Putting the band back together

I washed up in the Lao P.D.R. at the beginning of the Covid emergency, and got happily 'stuck' there for the next six years. It was, overall, a pretty fortunate place to be stuck in during that difficult time.

I'd already visited several times prior to 2020; in fact, my connection to the country now stretches back a decade or so. Thus, it is rather sad to be reflecting I might now be leaving it for the last time - or at least, for the last time for the foreseeable future.

I actually gave up my residence here back in April, but find Fate conspiring to drive me back here on a 'visa run' - hence, an unplanned final farewell to my old home.

One of the things I've so enjoyed about living there is that the 'national beer', Beer Lao - or Beerlao, as the slightly eccentric branding likes to render it - really is very good, one of the most consistent and best tasting to be found anywhere in Asia. And while in a hot climate a basic lager style of drink is always very welcome, I have found myself gravitating more towards some of this brewery's more niche products: Beer Lao Dark, a pleasantly nutty faux stout with a bit of extra alcoholic heft to it (6.5%); Beer Lao IPA (my beer of choice, when I can find it; although, unfortunately, it never seems to have gained any popularity among local drinkers, so supply can be a bit sporadic); and the 'new kid on the block', only launched within the last year, Beer Lao Lemon*.

I have determined to take an example of each of these brews back to Cambodia with me, to enjoy this weekend. (You can find them all occasionally - well, all except the Lemon variety - in Cambodia; but there they are novelty imports, and hence rather dauntingly expensive).

* I am in general a great sceptic about 'fruit beers'. When I lived in China, the main breweries there would often come out with some sort of novelty product that was allegedly flavoured with lemon or orange or mango or pineapple or durian or somesuch; but they were invariably horrible - sickly sweet, and tasting of chemicals-masquerading-as-fruit rather than the fruit itself. However, in a spirit of completeness, I gave the new Beer Lao Lemon a try, and was fairly bowled over by it! It's not just a bizarre beer-with-an-artificial-essence-of-lemon, but beer with lemonade - a 'shandy' as we call it in the UK. And that is what most British drinkers are weaned on: the drink your parents can get away with ordering for you in a pub even when you're barely half the legal drinking age. The drink, indeed, that you can buy legally in corner shops and supermarkets, even as a kid. The popular brands had a fairly negligible amount of alcohol, much less than 0.5%, I think - which presumably allowed them to be legally categorised as 'non-alcoholic' and put on unrestricted sale; though that is still a fairly hefty whack of the insidious poison for a small child, and I can remember a few occasions where I chugged two or three cans of the stuff in quick succession and got fairly light-headed as a result.

And the thing is.... well, not only is Beer Lao Lemon absolutely delicious, it also replicates very precisely the flavour of the common 'low-alcohol' brands ('Panda Shandy' comes particularly to mind, though there were several others) which were central to the childhoods of Englishmen growing up in the '70s and '80s (and perhaps since; but I haven't been doing any growing up since then); and so it brings on veritable swoons of nostalgia. But it also brings on a rather pleasant light-headedness, positively ambushes you with it, in fact. Because it tastes so exactly reminiscent of those not-really-alcoholic kiddie shandies of my far-off youth, I expect it to have the same lack of impact on my sobriety. But.... while it's alcohol content is a fairly modest 3.5%,.... that is probably about 10x to 20x as strong as dear old Panda Shandy; and so, it takes you by surprise a bit. A very pleasant surprise, but one you have to be a little bit wary of: it tastes like a soft drink, but it most definitely isn't.

