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

A little bit of Zen (75)

 

"Doubt is not a pleasant condition, but certainty is an absurd one."

François-Marie Arouet (Voltaire)

"Whenever you are most certain that you are right, you are most likely to be wrong. And least likely to persuade anyone else, either way."

GW

A little bit of Zen (74)

 

"An idea fully formed and put into action is more perfect than an idea that exists only as an idea."

The Buddha

I haven't been able to find a source for this quotation. And it sounds deeply fake to me. I think it is a wise and true concept; but I doubt if it can be reliably attributed to any Buddhist scripture.

An extra 'Little bit of Zen'

"The act of picking up and opening a book masks the counter-gesture that occurs at the same time: the involuntary act of not picking up and not opening every other book in the universe."

Pierre Bayard  -  'How To Talk About Books You Haven't Read'

I think this idea returned to my mind just now because I gave this book as a Christmas present to a crush of mine a few years ago (this is probably why I have such a limited love life...).  Bayard is a French literature professor (and philosopher and psychoanalyst?!) who achieved a modest popular success 15 or 20 years ago with this playful, elegantly witty little treatise on how reading maybe isn't all it's cracked up to be (I disagree with this central thesis; but he plainly wasn't entirely serious about his propositions to that effect).

One of most thought-provoking of the observations in his book is the disturbing reminder above that reading is inextricably linked with non-reading - that every positive choice we make inevitably contains within it a much larger number of (often regrettable) rejections and omissions. 

This is the essence of opportunity cost. And that, of course, is central to the game of Fantasy Premier League - as to all else. Every player we pick in our starting team leaves out three players on the bench; every player we choose to transfer in leaves hundreds more unselected. We have to try to simplify these decisions to make them seem less daunting, less intractable, less impossible. But I think most people tend to overdo this, to radically over-simplify their selection process - too readily dismissing alternative options that should at least be given a moment's serious consideration. We should not let the multiplicity of possible choices stun us into hopelessness and inertia, but rather try to see it as an impetus to choose more carefully.

A little bit of Zen (73)

 

"Something so comfortable, familiar and perfectly nostalgic - frankly, we have no desire to improve upon it at all.”

Joana Gaines

Ms Gaines (apparently an American TV presenter of modest celebrity) was ostensibly talking about Christmas. She inadvertently sums up how I'm sure many of us feel about FPL....  (NO MORE CHANGES next year, please!!)

Anyhow,  Happy Holidays to all!

A little bit of Zen (72)

 

"Fiction reveals truths that reality obscures."

 

Jessamyn West

“Friction reveals truths that lubricant obscures.”

GW

I am never one to back down from an argument...  'Productive dialogue' is always good, I feel; even if it leaves blood on the floor.

Oh, she said 'fiction'? That just makes the joke better.... Still TRUE, though.

[I know, I know: some of these weekly aphorisms are a lot less 'Zen' than others.]

A little bit of Zen (71)

 

"Character consists of what you do on the third and fourth tries."

James A. Michener

"The true test of character is not how much we know how to do, but how we behave when we don't know what to do."

John Holt

Curious, that two of my improbable heroes (Michener, often dismissed as a mass-producer of potboiler fiction, but actually a fine writer, despite being a successful one; and Holt, an entertaining and influential writer on the philosophy and practice of education) should have had such similar thoughts on the nature of moral character.

A little bit of Zen (70)

A biplane over Edinburgh, 1920

"Monotony is the awful reward of the careful."

A. G. Buckham

Mr Buckham is somewhat obscure to the Internet; at least, not eminent enough to have yet earned his own Wikipedia page. However, I very much hope it's the Alfred George Buckham I provided the link for above: a British naval aviator during World War I, and an impressive black-and-white photographer of planes and landscapes. That stunning aerial photograph high above the centre of Edinburgh in 1920 is one of his. There is a lot more worth checking out on the linked website devoted to him.

While rashness, over-hastiness, and silly gambling are never good things,.... neither are timorousness and excess of caution - in FPL, or more generally in Life.

A little bit of Zen (69)

"You should be self-confident enough to abandon your 'certainty' - and to explore and to allow contradictions."

Christoph Waltz

A couple of weeks ago, the great Austrian actor was the featured guest in Mythical Kitchen's 'Last Meal' series, chatting thoughtfully with erudite host, Josh Scherer, about a range of topics, while enjoying some of his favourite dishes and wines. It's a curious coincidence that I should stumble on this pithy warning against the vice of excessive 'certainty' so soon after coming across Derek Muller's video on the same topic, 

This is one of the best things I've seen on Youtube all year: Waltz is a wise and funny man, full of intriguing insights. He's nearly 70 now, but still exudes a boyish enthusiasm about everything, am effervescent joie de vivre. The line above comes at timestamp 29.17. There is a bit earlier in the conversattion, around about 13.35, where he touches on another idea that I often like to highlight on this blog - the importance of prioritizing process over result.

I highly recommend watching the whole thing. Waltz is a treasure; Scherer too.