Not just a football 'genius'??

I recently enjoyed this little profile of Ayyoub Bouaddi on the Daily Dose of Football Youtube channel. Manchester City's new midfield signing - only just turned 19 years old! - caught my eye with his performances for Morocco in the World Cup this summer, but I hadn't known much else about him. So, this introduction was most welcome.

It turns out that he appears to be not only a lovely lad, but extraordinarily bright as well: not just an outstanding 'football intelligence', but a formidable all-around intellect. (He shuns social media, and is more likely to spend his downtime reading books, listening to classical music, or playing chess. It's reassuring to learn that there are still some teenagers who follow such a path.)

Alas, I have serious doubts as to whether City was the right move for him. Daily Dose's creator Lucas Ribeiro suggests here that he might be becoming a first team mainstay in three or four years; but I don't see a ready path to achieving that when more experienced players like Elliot Anderson and Enzo Fernandez are standing in his way. And that's too long for him to wait; he's good enough to be a regular starter straight away. I hope they'll let him go out on loan so he can continue to get regular gametime.

Look on the bright side!

 

Things can always be worse.

At least you didn't play your Triple Captain on Palmer this week!

Well, that's about the only comfort I've got to cling to, after one of the most wretched gameweeks in FPL history! 

[At the end of my regular 'Luck-o-Meter' commentary on the gameweek action yesterday, I catalogued how of the 15 highest-owned players, only Haaland, Raya, and [thus far, somewhat disappointing] Gabriel had produced anything; and only Calvert-Lewin and Verbruggen, down at the bottom end of that 'popularity list', had managed even 2 points. Two players hadn't even played, two more had returned nul points despite playing, and five contributed only a single point; while Palmer, of course, returned -1 point! It was very possible - in fact, relatively common - to have a net zero points return from your entire midfield this week!!]

Well, that - and the perennial schadenfreude consolation that an awful lot of people managed to do even worse than me.

Heck, it seems that something in excess of 2,000 people may have made Palmer their Triple Captain this week (at least, if Google is to be believed; these days, alas, it usually isn't...). Around 29% of managers owned him going into this gameweek, and against recent whipping-boys Tottenham, surely everyone will have played him. Probably around a third of his owners had the captaincy on him; and a good many more of them (possibly nearly all - again, according to Google's somewhat unconvincing roundup of the gameweek stats) may have had him inherit the armband as vice-captain after Joao Pedro failed to appear. Nearly 300,000 FPL managers had transferred him in expressly for this fixture.

So, if your FPL weekend suffered from Palmer's uncharacteristic rush-of-blood on Saturday (as did mine), there were a lot of people in the same boat - some of them in an even leakier boat. 

And even if you suffered the worst-case scenario of having made Palmer vice-captain while playing your Triple Captain on Joao Pedro, well - although, yes, you wasted your triple-points chip, at least you only wound up with a -3; it has been known for heavily captained players to produce much bigger negative scores.

And at least Palmer didn't get a straight red card, and a three-match suspension. I think he certainly should have for the first foul, that petulant barge into Matheus Fernandes, which was pure retaliation for his wild challenge on Caicedo moments earlier. 

And arguably the second one - stepping on Gallagher's ankle late in the game - should have been a red card too: if it was a culpable action by Palmer, deserving of the yellow card Chris Kavanagh awarded (to produce the double-yellow sending-off), then the nature of the contact was serious enough to have possibly caused injury and must have been flying close to the threshold for a straight red. I don't think it was culpable: Gallagher slid in dangerously on Palmer, inserting his leg under Palmer's foot as he was about to put it down: the contact was brief, not heavy (Palmer actually pulled out of the step and picked his foot up again very quickly), and looked entirely accidental - he could not avoid treading on Gallagher in that moment, and it was Gallagher's fault. So, some Palmer owners will no doubt be wallowing in the injustice of that decision and claiming he shouldn't have been sent off at all - but he clearly should have been for the earlier foul.

Anyhow, he's only picked up a one-game ban for the double yellow card; and, thanks to the quirk that Premier League bans can be served in the League Cup, Palmer will be suspended for the Round of 16 tie at Anfield this Wednesday, and he won't miss any EPL/FPL time at all!  So, things could have been very much worse.

Of course, there is the slight problem that a lot of ignorant Premier League managers don't realise Palmer isn't banned next weekend (or they suddenly think he's become 'no good',... or they're vengeful because he 'let them down' so badly this past week...), and there's a big sell-off under way - which may force his price down. Alas, we just have to accept that with so many people in the game now, and so many of them being so dumb and so impulsive, the transfer market is extremely volatile - and we are occasionally going to suffer a loss of value in one of our key players for no good reason.

Dance of the Hours

Damn - it's that time of year, again.

The clocks in the UK go back again this weekend, ending the idyll of 'British Summer Time'. Over there, it suddenly starts getting dark really early. Over here (South-East Asia, my adopted home of the last several years), Premier League start-times are now 7 hours behind England rather than 6 hours - which puts all of the later kick-offs completely out of reach of a live watch. Bugger.