Halloween Music Break

 

I've never had much time for Halloween parties and such. (It's just not a thing in England; or at least, it wasn't in the time of my childhood...) But over the past several years I have become a big fan of the zestful Spanish cover band Broken Peach (as soon as you see them, you think they're a band you'd like to hire for a private party!). And they've made it a tradition over the past dozen or so years to put out a special video every Halloween, in which they all don the kind of ghoulish skeletal costume and make-up associated with the Mexican Día de los Muertos (two days after Halloween, on Monday), and perform eerily frenetic and jerky dance routines while playing a classic song (I suspect there must be a little bit of video trickery involved in enhancing this effect, because it just doesn't seem humanly possible to do such rapid and such precise twitches!). This year they've finally got around to producing a hard rock version of Michael Jackson's Thriller. But the one above from a few years ago, a wonderfully manic and snarly rendition of Soft Cell's Tainted Love (with a little bit of a mash-up with Sweet Dreams Are Made Of This by The Eurythmics near the end!) is my favourite of the lot.

If you check out their Youtube channel, you can find a full playlist of all their Halloween songs, and also a 'live' anthology concert of them, and an excellent half-hour - continuous one-take - concert of some of their own material.

I confess, I grew to love Soft Cell's version (although I'm glad I only ever listened to it, rather than having to endlessly endure the rather cringey video that accompanied it). You sort of had to, back in the early '80s, resistance was futile: it was the most massive hit of my college years, remaining the most played song on the jukebox in my college beer cellar for five straight years. Here's a great live version with Jools Holland's Rhythm & Blues Orchestra on the Hootenanny six years ago (a long-running New Year's Eve special of Later with Jools Holland.... the best music show on the BBC, and quite probably in the entire world). And, in my usual spirit of completeness, here's where it all started, the 1964 Motown recording from Gloria Jones.

Administrative note

 

My usual Luck-o-Meter commentary on the weekend's most improbable - and FPL-distorting - events may be late in appearing this week.

And/or severely truncated.  Or perhaps just absent altogether.

I am in the midst of a spell of travelling, and am expecting to be 'busy' and/or 'on the road' for most of the upcoming Sunday, Monday, and Tuesday. Thus, I might not even be catching up on the latest gameweek action until the middle of next week. Such is my life.

This might be an opportunity to rethink the Luck-o-Meter format, or perhaps retire it altogether. I've kept up these detailed reviews fairly consistently for over a year now, and have adequately proved the point  -  that shit happens, every goddamn week, in far greater amounts than most people notice or care to acknowledge, and that all of this randomness and weirdness actually has more of an impact on FPL outcomes than the expected/predicted points returns of the major players. 

And lately, I fear, these reviews have been becoming just too darned time-consuming to maintain in their current form.

I have been pondering some alternate approaches to exploring the impact of luck in our game, different metrics I might evaluate each week - which hopefully might prove just as insightful, but require less effort to compile. Watch this space.

A place of peace

I had somehow missed out on the Khone Pa Soy Falls on previous visits to southern Lao. Off the eastern shore of Don Khone, the large island in the middle of the Mekong near the Cambodian border, they are much less grand than the Somphamit Falls on the other side of the island, but somehow - to me, anyway - far more charming, perhaps because so much more accessible. You can follow obscure paths off into the underbrush to find tiny hidden beaches that locals use to wade out into the torrent to set fish-traps; so, you can get right up to the water's edge, and even step into it at some points - whereas the larger falls you have to admire from a safe and respectful distance. 

I have been back here a few times this week (it's about an hour-and-a-half's walk from where I'm staying). And meditating; trying to fix the scene in my mind, so that I'll always be able to recall it when I need a soothing image to cheer or calm me.

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.

Drip, drip, drop... - Monday Music Break No. 9

Chopin was my 'gateway drug' into classical music. The majority of my parents' extensive music collection - the stuff I first started listening to on vinyl when I was about four or five years old - was very middle-of-the-road pop singles from the '50s and early '60s (the early days of their marriage, before I came along to spoil things); and most of the LP records they owned were the soundtracks of the big musicals (I am more deeply familiar with the Rogers & Hammerstein songbook than I care to admit...). But my mum had a sneaking soft spot for classical music too, and the first example of this among her records that I discovered and fell in love with was an anthology of some of Chopin's most popular short piano pieces - The Chopin I Love - played by the incomparable Artur Rubinstein. Dear Artur had such a light touch with the Polish maestro, and he naturally became my favourite exponent of his work. And yet I somehow never came across a performance by him of the Preludes - not until many years later, anyway. The first record of that piece I owned and came to love was a wonderful Deutsche Grammophon recording by Maurizio Pollini.

