERYTHING can become a metaphor for me.  Life is a metaphor for FPL, FPL is a metaphor for life.... Life is FPL....

Forgive these idle musings. I am making rapid progress into a bottle of Tullamore Dew this slow Tuesday evening....

A little bit of Zen (85)

“May you get all your wishes but one, so you always have something to strive for.”

Irish blessing

"And may the head on your Guinness be tight and creamy..."

GW  (Though he probably won't be expressing himself that coherently over the coming few days, what with being a Plastic Paddy and all....)

A little bit of Zen (84)

 

"I didn't want to write history. I wanted to give 90 minutes of joy to people. And I wanted that joy to come not from winning but from being entertained, from witnessing something special. I did all this out of passion."

Arrigo Sacchi

This, for me, is the true essence of football; an essence that Pep and Mikel and their ilk often seem to miss. Sacchi, of course, didn't achieve the sustained success that many of these more modern managers have; but for a few years back around the end of the 1980s, his AC Milan was one of the most beautiful teams ever to play the game, a team that people still swoon to recall nearly four decades later.

I came upon this quotation in 'Inverting the Pyramid', Jonathon Wilson's diverting history of the evolution of football tactics - which I re-read while on holiday in Vietnam this time last year.

Even more of A LOTTERY than usual?

 

As I have frequently observed in my regular 'Luck-o-Meter' gameweek reviews, this season is shaping up to be one of the lowest-scoring - perhaps even the lowest-scoring - in Fantasy Premier League's 24-year history.

It is also seeing unusually large points spreads within a single gameweek rather often: a significant number of managers being able to attain very high scores despite there being a very low global average.

And it is seeing some remarkable reversals in fortune from week to week (more than in a 'typical' season? it's impossible to check data on that, but it feels as though it might be so...), with many people following a huge high-score with a dismal low.... or vice versa.

All of this is making the game feel MORE RANDOM than usual this year, even more than usual determined by PURE LUCK.

And, for many people, this is making the game seem less satisfying, less FUN this year.

But is this really so??

Well, YES, I rather fear that it is.   [Though I observed a little later that while I fear Premier League football has become rather less attractive this year, these shifts in the game can - to an extent - be seen as intriguing new challenges for FPL managers.]

But what are the factors contributing to this phenomenon?

1)  The opacity of the new 'defensive points'

While there have been a few players who've established an impressive reputation for earning these new points almost every week (far more often, in fact, than we would have thought possible, based on the limited sample data FPL had released on the new metrics from last season), for most players, their 'defensive contributions' tally yo-yo's wildly from one week to the next. It is effectively impossible for the casual watcher to try to check these tallies (since we haven't even been given any detailed definitions or examples of how the various eligible game actions are recognised); and I, for one, have very little confidence in the accuracy or consistency of how this is being done by the official stats-provider. While there are a few dependable 'high defcon' players, and we may be surprised/disappointed when Anderson or Garner or Gabriel or Tarkowski don't return defensive points, for the great majority of players, it is entirely unpredictable whether they will earn - or whether they have earned! - these additional points in any given gameweek. As I pointed out in my criticisms of this unnecessary rule-change at the start of the season, it suffers from the same problems as the vexed Bonus Points System - its allocations are impossible to verify independently, and the results will often seem erratic or unfair; it is essentially just another randomizing element in the game (and we'd like fewer of those, not more).

2) Defences being 'on top'

It is an especially unfortunate coincidence that at the same time as this major adjustment to the scoring system, we also happen to be seeing one of the biggest shifts in tactics in the Premier League in over a decade, with a new emphasis on man-marking proving remarkably successful at stifling most of the forms of attacking play that teams have most relied on in recent years. This has led to far fewer chances from open play for almost every team, and hence greatly reduced points from 'attacking contributions' in FPL. So, not only do we have new less predictable points to factor into our game calculations, we also have far fewer of the traditional, mostly rather more predictable points to balance against them.

3)  Set-piece roulette (or 'WrestleMania'....)

With the suffocating of open attacking play, more and more teams are being forced to follow Arsenal's example and place increasing emphasis on set-piece routines to try to nab crucial goals. While some of these set plays are impressively intricate and clever (and I'm actually quite pleased to see the return of the long-throw this year!), unfortunately, many of them rely excessively on grappling with opponents in the penalty area and trying to mob the keeper on his goal-line. Not only does this make our lovely game unbearably ugly, it adds to the sense of randomness and injustice in the game - both in real-world results and in the FPL points outcomes - because so much now depends on whether the referee and the VAR officials choose to take notice or not of egregious holding offences and other such 'personal fouls' within the penalty area at corners and free-kicks. [We just witnessed a particularly frustrating example this past weekend, when Chelsea should, by rights, have been awarded at least two penalties against Arsenal - but didn't get any.]