Just to make things even more discombulating for us poor folks on 'foreign soil',... the changeover happens in the early hours of Sunday morning back in the UK: so, today's games are at their 'normal' time, but... tomorrow's are an hour later. (All around my manor, there will be chaps turning up to sports bars at 8pm this Sunday and being bemused to find nothing happening.)

Winter - I do not like it, for so many, many reasons; but this is one of them.

A practical guide to better thinking

 

I was happy to stumble upon this the other day, a lecture delivered by John Cleese in 1991 on the theme of 'Creativity'.

Although the talk naturally includes a lot of jokes, it is fundamentally quite a serious exploration of the topic, and includes a lot of useful practical advice.

Cleese distinguishes two mental attitudes, 'open' and 'closed'. The latter is not entirely a bad thing: it's actually very useful for staying focused on task completion. But it is hopeless for more original thinking and problem-solving; for that, you need to work on recognising and cultivating the 'open' attitude. 

This really is one of the best sets of tips I've ever found for improving creative thinking - whether that is going to be directed towards writing, painting, launching a new business,... or picking an FPL squad. Well worth 35 minuts of your time.

Still chillin'....

 

Still 5 more days before our next FPL deadline....

In the first week of this inordinately long international break, time was dragging rather. But then I began to rather enjoy the unaccustomed leisure; indeed, it was feeling pleasantly like the summer break that we didn't really get this year, because of the extended World Cup.

The combination of a deluge of trading in the transfer window and an early international break means that it's pretty much impossible for any club to establish any settled form early in the season; and even if they had appeared to be doing so by Gameweek 5, the long halt in club training must surely have disrupted things again now. Effectively, we're resetting to the start of the season again, beginning again from nothing. I would not have liked to be playing the Wildcard over this international break because - as with choosing the initial squad at the start of the season - we'd all be essentially betting blind; we won't really have any idea which teams and individuals are in hot form for another two or three weeks yet; any changes you made to your squad between GW5 and GW6 are likely to be very soon regretted.

I think anyone who has been able to save their Wildcard should be able to reap much more benefit from it by playing it towards the end of this month, or at some point in November.

A little bit of Zen (113)

 

"If you don't know who the worst player at the table is - it's you."

Ancient poker wisdom

Long before I was an FPL player, I was a poker player. And I only started to get good at it when I started being able to recognise how good - or not - everyone else I was playing against was.

It's much the same with any game; it's much the same with FPL. It's always rather easier to recognise what's wrong with someone else's squad than it is to notice the flaws in your own; but if you can't even do that, then you really have a problem.

Most FPL managers seem to look at other people's teams just to copy some of the more apparently successful selections it contains. They'd do far better to critique what's wrong with it - even if it belongs to the current global leader or the guy who's winning their works league at a canter. Try not just to spot people's weaker picks, but make sure you understand exactly why it's a mistake; and recognise if it's likely to be part of a generic flaw in this manager's thinking - a blindspot, a prejudice that may lead them to make many similar errors.

When you get really good at doing that for others,... you may get better at doing it for yourself too. Study your opponents to better understand yourself.

The Last Days of Ringpulls

 

I believe the Cambodia beer brand (my long-time favourite) was the first to kick the idea off. About 7 or 8 years ago, they started a lottery-style promotion on their products, printing a certain proportion of the undersides of the ringpulls on their cans with symbols indicating an 'instant win' prize. The majority of these wins were just 'one free beer', but occasionally there'd be a small cash prize (I've been lucky enough to catch a few $5 and $10 ones over the years, and $1 prizes are relatively common; I believe there were - much rarer - instances of $20, $50 or $100 windfalls as well). And, once-in-a-blue-moon - or so the marketers protested - you might even win a moped, or - even more vanishingly rarely - an SUV.

This initiative proved to be so popular that all the other beer companies eventually felt obliged to follow suit. And the idea even started to spread to a few other locally-manufactured products, such as soft drinks. But the beer market was its natural home, and it soon became central to Cambodia's drinking culture - and, indeed, to much of its social culture. Comparing your fortunes with those of your companions over the course of an evening's consumption, assiduously storing up your winners to redeem at your favourite corner store, or donating them to a favourite bar to help ever so slightly with their stressed bottom-line (it became a common moral discussion as to whether one was actually obliged to hand over winning ringpulls if you'd got them in a bar or restaurant; a few places started coveting them so greedily that they instituted a policy of opening your ringpulls for you and retaining them automatically...), or giving them to street kids who seemed to come to value them more highly than just small change - these engaging oddities were all a central part of the experience of life in Cambodia for the last several years. In rural villages, the ringpulls apparently even became a convenient medium of exchange for small transactions.