But then, relatively late in life (18!!) I discovered Vladimir Horowitz - one of those rare performers who've actually given me the shivers. The only other one in the classical field who hit me this hard was the violinist Jascha Heifetz (I find it difficult to listen to anyone else playing the Tchaikovsky concerto - his rendition is definitive for me). With most performances I find myself admiring many different aspects, but still perhaps being aware of one or two things that don't quite chime with me; these guys.... they somehow seem to play it exactly like I think it should sound. That happens very, very rarely; but it is a scary-wonderful feeling when it does.

As so often in my musical history, I remember the serendipitous moment of first discovery quite clearly. My first week or so at college, a secondhand record sale at the student union, turning up a Horowitz album in one of the bins and immediately feeling an eerie, compelling must-have fascination with it. I'd heard the name, obviously, had probably heard some performances of his on Radio 3 (the BBC's classical music station, which had been a mainstay of my teenage years; I definitely leaned more towards the classics than to pop and rock in those days), but he still felt like a stranger to me. Not for long. Schumann's Kreisleriana - mesmerising. When the second side ended, I just sat there dumbstruck for quite a long while, thinking, "Jeez - what was that?" Then I flipped the record back on to Side 1 and played the whole thing again.

Over the next few years, of course, I picked up quite a lot more of his recordings and started to read up on his life story. So, when in 1986 Gorbachev's 'thaw' in the Soviet Union finally allowed him to revisit the country of his birth - for the first time since he'd fled the post-Revolution strife in Russia as a young man just over 60 years earlier - it was a major international event, and one of the most moving memories of my student days. His triumphant return concert in the Moscow Conservatory was televised live on the BBC; of course, I watched it, in rapture. For me, that was a more transcendent, a more indelible moment in my young life than Nelson Mandela's release from prison a few years later. [Luckily, the complete concert is now available on Youtube. I've only just discovered this. I'm not sure I'll be able to watch it one sitting; I'm sure it will make me cry buckets.]

It only just occurred to me that this, Chopin's 'Raindrop' Prelude (Op. 25, No. 15) played by Vladimir Horowitz, might be an apposite selection for this week's 'Music Break' - because we've been having a particularly heavy and protracted finale to the rainy season here in South-East Asia this year, and I've spent far more time than I would have liked over the last several weeks stuck indoors, listening to the rain....

[I first thought of making this addition my musical series a few weeks ago, when the rains were at their height. But I already had a post sorted for the coming Monday, and on the following week I wanted to do something linked to my imminent birthday; so, this piece devoted to Horowitz and the 'Raindrop' Prelude is slightly delayed. 

And it is starting to feel as though 'the season' may just have ended. In Cambodia, at least, the pattern of the summer months is that, after a gentle and intermittent build-up from late March or early April through mostly still dry-and-hot April/May, June and July are the peak months of the soggy onslaught. There's usually a little bit of a lull from around the last week of July: sometimes just a week or so, sometimes maybe a few weeks of much lighter rains, perhaps little or no rain at all. And then we get a second phase of rains through August/September, generally rather lighter than the early blast, and often threatening to peter out altogether through September. But then.... there is a last volcanic spasm starting towards the end of September, and reaching its drenching peak in the first week or two of October - a deluge so intense that, although the worst of the rains usually last barely half the month, October generally ranks as one of the rainiest months in the entire year. 