4)  The sad absence of many big attacking contributions from midfield

Kevin DeBruyne and Son Hueng-Min, two of the giants of FPL over the past decade, both transferred out of the Premier League at the end of last season. Diogo Jota tragically died at the start of the new season. James Maddison was eliminated by a season-long injury. Mo Salah has suddenly proven largely ineffectual at a painfully rebuilding Liverpool. Florian Wirtz, probably the most exciting of the season's new arrivals, took four months to start finding his form. Bryan Mbeumo and Matheus Cunha also had problems settling in at Amorim's floundering Manchester United. Ebere Eze didn't get regular starts after moving to Arsenal. And almost all the other usual top points producers in the midfield category - Palmer, Saka, Odegaard, Foden, Mitoma, Kluivert, Gakpo, Gordon - have missed big chunks of the season through injury and/or just haven't been able to reproduce their best form of recent years. Despite many midfielders being able to pick up substantial additional points for their 'defensive contributions', only Semenyo, Fernandes, Rice, and Wilson have got anywhere near the kind of points totals (70% of the way through the season) we'd usually be hoping to see from at least 6 or 8 players in most previous years. It is far more difficult to predict returns from players who are less consistent in their productivity - but that's what we've often been having to rely on this year.

5)  The sad absence of many big attacking contributions from full-backs

Again, as with midfielders, Trent Alexander-Arnold transferred out of the league, Ben White has mysteriously fallen out of favour at Arsenal, Josko Gvardiol switched back to being more of a central defender than an attacking full-back,... and then picked up a season-ending injury; Matty Cash and Diogo Dalot and Marc Cucurella have so far struggled to make as much of an impact as they did in the previous year or two; Daniel Munoz has also suffered a lengthy spell out, and three of the other most promising attacking full-backs of last year, Antonee Robinson, Rayan Ait-Nouri, and Ola Aina, have missed most of the season. Really, Matheus Nunes and Nico O'Reilly at City and Jurrien Timber at Arsenal (although his contributions have mostly been coming from involvement in set-piece melees rather than through wing play) are the only full-backs to have had much of an impact this year. A top attacking full-back might hope to pick up an 'assist' once in every 3 or 4 games; even an aerial monster like Gabriel isn't likely to nab a goal (or an 'assist') at a set-play more than once every 5 games - and it's much harder to anticipate when those contributions might occur, since they're often happening in messy goalmouth scrambles (where there may often be doubts about the attribution of both goals and assists, as the ball pings around between multiple players; Virgil Van Dijk, in particular, has been extraordinarily lucky to have 2 or 3 goals credited to him which looked more like own-goals off an opposing defender). The pre-eminence of aerially dominant central defenders in the FPL points returns this season (unique, in my memory of the game) again makes it slightly harder to anticipate when and where points are going to come from.

6)  A new overcautiousness in the VAR room

It seems to me that teams of VAR officials have become much more timid about overruling their on-pitch colleague this year - which has been resulting in more, not fewer, egregious errors being made over crucial decisions, and even more uncertainty about whether VAR will intervene and to what effect - a further randomizing factor in our game

7)  And a ton of injuries....

Now, I don't think this season has been worse than some recent ones (certainly not for me, personally; I suffered 55 major injuries in one season a few years back!). I just noted yesterday that, although there has been quite a high number of injuries overall, we had been spared - so far - suffering a cluster of injuries to leading players all within a week or two. But, yes, there have been a lot of injuries (and drop-offs in form) this season. It has been very difficult to keep a settled FPL squad for long, or to save up 'rolled' transfers for a tactical 'mini-Wildcard' rebuild.

So, yes, for this bizarre combination of reasons, it has been a particularly WEIRD FPL season.

I generally say that the game feels like about it's about 70%-80% down to 'luck'; but this year it has often seemed to be more like about 95% 'luck'!!

And that is a bit frustrating.

But we should play the game for engagement rather than 'success'. We should hope to find insight in it, but not justice.

A little bit of Zen (83)

 

"Think little about yourself, think deeply about the world."

Miyamoto Musashi

A little bit of Zen (82)

 

"There are many ways of going forward, but only one way of standing still."

Franklin Delano Roosevelt

A little bit of Zen (81)

 

"We come to love that which we experience every day. But we can grow to hate that which we love every day."

GW

This, alas, is the way of the world. Familiarity breeds affection. That can lead to obsession. But ultimately, also, to ennui. And finally, very often, to contempt.

I have often slipped into the ennui zone with FPL - but I've never yet fallen out of love with it. Perhaps I will one day....  Perhaps.

[What else am I going to write about on the eve of Valentine's Day??]

A little bit of Zen (79)

 

"What are days for? 

Days are where we live. 

They come, they wake us 

Time and time over. 

They are to be happy in."

Philip Larkin - 'Days'

I love Larkin's poetry, but he was a notoriouisly gloomy and curmudgeonly so-and-so. This must be one of the positive things he ever wrote. possibly the only positive thing he ever wrote.

A little bit of Zen (78)

 

"The superior man is distressed only by the limitations of his ability. He is not distressed by the fact that other men do not recognise the ability that he has."

Kong Qiu ('Confucius')

A little bit of Zen (77)

 

"He who is not contented with what he has, would not be contented with what he would like to have."

Socrates

A little bit of Zen (76)

 

"Out of intense complexities, intense simplicities emerge."

Winston Churchill

"Simpliciy is not a simple thing."

Charlie Chaplin