The beer companies, I suspect, increasingly felt trapped in a vicious cycle of competition: the promotions were boosting sales, but they felt obliged to keep increasing the number and value of the prizes offered to maintain their market position against competitors - and it may often have been costing them more money than it was actually earning from increased revenue. In the first year or two of the campaign, when it was an exhilarating novelty, it was pretty easy to redeem small prizes anywhere - at any bar or restaurant or mom'n'pop shop. But the beer companies got increasingly cranky about paying out, making the redemption process for retailers increasingly bureaucratic, and reducing the amount they'd get paid (or so I've been told a few times; obviously I don't have direct experience of this - and I've only been a visitor rather than a resident in Cambodia for most of this period): when they started only reimbursing the wholesale rather than retail price of the most common 'free can of beer' prize, not unnaturally small store owners were no longer willing to give you a can for a single ringpull, and before long it became fairly standard that you needed two 'one free beer' ringpulls to claim one can. And the whole thing was apparently such a hassle that the majority of stores stopped having anything to do with it quite a few years ago. It became a bit of a Grail Quest to find an amenable neighbourhood shop that would still give you free beers for winning ringpulls. And it got to the point where you could usually only redeem cash prizes, even the very small ones, directly from the beer companies at one of their offices (and they are few and far between, not easy to find or access; the Cambodia beer company used to have a small one right in the centre of Battambang, my 'spiritual home', and for a while that was my go-to for cashing in on my winning tabs - but it closed down a few years ago...). So, for many of us, the shine had gone off the idea somewhat quite a long time since. And yet... it was now such an ingrained part of daily life that it had the comfort of the faimilar about it: it was one of those distinctive things about being in Cambodia, one of those unique local quirks that you couldn't help but feel warmly about (even if you weren't a beer drinker).

Even though I'd always do my best to redeem or give away my accumulated winning ringpull tabs in the last days of any visit here, there always seemed to be a few that I'd forgotten about (scattered obscurely in pockets of trousers and the bottom of rucksacks) and a few more that I'd only acquired on my final night or two. And so, every time I come back I have a little plastic baggie of ringpulls that will make my first few days of beer-drinking here pleasantly subsidised. And for the past few years there's been a cheery old bloke in a little corner shop in Battambang who has happily taken all of these tabs from me at a good rate, and even accepted my cash winners (at, I think, 75% of face-value). It's become one of the little rituals of life here that I really enjoy. Of course, the guy uses it as an excuse to boost sales, insisting that I can't really take less than a case for such a large number of discount ringpulls, and so I always end up having to pay a bit of cash as well; I don't mind at all. But then, of course, you're trapped in an endless cycle. The rate of winners, although very variable from case to case, is overall quite high. I'm guessing it's probably 30-40% for the 'free can' wins, and can occasionally be much higher. I think I have generally been particularly lucky (for possibly the one-and-only time in my life!), and have achieved an overall win rate well above 50%. So, for every largely 'free' case of beers I get from my favourite pusher in Battambang, I end up with another little baggie of ringpulls which has got me well on the way to needing to get another one.

Oh, but now this simple, silly pleasure is about to be squelched by the killjoy government. There have been dark rumours for two or three years now that, bowing to foreign pressure (the country is still heavily dependent on foreign aid to pay for most of its infrastructure, and foreign NGOs do a huge amount of work in the health and education sectors) to tackle excessive alcohol consumption, the Prime Minister was about to introduce measures to limit or ban these ringpull promotions. Indeed, it was widely believed that a complete ban was imminent in 2025, and many people told me then that a definite date for it had already been announced. It seems that was not in fact correct, and the government has been dragging its feet on announcing such legislation for a year or more, but.... finally, it seems, the ban really is happening. All such promotions are supposed to cease from October 1st. From what I've read online, it would appear that that is the date on which winning ringpulls should no longer be produced or sold. But, since it takes a while to clear out stocks, what actually seems to have happened is that the distribution of new winning ringpulls has already been phased out over the last month or so, and October 1st - or probably in fact September 30th - is being treated as the last day on which you can redeem them.

This imminent disappearance of what has become a cherished national institution has had a lot of rather weird little effects in the beer market ecosystem and in the drinking culture over this past month or so.....

People have always been a bit superstitious about certain stores or bars having a greater incidence of 'winners'; or about certain times of year being more propitious (that belief is in fact well-founded: the beer companies do indeed dramatically increase the proportion of small-prize ringpulls just before major holidays); or about certain cases being overstuffed with lucky tabs (probably so; but no-one ever seems to have discovered a reliable means of identifying them). This sentiment has been acutely heightened in the last days of the promotions: people are moving around to different bars, to try to find ones where they seem to be 'luckier'; some are even (sacrilege!) switching away from their preferred brand in the hopeful belief than an inferior rival may yield a higher percentage of wins.

The beer companies have also started putting out openly advertised non-lottery cans, to wean people back on to the idea of beer without prizes. But at the moment these are so universally shunned, and such is the value that people attach (probably exaggeratedly) to the prize promotion, that they have had to sell these at a substantially lower price. Bars which have tried to save money by preferring to buy these no-win cases are now pressured by their thrifty - and probably gambling-addicted - patrons to pass this saving on to them rather than keeping it for themselves. Much ugliness and pettiness has suddenly broken out as a result of this seemingly trivial adjustment to the country's marketing laws.

But all of this stress and furore will soon be over. Few of the winning ringpulls are still in circulation. And it would probably be difficult now to redeem them, in the last week before the ban formally takes effect. If I should acquire any more now, I think I'll probably just keep them - as a souvenir of a strange but happy time.

'But what has any of this got to do with FPL?' I imagine my notional reader asking.

Well, I have often commented on my discomfort and distaste for the strong element of gambling addiction involved in the appeal of the Fantasy Premier League game. And in my sidebar profile here I have labelled my own devotion to the game an addiction (jokingly; but all jokes have a core of devastating truth).

