The distant laughter of the Fantasy Gods....

 

On Saturday - when half the world had bet their precious Triple Captain chip on him - the great Erling Haaland played like a man who'd been heavily on the lash on Friday night....

But just three days later, he comes up with a goal and 2 assists, for what would have been a very decent return on the TC chip!!!

The pagan gods who preside over the realm of FPL are not just cruel and capricious, but fond of mockery; it is not enough for them to smash our hopes, they must then taunt us in the midst of our despair.

But really, backing Haaland against Leeds was the 'right' choice, Fulham are a way better team than Leeds, and this match was on their home ground: it was not nearly so favourable a prospect for a big haul from the lanky Viking. (But then, neither were the Bournemouth or Everton games; or even Burnley or Wolves.....! It's impossible to predict with any confidence when the big hauls are going to happen.)

Triple unhappiness!

 

Oh dear, the great Triple Captain play on Erling Haaland this weekend (Gameweek 13 of our 25/26 EPL/FPL season) really went BADLY.

But in times of tribulation like this, it is good to try to mainain a sense of perspective.

For one thing, an awful lot of people were in the same boat: the great majortiy of still active managers in the game were probably playing the chip in this gameweek. 

And things could have been so much worse. He might have felt an injury in the warm-up and not even started. He might have got injured, or just been subbed off early by Pep, before the 60-minute mark. (And we should feel especially grateful every time a favourite player escapes a serious injury in a game, not for the impact that might have on our FPL points hopes, but for the man himself - and for the fact that we have not been denied the pleasure of watching him play for the rest of the season, or a big chunk of it.) He might have been given a yellow card, or perhaps even a red one. (Not very likely with Haaland: his disciplinary record is very good. But you never know.... Weird shit happens sometimes!)

It is quite common for captain and Triple Captain picks in FPL to register only 1 point or 0 points in a game - or even, occasionally, negative points.

So, the Haaland TC play this weekend, while very, very disappointing, was not an utter disaster. Those happen too; and this wasn't one of them. Perspective.

It was not even a particularly unlikely - and thus should not have been a completely unexpected - outcome. Captain and Triple Captain picks are going to return a blank somewhere between 1-in-2 and 1-in-3, even at the best.

When Fate shits on you like this, all you can do.... is hope that you're going to get a 1-in-3 unusually good outcome next year!

Another little breather....

 

Yet another international break is upon us. We should really be grateful for a little bit of a rest from the relentless grind of the FPL season,.... and yet, and yet we do tend to fret at the sudden absence of our usual preoccupations and anxieties at the end of the week.

'Withdrawal symptoms'!!

More on the Sisyphus metaphor

My (becoming) regular likening of the FPL experience to the mythical labour of Sisyphus at the start of each season... just reminded me of this little oddity. I hope it will amuse. It is a story that came to me in a dream, a quarter of a century or so ago. (Really)

I am in a desert environment, a hot, dusty plain - almost completely featureless but for a large hill just in front of me.

Half-way up the hill, I see a brawny man grunting and sweating as he struggles to turn over a large, round-ish boulder.  He eventually succeeds in flipping it over once, pauses for just a few moments, and then sets to trying to do it again.  The stone is clearly enormously heavy, and it is painfully hard work: he is endeavouring to move it uphill.

I approach, fascinated.  I'm tempted to offer to help him move this rock, but feel embarrassed as to how to do this. And the man is anyway too intent on his labours to notice me.

At last, he manages to get the boulder to the top of the hill, and then, with one last huge heave, he sends it toppling over the crest and rolling - skipping, bouncing, crashing - down the far slope under its own weight, raising a cloud of dust behind it as it goes, scattering smaller stones left and right, smashing the occasional withered tree or cactus that stands in its path.

The man whoops and hollers with delight as he watches the boulder's descent.  Then he trots down the hill after it.

I catch up to him at the foot of the hill, just as he has once again started toiling to roll it back to the top.

"Say, that does look kind of fun," I say, sheepishly.  "Could I have a try?"

And Sisyphus (for it is he) replies, "Get your own f***ing rock!"

In FPL-land, I feel this should remind us to make our own selections, and keep our teams to ourselves. Each of us has his own boulder to push; and we should not seek, or offer, help in that task.

Yes, everything's a potential metaphor for me.

When will it end....?

 

For some weeks already, many of the FPL hordes online have been griping and fretting about how long the summer break between our seasons drags on; they are becoming painfully frustrated by the seemingly endless wait for the next session of Fantasy Premier League to be launched....

Patience, patience - if will be here soon enough. Far too soon, really!

The new launch date migrates around the month of July quite a bit (perhaps occasionally delayed by upgrades to the site in progress - we can but hope!!); but in general, it's round about now. 

They probably don't want to launch while a major tournament is under way: that would seem impolite,... and it probably wouldn't work in their own favour either, as people's attention might be mostly elsewhere on the date of launch. In the past, though, they've often started trailing new player pricings during the last week or so of the big summer tournament, and that hasn't happened yet this time - so, maybe something is holding things up a bit?

Most of the Premier League clubs have been reassembling their squads this week, to begin their pre-season preparations. And - amazingly! - a few actually have a first warm-up game scheduled this coming weekend. I would usually have expected the Big Announcement of the FPL relaunch to happen early next week,.... but they do love their pre-season teasers so much: I can't see them doing it until at least a week after they've done their first information-drop about the new pricings. So,.... maybe the very end of next week, or early the week after?

We shouldn't be too bothered about this anyway!  The only relevance of the new launch date is the somewhat unfair (but to me, ultimately unimportant) rules wrinkle that date of registration is used as an additional tiebreaker for rankings, after number of transfers made.