But when that last spasm of the rainy season finishes, it often does so very abruptly: there might have been a week or two of lighter rain, gradually diminishing in frequency, duration, and intensity; or there might have been one last big shower, and then.... suddenly nothing. Either way,.... well, there may be an element of romanticization, of imaginative exaggeration going on in this, but... many people say that there's a feeling you recognise on the first days after the rains have stopped: it's impossible to point to any definitive indicator in that day's weather, or in the pattern of weather in the preceding week, but there's suddenly this blissful sense that this one perfect sunny day is not just an isolated blip in an ongoing pattern of heavy rains but a harbinger of many more such days to come - a long, almost uninterrupted stream of them stretching all across the winter months (and with very slightly cooler temperatures in December/January - it's all relative; it's still generally warmer overnight on a typical January night in Cambodia than it is at noon on a summer's day in the south of England, but it can feel quite 'refreshing' after months and months of 35C daily peaks). 

That is a lovely feeling; and I was feeling it yesterday. Although the day had started quite overcast, and there had evidently been a brief but heavy shower at some point in the early hours of the morning, as soon as things had started clearing up by 9am or so, it was feeling like one of those perfect days that heralds the end of the rains. 

Alas, I'm not in Cambodia just at the moment. I'm about 150 miles to the north-east, having had to skip across the border into southern Lao for a while on a 'visa run'. There are some local variations in the patterns of the rainy season; but I think, on the whole, Lao, Cambodia, and Thailand tend to be very, very similar. I'm hoping I'm in for a sunny-and-mild (and dry) week while I'm in Don Det; and more of the same when I head back to Siem Reap.]

That time of year again - Monday Music Break No. 8

It is my birthday... imminently. As the accumulated number of years grows larger, I find it harder to rejoice in the nearer approach of oblivion. But I do my best.

This little bit of manic silliness usually helps. John Otway has been one of the great joys of my life. I discovered him during my student days, and have been to see him live probably three or four dozen times at least. He's now celebrated as something of a national treasure in England, although his acclaim has grown through 'cult status' rather than any mainstream success: he is the quintessential pub performer - having played thousands of small gigs in the upstairs rooms of music pubs all over the country across five decades. 

I gather he is still performing; though I would hope that, at his age (he just turned 74 at the start of this month), he has toned down his stage antics a little. His shows used to be extremely physical (one regular highlight being him building a teetering tower of plastic beer crates at the side of the stage, then climbing to the top and launching himself off it into a flying forward-roll across the floor of the stage), and I would fear for his health if he was still throwing his body around like that.

This is Birthday Boy, from Way & Bar, his early album in collaboration with long-time friend 'Wild' Willy Barrett (in theory, I still own a copy of this, the original 1980 vinyl release - though it has been lodged in a friend's attic for the past 20-odd years, so might have succumbed to the ravages of time by now). It is a good representation of the great man's work, capturing his punkish energy and irresistible good humour. Though in fact his original compositions are fairly few, and his live shows have always been dominated by his quirky repertoire of covers (he once did an entire album of Tom Jones songs): Bowie's Space Oddity rendered in a thick Yorkshire accent ("Ey-up, Planet Earth's blue, An' there's nowt ah can do...."), the American Civil War song Two Little Boys somehow rediscovering a poignancy that most recordings of it miss, and House of the Rising Sun devolving into a raucous call-and-response, as Otway repeatedly feigns forgetting the words, pausing mid-line for audience members to prompt the next lyric by shouting facetious questions ("My mother.... was a tailor...." "Oh, well, that's nice. But what did she ever do for you?"  "Well, she sewed my new blue jeans..." "And what about yer dad??").

Memories of Otway shows are one of my happy places. I need those this week.

Alas, poor Florian!

 

Adam Clery of ACFC has done a breakdown this week of where things are going wrong for Florian Wirtz at Liverpool at the moment.

It does rather seem as if things have got so bad that he might soon lose his start - and perhaps even be let go by the club in the January transfer window. I am very sorry to see this, since I am a great admirer of Wirtz's talent. We have seen often enough for Germany and at Leverkusen what an exceptional player he can be. Heck, we've even seen it occasionally at Liverpool: there was that brief spell from around November last year when he finally found his groove and was producing very good returns for several weeks - until he picked up another injury. And when he came back from that layoff, he never quite recaptured the magic again. Why not? It is a bit of a mystery.