And the ringpull lottery is one of the purest, simplest forms of gambling there is. Interestingly, you don't really stake anything in the conventional sense (you're paying for the beer, not the 'lottery ticket' that goes with it - although, in effect, the beer companies have been charging you a small, invisible premium to participate in this lottery). But it occurs to me that what you're really always staking in a bet is your hopes and dreams, the possiblity of disappointment; a cash stake is just a concrete manifestation of that; it's the emotional investment that you really feel, it's that which gives you the thrill of success or the despair of failure.

And it has recently struck me that this is at the root of FPL's hold over us. We don't have to pay money to participate; but we do put a very heavy emotional investment into it.

And this realisation has led to the further thought that although many people protest that they want to prosper in the game by 'skill', to be acclaimed for their superior insight and judgement, that's just not the case at all, they are deluded. The appeal of the game lies precisely in the fact that it is almost entirely a matter of luck: we want something for nothing, we want to feel 'lucky', we want to feel 'blessed', we want to feel that Fate or Destiny or God or the Universe has been kind to us for once in our lives.

I feel we can never, or only very rarely, experience anything like that intensity of joy and validation from being justly rewarded for our skill and effort. And this, I think, is because dissatisfaction is the fundamental motivator for all animal life. We can't help it: that's just the way evolution has built us, that's why we've survived so long and prospered so well as a species - we almost always feel dissatisfied with everything. That's what makes us constantly strive for more. Even when we do receive reward or praise for our achievements, we tend to overvalue our own abilities, and so we inevitably feel that the praise/reward falls at least somewhat short of the due mark. And even if we might occasionally acknowledge that the level of praise/reward we receive is absolutely appropriate, we feel that it is no more than our just desert - and we don't get much of a thrill from it. We can imagine what such a thrill ought to feel like; we desperately want to experience that. But our satisfaction/dissatisfaction threshold is set too high. We still crave more: we feel we somehow deserve to be over-rewarded. And thus the accomplishments of our intellect, capabilities, industriousness - they rarely give us full or lasting satisfaction: we never feel that we are getting due recompense for being so smart and wonderful.

But when we find a winning ringpull, when we win a bet, when we have a good gameweek in FPL,.... for one brief, rare moment we are getting the thing we seem to most crave - being over-rewarded. We're getting something for nothing: and that is the best bloody feeling in the world.

Fantasy Premier League is so ridiculously enjoyable - and so insidiously addictive - precisely because it's nearly all LUCK, because whatever success we achieve in it feels essentially undeserved; and that gives us a ludicrous rush.

One further analogy comes to mind, though. Although the beer can ringpull lottery was heavily weighted towards customer satisfaction with a very generous win ratio, you could still occasionally hit a long succession of blank ringpulls. And those no-win experiences hurt, each and every one of them; every blank tab was a cruel taunt, it seemed to be scornfully jeering 'Loser!' at you. A long run of such blanks could be profoundly depressing. So too in FPL: a succession of low-scoring gameweeks, or even a single gameweek in which all of your top players fail to return.... deflates the spirits something awful. Getting that mood rollercoaster under control is, I think, the main challenge involved in playing the game: we have to try to learn to dismiss the bad results, to laugh them off; we can enjoy our occasional good gameweeks, but we must ignore the bad ones and not let them dishearten or annoy us.

Time to chill - Monday Music Break No. 4

 

Now that we have almost three weeks off before our next dose of Premier League action (and Fantasy Premier League vexation....), we should all try to make the best of the unaccustomed downtime.

There is no better soundtrack to studied indolence and carefree loafing than this - So, Relax from the inimitable Leon Redbone. This live rendition from a 1992 concert in Paris is even more deliciously soporific than the original studio recording above.

Let us all enjoy THE SILENCE for a while....

To Konsa, or not to Konsa?

Ezri Konsa is seen by many as being an irresistibly affordable 'route into the Arsenal defence'. And I can see that temptation: while he has a start in the team, he does indeed represent a very attractive 'value'. But as soon as he loses that start, he becomes a huge waste of money. And I think most of his recent adopters have been rather blindly over-optimistic about his prospects of keeping his start for very long.

Indeed, there does seem to have been quite a divergence of opinion on Konsa in the FPL community over the past few weeks: while he has now seen over 1,000,000 transfers in during that period, he's also suffered around 530,000 transfers out - and his price did in fact briefly dip down to 4.4 million just after his move to Arsenal (either managers were shocked/disappointed when he didn't immediately start, or just recognised that his prospects of a regular start might now be much lower; Villa are a much weaker defensive team, but at least he would have been playing every single minute for them).

Those who rushed in for Konsa now feel vindicated because he's started the last two games. They mostly seem to have been convincing themselves that he was always bound to move into the Arsenal side almost immediately, and would remain a fixture until Saliba is fully fit again (which seems as though it might be at least a couple more months). But the only arguments they seemed to be able to adduce for this bold assumption were that he was an England player (well, yes; but he's only just started becoming a first-choice starter - and England have been conspicuously short of much established quality to draw upon in the centre-back position for a while now; so, that's really not a very powerful recommendation) and that Arsenal wouldn't have paid over 50 million quid for him just to be a bench player (although they have recently spent a ton of money on players like Gyokeres, Eze, and Guimaraes - who are obviously going to spend most of their time on the bench); both rather spurious justifications, relying on 'status' rather than merit.

