"This would be the best job in the world… if there weren’t any games. Defeat is suffering; victory is… happiness?
No. Unfortunately, that’s not true. It’s a relief - for a few days, you’re calmer.
But then, suffering is part of your work, what keeps you alive: the pressure, the stress.”
"We are here on earth to help others; what on earth the others are here for, I don't know."
From 'Win' and 'Lose', and still somehow...
It's Life's illusions I recall;
I really don't know Life at all."
Joni Mitchell - 'Both Sides, Now'
.jpg "'Only a Game?'")
"‘It’s only a game,’ people say - as if they don’t realise that everything’s a game."
GW
The photo above is the cover of an early paperback edition of a classic footballing book, 'Only A Game?' - a diaristic account of a professional footballer's life in the early 1970s, written by an Irish player, and later a distinguished broadcaster and journalist, Eamonn Dunphy,.... about an unhappy season he spent with Milwall.
Gosh, there are only just over 200 hours left before the 2024-25 Premier League season is all wrapped up! The Fat Lady is doing her warm-ups....
Overwhelmed as we've often felt by fatigue and frustration (and a frequent raging sense of injustice....) during the course of this season, we'll miss it when it's finally over....
We see a lot of people on the FPL forums at the moment frantically worrying what they can do to 'improve' their ranking over the last two gameweeks, clinch a mini-league or cup victory.... The answer, alas, is NOTHING. Just keep playing your game, and hope for the best! People who go desperately 'chasing' points by taking wild gambles usually just shoot themselves in the foot.
If you're already in an impressive rank position - top 100,000, or top 50,000 or top 10,000, or whatever; or near the top of some of your leagues - that's about as good as you can ever hope to get (realistically, it's probably far better than you ever expected at the start of the season; and, very probably, rather better than you've deserved...); so you should be happy with that.... and not still feverishly chasing rainbows.
People who get hung up on hoping for further improvement, when they're already at Icarus altitudes, are probably just setting themselves up for huge disappointment. The upper end of the rankings tend to get pretty strung out; and there probably aren't going to be too many people who achieve significant further rises in rank in those strata over Gameweeks 37 and 38; a good number, in fact probably the majority, will slip back slightly; a good 10% or 20% (mostly the ones who were chasing too hard...) may fall back disastrously, allowing a few late entries into the upper ranks.
Croatia's Lovro Budišin and his team 'Aina Krafth Bree' (is that a pun that only works in Croatian??) are a staggering 43 points clear at the top of the global rankings, so it's pretty unlikely that anyone is now going to displace him as this year's Champion. (He's already been in the No. 1 spot for 6 weeks,... and in the Top Ten for 16 weeks!! That is a freakishly good run of form, even for the Global Champ...)
But only 6 other managers are within 20 points of second-place Max Littleproud, so.... there might not be too much movement at the top of the table at all over the coming week.
Only 53 managers have reached 2,600 points for the season so far; another 544 have a score from 2,550 to 2,599. And nearly 4,700 more have reached 2,500 points (an improbably large number, in fact, are currently on exactly 2,500,... and 2,499....).
98,248 managers have already reached 2,400 points - which would, in fact, be an extremely good total for season's end. And this in a season where we've had a lot of unusually low-scoring gameweeks, and a lot of surprises and upsets (City being shit for most of the season, Arsenal being much weaker than last season, Liverpool winning the title at a canter, despite being much less convincing than they were in the Klopp heyday a few years ago...); by rights, you'd expect this to be a below-average scoring season, yet all these folks have still managed to amass absolutely ridiculous points. (There's no accounting for LUCK....)
526,229 managers have reached 2,300 points or better - which I would regard as a very good total with two games left; if on 2,300 now, you should be able to reach 2,400 by the end of the season; and if you still have a bonus chip to play, or can somehow otherwise manage at least one very good gameweek from the last two (and actually, GW38 looks like it could be pretty good for everyone, with a very kind cluster of final fixtures!), you could maybe still get above 2,450.
2,400+ points - that's pretty AWESOME: that is, in fact, about the best you can achieve on merit alone - anything more than that requires an awful lot of LUCK as well. And there is no point in hoping to be LUCKY.
"The amount of eccentricity in a society has generally been proportional to the amount of genius, mental vigour, and moral courage which it contained. That so few now dare to be eccentric marks the chief danger of the time."
But NOTE: to be 'eccentric' means to be an unorthodox and individualistic thinker... not to be a mad and self-destructive one. We generally see far more of the latter in FPL, alas.
I already wrote something of the sort at the start of the season, but I want to revisit that idea now - and, hopefully, come up with more of a checklist that people can measure themselves against.
I have also previously offered some guidance on what I think various points thresholds tend to indicate about a manager's level of ability (though that's a crude, inexact measure). and suggested some external objectives you might use as a gauge of progress and a source of motivation: tallying a personal head-to-head (even if not formally entered in such a league) against key rivals, or against people you've identified as being consistently impressive managers; seeing how well you can do in a small or mid-sized mini-league that seems to offer a high standard of competition; or forming a mini-league of your own to compete against friends, family members, neighbours, co-workers, etc.
However, that kind of thing is really just for fun, to help boost your motivation and enjoyment. And there is a danger that it can become too much of a distraction from The True Path.
Because The True Path is not about any external goals; it is about focusing on the process - becoming aware of how you make your decisions, and striving to become better at that. You don't need any external benchmarks to achieve this. Obsessing over 'rank' or points totals is a dangerous waste of time and effort; most of the time, it simply leads you into making worse decisions.
My full post on this should appear in a day or two.
“To live only for some future goal is shallow. It's the sides of the mountain that sustain life, not the top.”
"I want to taste and glory in each day, and never be afraid to experience pain."
It's almost as if she wanted to play FPL....!
Shankly, a gruff Scotsman, was one of the great managers of the early modern era in football, the man who first set Liverpool on the path to sustained greatness during a long tenure in charge of the club throughout the '60s and early '70s. Although this line is generally attributed to 'Shanks', I have also seen it sometimes ascribed to other football managers of his time (including his successor at Anfield, fellow Scot Bob Paisley), and I haven't been able to find any definite citation as to when or where he's supposed to have said it.
The line has something of the cracked logic of the celebrated baseball coach 'Yogi' Berra, whose 'wit' was characterised by such apparently inadvertent paradoxes or tautologies (though one suspects that at least some of them were self-consciously crafted).
It was probably just a stumbling attempt to express the extremity of his - and many fans' - passion for the game, but....
I like to think there may be deeper layers of meaning in it: that perhaps he was suggesting that life and death are ultimately not that important after all, not as important as they are commonly supposed to be, that perhaps individual moments of experience matter more than states of being... or perhaps that all things are equally important, equally unimportant....
GW
“There is only one way to happiness, and that is to cease worrying about things that are beyond the power of our will.”
"Success is no accident. It is hard work, perseverance, learning, studying, sacrifice - and most of all, love of what you are doing or learning to do."
Darn - well, much as I expected , this 'Round of 16' stage in the new Club World Cup has been very finely balanced so far. I supp...
.jpg "Japanese monk (possibly Dogen Zenji)")