I say I find that little detail unimportant and irrelevant because rank is an irrelevance anyway, no true measure of merit; and if you gain a few ranking places simply by virttue of having rushed to sign up for the game early, can you really take any pride in that?? This tiebreak rule can have a huge impact early on, but its significance diminishes as the season progresses. By the end of the year, it's very unlikely to have much bearing on the positions at the very top of the table, as they tend to be extremely spread out on points alone - certainly, the global No. 1 is almost invariably way out on their own. And it makes absolutely no difference to me if I finish in 41,000th or 42,000th spot, or 150,000th or 155,000th: these numbers are meaningless.

But if you are intent on gaining such a trivial and unjust advantage over your peers, what you should do is: Watch for word of the relaunch over the coming days, log back into your account as soon as you see this (they seem to demand that you change your password every bloody year, which is a royal pain-in-the-behind...), use the Auto-Select option to generate a preliminary squad and 'submit' that.

Then.... LOG OUT, and DON'T LOOK at the site again until after the Community Shield on August 10th.

Really. As I said in one of my earliest pieces on this blog, it is actively harmful to spend time going through endless draft squads weeks before the season even kicks off. You will only just be starting to form a picture of tactics, lineups, and possible form and confidence for the various teams on the basis of their later pre-season games in early August. And there will still be some big transfer news - and, alas, probably also some big injury news - in that final week before the Big Kick-Off on August 15th. [Full schedule for next season's fixtures.]

So, you will not have adequate information for making any Initial Squad selections until.... Friday 15th August. Beginning to make decisions before that is utterly pointless. It is worse than pointless, it is positively detrimental - because once you've made a decision, it is very difficult to unmake it: the human brain just doesn't like doing that (even with decisions that you're trying to regard as tentative, provisional, contingent, or whatever....). 

What you're doing when you start making 'preliminary decisions' about your squad way before the new season starts... is just hard-wiring prejudices into your thinking which will, more often than not, work against you. DON'T DO IT!!

Emptiness

 

An international break so early in the season?? It doesn't seem right, does it?

Just as we were starting to get back into the swing of the FPL season, all the comforting little weekly rituals of checking for last-minute team news and so on... suddenly snatched away from us! It is easy to feel bereft, resentful.

But we should EMBRACE THE VOID.  Having a bit of time off to clear our minds, to attend to other things a while... should be good for our mental health generally, and for our selection perspicacity when we return to the fray in another week. Enjoy the silence....

DON'T jump the gun!

The Fantasy Premier League official website (and accompanying Facebook page) started getting active again even while EURO 2024 was still in progress, gradually teasing selected new player pricings during the last few days of the tournament... and then relaunching the game for the new season only two or three days after Spain's triumph in the Final.

And immediately the FPL forums were flooded with people anxiously obsessing over every little snippet of leaked information... AND sharing endless variations of DRAFT SQUADS. More than FOUR WEEKS before the season kicks off!!!  [The opening game this year is an evening kick-off between Manchester United and Fulham on Friday 16th August; the main programme gets under way on Saturday 17th.]

I know I'm not exactly modelling the best example here, with the amount of time I've spent writing for this blog over the last week, but.... there is such a thing as an  FPL/Life Balance, people! And spending hours and hours fretting about the game in pre-season is not conducive to maintaining that.

So much might yet happen before the Big Kick-Off - valuable hints about form and tactics and likely team selections  (not many, perhaps, but some...) emerging in the pre-season friendlies, players arriving or leaving in the summer transfer window, and, unfortunately, INJURIES. There really is no point in trying to select a squad - even provisionally - when we really have no idea who's going to be playing (and for which team!) on the GW1 weekend in mid-August. There is no point in even thinking about it.

It's not just a WASTE OF TIME - it's positively a BAD IDEA, something that will almost certainly lead to you making WORSE DECISONS about your selections.

Because of the way the human brain works... if you start looking at the player options, and allowing yourself to think, even vaguely, about possible squads, you will inevitably start making some decisions about your likely squad: decisions based on inadequate, incomplete, soon-to-be-outdated information; hence, in many cases at least, WRONG decisions. You probably won't be very self-aware about this; well, if you're even a little aware of it at the time, you'll almost certainly forget about it very quickly. But these proto-decisions - not always outright selections, but foundatioinal preferences and prejudices and assumuptions that will have a massive influence on selections - are mostly forming deep in your subconscious; and once they're there, they're very difficult to displace. The deep-rooted cognitive bias in favour of self-consistency means that once you've made a choice like this, it's very, very difficult for you to change your mind about it (especially if you don't realise you've made that choice, and/or don't know why you've made it!). There's a similar, very dangerous phenomenon called the 'anchoring bias' - which means you're very likely to make decisions based on the first one or two pieces of information you look at.

Anyone who's picked a squad two or three or four weeks out from the start of the season is VERY unlikely to have picked a good one. And they're also much less likely to be able to pick a good one later on... than someone who only starts pondering the options after the Community Shield.  [This year, the season's traditional curtain-raiser is being played between Manchester City and Manchester United on Saturday 10th August.]

I know I put out a BIG POST about 'How to pick the initial squad' just a few days ago...  I'm SORRY: I just wanted to get it out there in plenty of time before the start of the season, to give people a chance to discover it. I did not mean to encourage anyone to start trying to pick their squad straight away. (Bookmark that link, and come back to it in a week or two!)

The best time - the ONLY sensible time - to pick a squad for the new FPL season is.... on the afternoon of Friday 16th August.

Really, that is absolutely a TOP TIP!!  Try it next year.