The fact is, Konsa has only got the chance to be integrated into the starting lineup so quickly because Christhian Mosquera suffered a muscle injury. This problem appears to be fairly minor, and he might be available for selection again any day now; indeed, Arteta hinted that he might have been ready to participate against Sunderland at the weekend (although, in fact, he was not even on the bench). I like Konsa and rate him fairly highly; but I don't think he's clearly better than Mosquera, who has looked absolutely outstanding whenever he's been called upon to deputise for Saliba over the last 12 months. 

And even if Konsa did offer potential advantages over Mosquera in certain aspects of his game, a defence relies very heavily on its members developing a close rapport with the rest of the back-line and the keeper: a rapport that depends not only on an intimate understanding of teammates' strengths and weaknesses, their style of play and style of communication on the pitch, but on the underlying personal relationships too - a deep trust that grows out of genuine camaraderie and friendship; that level of understanding doesn't come about overnight. Moreover, Arteta is a notoriously detail-oriented coach, and you might expect that it may take some weeks - if not perhaps even a couple of months - before a new player could fully absorb all of his tactical precepts. For these reasons alone, I thought - and still think - it unlikely that Konsa would be preferred for an immediate starting spot in the Arsenal defence over more established players, unless an injury crisis creates an opening for him.

I would certainly prefer Mosquera to Konsa - at least for now - if only for his experience within Arteta's system and his familiarity with the rest of the defensive unit. But I'm not Mikel Arteta! Who knows the mind of Mikel Arteta?? Many Arsenal fans like to assume that they do; but they're deluding themselves.

There are other strong options - possibly/probably stronger than Konsa! - for the role of Saliba's stand-in as well. Timber's now recovered from injury, and has occasionally played in that second centre-back slot quite capably. I can see Arteta might be a bit concerned about his physical suitability for the role (he's only about 5'10" tall, so probably lacks the commanding aerial presence of most of his other centre-back options), but he could slot in at right-back or left-back, allowing White or Calafiori to partner Gabriel. Hincapie too could play in that position, or take over at left-back, again allowing White or Calafiori to move into the centre.

So, Konsa cannot as yet be regarded as a nailed starter, the obvious, usual first choice. And even if he does soon appear to have become such, with so many other strong candidates for a start in defence, it seems doubtful to me that he can ever be relied upon as an invariable starter.

And even if Konsa does get a regular run of starts, he's under a lot of pressure from the 'club quota' too. With so many Arsenal players clamouring for consideration in an FPL squad, is his cheapness really a decisive recommendation? Konsa doesn't seem likely to offer very much attacking threat, and with Arsenal dominating possession so easily against most teams, he might not produce that many 'defcon' points either (Gabriel is the only Arsenal defender who's regularly registering those so far). Calafiori is looking much the most appealing pick from the Arsenal defence, with a regular prospect of assists or goals as well as his share of the collective clean sheet bonuses. But White has also looked a very strong option; and Timber will probably become so as well, if he regains a regular start. Odegaard and Saka have started the season in blistering form; Rice is likely to again be a very dependable source of midfield points; the new winger Tzolis has shown a lot of promise; Kai Havertz is gaining attention as a potential 2nd/3rd forward pick; and David Raya is currently by far the most popular goalkeeper pick (with nearly 40% ownership; I don't agree with it myself - several of the 5.0 and 4.5-million-pound options are likely to at least do very nearly as well; but after his penalty save against Sunderland, he is for now at the top of the goalkeeper charts, so his owners aren't likely to reconsider their choice for a while). 

I think it's a bad idea to treble up on any team this early in the season. Apart from anything else, it's nice to be able to keep the fexibility to easily bring in a third player when form or fixtures strongly encourage it (will Havertz clearly establish himself as a leading forward option? will Tzolis hit a hot streak?). And you really don't ever want to be more than doubled-up from the same club in one area of the pitch. So, if you already have Calafiori and another Arsenal defender or David Raya, there simply isn't any room for Konsa. And if you pick Konsa over one of those other Arsenal options (perhaps one you already owned, and chose to let go) - are you sure that money you saved is going to buy you more points in another area of the pitch than it would have done by sticking with Calafiori (or White or Raya or Gabriel or whoever)??

Perhaps Konsa will keep his start over Mosquera and the rest. Perhaps he'll get a long run of games for the next two or three months. Perhaps he'll luck into one or two headed goals and get some strong 'defcon' returns. And perhaps he'll prove to be not only the cheapest Arsenal defender but one of their best points-returners too. But to me, none of those things seem terribly likely. This selection might work out,.... but it is a very big gamble. (Not the sure thing his adopters are trying to convince themselves it is!!)

An irresistible bit of pep-me-up - Monday Music Break No. 2

Austrian keyboard-player and experimental composer Joe Zawinul was playing a kind of 'Fantasy Football' with musicians when he founded his electronic jazz-pop band Weather Report at the beginning of the 1970s, filling the constantly evolving lineup with a series of outrageous talents: saxophonist Wayne Shorter was a long-time mainstay, but at various times the group also included fantastic drummers like Chester Thompson, Alex Acuña and Omar Hakim, and the legendary bassist Jaco Pastorius - here plucking out the opening melody on his favourite fretless bass. This is their best-known piece, Birdland, the exuberant extended instrumental which opened their 1977 album 'Heavy Weather'. 

I once saw a cartoon strip that joked that it was simply impossible to remain depressed while listening to this piece of music. Unfortunately, I can't now track that down online; but I wholeheartedly agree. I discovered this band when I was at college during the 1980s, and this track soon became a regular go-to adrenalin jolt for me whenever I needed to shake myself out of the mood doldrums, or just get myself energised for an early start to the day after a heavy night-before.

The video above is a live performance from a 1978 concert at the Stadthalle Offenbach in Offenbach am Main, Germany (unfortunately, there is one annoying skip in it, near the end). The original album version - purportedly recorded (at least according to Jaco's later recollection) in a single take - can be found here.

If you like this, Youtube currently has a complete recording of the band's 1976 appearance at the Montreux Jazz Festival.

If you've just had another wretched gameweek in FPL,.... this is just what you need to blow the cobwebs out of your head and send you into the new week in a more upbeat frame-of-mind.

A cruel game, indeed!

"Why you gotta be so mean...?"

A record number of FPL managers punted their first Triple Captain chip on Erling Haaland this weekend, anticipating a goal-fest against the previously dismal promoted team, Coventry City. But this week, Coventry were actually quite good, nearly got something out of the game; and the Lanky Viking failed to convert a few chances you'd usually expect him to put away with casual insolence. He might have had a hattrick - but instead returned only a relatively modest 9 points. Cherki set him up beautifully for his two best chances and might have had 2 assists in the game - but came away with nothing.

Calafiori had a goal disallowed for a teammate's offence, then lost his clean sheet bonus through an uncharacterisic lapse by David Raya,... and got booked: he might have reaped 14 or 15 points from the game, but only came away with 1 point! (Oh, no - apparently he wasn't booked, after all. Well, that's a relief: 2 points!!)

Saka and Palmer both played well without managing to register an attacking contribution and ended up with blanks.

Few teams managed to keep a clean sheet (apart from, improbably, the till now woefully awful Spurs and Villa!).

Yep, all the players that I owned had a misfiring week. I think I've got a pretty good squad; and they all played pretty well this weekend. But they returned a miserable 44 points for me. (Without that goal from Jaden Bogle, I would have been below the gameweek average - wretched thought! Oh god, in fact I was - well under!!!)

So it goes. This is a harsh, brutal, unfair, frustrating game. The only reason we play it, really, is to school our anger management...

The NERVE!!

I was asking Google the other day how many people might have played their Triple Captain chip on Bruno Fernandes in Gameweek 2 (and, of course, it was taking a long time to admit it didn't know...).

And its bloody AI - which now hijacks every single search query, even if you haven't selected the 'AI' option - offered to 'help' me select my FPL team.

I was fretting before the start of the season that AI was probably going to ruin the game before long. It may already be happening. 

So many FPL managers seem to be incapable of - or at least unwilling to - select their own teams, and they're probably all leaning on AI suggestions to do the job for them now. Are there any 'real' players still out there, players relying on their own judgement - rather than cheating???

Not many, I fear; not many.

'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.

Why all this WAITING?? (Monday Music Break - No. 1)

FPL always used to aim to confirm all match details (sometimes tweaking the BPS numbers or reallocating contested assists and whatnot) and finalize everyone's scores and league rankings within an hour or two of the gameweek's last match finishing.

But this year they've switched to not confirming everything until 9am the following morning (UK time). And that might be only a guideline, a 'good intention', a hopeful target: last week, it appeared to be quite a bit later than that. (I wonder if the Lords of FPL Towers are just too tight-fisted to pay staff overtime for all-night working any more??)

This means that in my timezone (East Asia, currently UTC+6) we perhaps won't be getting the gameweek's details straight until quite late the following afternoon. It is a little bit of a pain-in-the-behind.

But it did remind me of this song....  Lonely Boy by Ohio indie rock duo, The Black Keys. I confess I had always thought it was called 'I got a love that keeps me waiting' - which is the more powerful hook.

I wouldn't necessarily call this a major favourite of mine. It sounds great, and the hook is enormous - but I feel it kind of fails to deliver on that promise: it's like a placeholder lyric that is never developed into anything. Though there's something intriguingly meta in a song about frustration being itself inherently frustrating! The video plays into that a bit as well: whoever thought of having a dance video that doesn't properly show the dancing (no feet?!)?? Ah, so often mere irritation is a key part of a song's earworm quality....

Coincidentally, this band is on tour in the UK at the moment - three more gigs over the next few days.

Music is one of the great passions of my life; an even greater one than football, in fact! And I have dropped a few favourite songs here on the blog before. I've been thinking for a while of making that more of a feature - so, this is the beginning of a projected regular series of musical pick-me-ups to start the week.

What's up, BBC??

It has for many years been one of the central comforting rituals of my life to catch up on Saturday's Premier League action over a good cup of coffee on a Sunday morning, with the BBC's iconic 'Match of the Day' highlights programme on the iPlayer.

But this weekend, Auntie Beeb was trying to spoil my Sunday pleasure. Saturday's 'Match of the Day' somehow did not exist. Well, it did, of course - but it was stubbornly invisible to the in-site search engine. And it didn't even appear on the programme's 'Series page', which is supposed to archive all the currently available episodes.

I had to find the daily archive of Saturday's programme schedule and scroll down to the bottom to find 'Match of the Day' in its usual late-night slot (typically starting at around 11pm, UK time). Such a bother!

It's an oversight in the 'indexing', it would appear: they've posted the programme without putting up any of the usual links to other parts of the site that let you know it's there. I wonder if this is just a piece of carelessness by some overworked drone at the Television Centre, or a transient technical glitch, or.... if the bastards are actually 'hiding' the programme deliberately,... perhaps to try to promote the new(ish) feature of making individual match highlights available. (These are, admittedly, quite handy if you're in a hurry - or if you just want to easily rewatch one particularly entertaining game - but they are just the game action; there's none of the post-match discussion and analysis, and you don't even get the team lineups at the start; so, they're a very poor substitute for the normal programme.)

I am now waiting trepidatiously to see if the Sunday edition will 'appear' as normal in the next hour or so....

A little bit of Zen (109)

 

"I need ammunition - not a ride."

Volodymyr Zelenskyy

The Ukrainian President's concise and stupendously badass response to Joe Biden's offer of sending American Special Forces to help safely extract him from the country in the hours after Putin's invasion began in February 2022 should be an inspiration to all of us - in FPL, as in other areas of life. So many FPL managers we see on the online forums are just looking for a safe way out, for a free ride - 'Please, tell me who to pick.'  They should be looking for ideas, information, perspectives: things that will help them develop their thinking about the game, and enable them to start making better decisions for themselves.  That is what I try to do when I respond to such online queries. 

I never want to tell people who they should pick; I want to try to help people understand how to make better picks. You need 'ammunition', not a ride.

Here we go again....!!

 

"We must imagine Sisyphus happy."

Albert Camus

This game we so love and hate does seem very like the famous mythical punishment in Hell: endless toil, constant setback... ultimate futility.

We must learn to value the effort expended for its own sake, to celebrate the endeavour to achieve, rather than achievement itself.

Only about 14 hours to go now until the first kick-off of the new season:

 Arsenal v Coventry - at 8 pm, UK time. 

Stand by your boulders....

[Yes, this is a re-post from last year and the year before. But it is so inescapably appropriate that I'm going to use it every year.  I have a deep connection with the Myth of Sisyphus.]

But first, this....

I shall be attempting, a little later today, to put together a few thoughts on this season's initial FPL selection dilemmas.

But I'm still buzzing from that really fantastic World Cup we enjoyed last month, and wanted to revisit one of its outstanding moments: Cabo Verde's stunning extra-time equaliser against Argentina in the 'Round of 16', an absolute pinger from their young full-back, Sidny Lopes Cabral - subsequently voted the 'Goal of the Tournament'.  [FIFA seem to be churlishly blocking embedded video of their highlights - at least in certain territories - but I think this should still work for everyone if you click the 'Watch on Youtube' button (though you might have to watch the full highlights, rather than being taken straight to the Lopes Cabral screamer).]

That was a goal celebrated by the whole world (yes, even Argentinians should have been able to appreciate it, should have relished being made to work so hard for their progression). It's good to have the occasional thing like this that can bring us all together.

Does it 'matter' this year??

 

The traditional curtain-raiser to the new season, the Community Shield, kicks off this Sunday afternoon (though, for some reason, it's in Cardiff rather than London this year?!).  I've said before that in recent years, the two participants have been tending to take this game much more seriously than in the past, treating it as a valuable final warm-up - much more competitive than any of the other pre-season games - and as an opportunity to establish an early psychological edge over a rival. That is particularly the case, of course, when the two teams - the winners of last year's League and FA Cup trophies - are the likely frontrunners for this year's league title. That doesn't always happen; but this year, Arsenal and Manchester City are indeed the two favourites to become the Premier League Champions of 2027 - so, there's a lot to play for: this could be a 'dry run' for this season's title chase.

And for us FPL enthusiasts, we could see - for the first (and only!) time in pre-season - some reliable indications of the preferred lineups, and the likely early form of these teams and players.

There is particular curiosity - anxiety - about what part Erling Haaland may play in the game. He only finally returned to training from his extended post-World Cup holiday in the last few days, and so it may be doubtful if he's able to take part at all. If he doesn't feature, or gets only very short minutes. there will be major concerns that he might not be ready to play in City's opening league game against Bournemouth, at The Etihad next Sunday. And, since he costs a whopping 15.5 million quid in the game this year, that might prompt a lot of people to go without him in Gameweek 1, feeling that they should use some of that huge chunk of budget on a forward who's more certain to contribute a full 90 minutes.

The problem with this is, of course, that because Haaland is so much more expensive than every other player (3.5 million more than this year's only other 'super-premium', Bruno Fernandes; 6.5 million more than the second most expensive forward, Alexander Isak), you can't very well put all of that extra budget to use if you're only expecting to go without him for one or two weeks; you need to be swapping him for one other expensive player, and leaving the considerable surplus in the kitty (unless you're also committed to using your 1st Wildcard straight away, so you can make multiple changes to the squad when you bring him in). Well, you could also wait a few weeks, and save up transfers - or even take a few hits - so that you could bring him in alongside multiple other changes, and thus have all, or at least most, of the initial budget put to work in your selection. But we rarely have that luxury to use transfers at will early in the season; there are usually large numbers of forced changes thrust on us through early injuries, or players being in terrible form or just unexpectedly dropped.

I have a further concern that unless his ownership level is very high (it's currently at 73.5%, which, I fear, is not quite high enough - and it might drop a little from this peak if there are major worries about whether he's going to start next week), there's a danger of being caught out by a price rise. It will be difficult to anticipate when the fence-sitters decide to come in for him, and there might be a sudden jump in price,... perhaps even during that opening weekend (especially if he scores a brace off the bench in that first match!!); and that might happen while many of us are asleep.... At the start of the season, a shortfall of even 100k in your budget can be a massive inconvenience, because most of us are maxed out on our spending on the initial squad, and most the price-steps are still at the original 500k minimum intervals; hence, a single price movement can leave you unable to afford everyone at a particular price-point (and perhaps unable to afford anyone at all, if you want to offload a 4.0-million-pound 'budget enabler'). If Haaland's initial ownership level is up around 80%, I think we'd be fairly well insulated from that danger, because there's always a substantial minority of naysayers who just don't like him (or, more likely, don't like City), or have obstinately committed to doing without him for the season to use the budget elsewhere; so, even if he were to score a hattrick off the bench against Bournemouth, the number of new managers coming in for him should be relatively modest; and when the starting ownership level is that vast, you need really huge numbers of purchasers to move the price-dial any further - it becomes just about impossible. But if the ownership number is down around 70% or even lower,.... I think I'd take the chance on having him from the get-go. 

This is really no different to any other gameweek; there's always a chance that Haaland is going to miss a start here or there, after picking up a minor knock, catching a cold, or just getting rested before a big European game. This is why you have a decent 3rd forward - someone you won't start every week, someone you might hardly use at all, but someone who'll hopefully give you fairly decent points whenever you do need to use him.

Moreover, I don't like the idea of committing to transfers - let alone multiple transfers or a possible early Wildcard - just to bring in a key player for a particular gameweek. At the start of the season we are facing so many uncertainties: lots of players go down with injuries ('trying too hard' while not yet fully match-fit), lineups get unsettled by arrivals or departures during the transfer window, some teams or players are mysteriously out-of-form while others may be unexpectedly super-hot. We very often have to make multiple transfers - or reach for that early Wildcard - anyway, without having made 'plans' to bring in Haaland a week or two late.

But if the big Viking gets a decent run-out on Sunday and looks sharp,... this will all be moot: he'll be in at least 80% of teams by next Friday!

[I have moved to Danang for this weekend - purely because it is reputed to be the one place in Vietnam with a few decent sports bars where I might be able to watch the game... Fingers crossed! Since bloody TNT Sports acquired the rights to the game last year, we don't even get highlights on BBC or ITV any more.]

[So, Haaland started, and played about an hour: not fully sharp, but no real issue with his fitness. The bigger concern arises from the rest of his team: everybody else looked miles off it - even Donnarumma - and they're clearly still struggling to get to grips with Maresca's desired style of play. They have so many excellent players that I imagine things will start clicking for them fairly soon, but.... they're looking a very dodgy prospect for the opening few games of the season.

The weirdest and most worrying aspect of yesterday's unexpectedly one-sided Community Shield was that while Arsenal fielded what was largely a 'B team' (no Rice, Zubimendi, Saka, Gyokeres, Timber, Saliba....), City, with the exception of Kovacic, were putting out something much closer to a full-strength side, pretty much what we might expect them to start with against Bournemouth. Ouch.]

The rise of 'the idiocracy' (again)

Around this time last year, I shared this video from the Philosophy Coded Youtube channel, on Dietrich Bonhoeffer's analysis of 'wilful ignorance' as a mass phenomenon (Bonhoeffer was a German pastor, famously martyred for his opposition to the Nazis; so, he was probably thinking particularly of the Germans' complacency in accepting Hitler's rise to power in the early 1930s).

The other week I discovered another interesting discussion of Bonhoeffer's ideas on this topic from Jonny Thompson of the Big Think channel in the video above. (Apparently there's an extended version of this talk, although I haven't yet had the chance to watch that to see what more it adds.)  Thompson observes that there was a similar concept - 'amathia' (ἀμαθία, the rejection of learning or understanding) - in Ancient Greek philosophy. Unfortunately, we do see rather a lot of this 'sticking one's head in the sand' in the realm of FPL; managers cling to their superstitions and prejudices in defiance of reason, they follow the promptings of supposed 'experts' or just fall in with the herd - rather than taking the trouble to think for themselves. Like the gadfly Socrates, I am always trying to goad people into original thought - and it makes me very unpopular on many of the forums!

And if that hasn't got you depressed enough about humanity,.... Philosophy Coded has a follow-up video on Bonhoeffer's ideas.