I have suspected from time to time that he maybe just isn't quite physically robust enough - or 'brave' enough, or assertive enough - to prosper in the exceptionally intense environment of our Premier League; he doesn't seem to win many duels, and often gets dispossessed rather cheaply. But then, he does seem to be quick, strong, athletic, eager in the press; and the Bundesliga can be quite physical too. There may be something in this 'physical fragility' argument, but I don't think it's the whole story. Perhaps the pressure of the Anfield crowd, combined with the responsibility of being brought into the side as a successor to Salah, the intended creative linchpin around whom a new team would be built, was just too much for him. And of course it can't have helped that Slot's second season spiralled so badly out of control on so many fronts, with the dreadful results and the manager's deteriorating relationship with the departing Salah. But.... things seem to be even worse now under Iraola. He's lost all confidence and fluency; his decision-making seems to have deserted him; he doesn't appear to have any rapport with his teammates.

If Wirtz does 'fail' in our league, I feel that would be a very sad outcome to a move that promised so much. I said at the beginning of last season that, although I worried it might take him quite a while to settle in, I was confident that his class would eventually shine through. That's never really quite happened.

And I confess, I did have a punt on Wirtz in my initial squad this season. I felt that Liverpool might quickly turn the corner under Iraola, and I thought Wirtz, if he could rediscover that form he'd briefly shown in the middle of his debut season, would be their most valuable player for FPL. That was probably another instance of my recurring fault of taking a few too many chances in my initial selection,... and trusting too much in my admiration of raw talent. Rather too often, I'll have a little gamble on a player because I believe in their capacity for excellence... without waiting to see if they're actually showing signs of realising that capacity in the current season. Safe-and-steady is usually the way to go with initial squad picks - unless you want to start off the new campaign in the bottom half of the global rankings!!

So, is it all over for Florian? I do hope not. I suspect that, with a player of this class, with a player who's cost this much money, Iraola will have to persist with him for a bit longer. And maybe he's a shrewd enough coach to identify the player's problems - whether physical, or purely mental - and help him overcome them.

I imagine he's going to start for at least one more week, anyway - a fortuitous by-product of Ryan Gravenberch's sending-off against City last weekend. Gravenberch is now suspended for the next game against Brentford, which surely means that Szoboszlai will have to play in central midfield alongside Macallister. If Gravenberch had been available, there would have been an enormous temptation to deploy the Hungarian - consistently Liverpool's best and most dangerous-looking player in almost every single game - as the No. 10, instead of Wirtz. (And damn, yes, if that starts happening, Szoboszlai will immediately become a much more appealing FPL asset....)

We shall see.

A dose of the spiritual - Monday Music Break No. 6

 

Some of my happiest musical discoveries have come about by the strangest chance.

Back in the early 1990s, I was doing a round-the-world backpacking year. During a month or so I spent in Fiji, I fell in with a couple of young American guys who were on a summer break before starting at grad school the following Fall. We kept in touch a little thereafter (this was back in the days when people still wrote letters!), and a couple of years later they mailed me a CD of 'Missa Luba', a recording of an African setting of the Catholic Mass, accompanied by some other traditional religious and folk songs from Kenya, performed by that country's Muungano National Choir (about whom there seems to be remarkably little online these days, apart from the fact that the group was supposedly founded in the late '70s by one Boniface Mganga; although there is at least a brief discography, and you can also apparently find some of their recordings on Spotify).

My American friends had conceived of a project to see if they could send the CD around the world back to themselves in a 'Six Degrees of Separation' kind of chain, each recipient forwarding it to another friend (not known to the previous sender). I can't recall what mechanism they'd devised for ensuring that it eventually found its way back to them. I think their address, and the detail of them having started the chain, was to be included in an accompanying letter with each new mailing, and when the music eventually got back to the States, the first recipient there was asked to send it back to them. Apparently, they didn't know anyone in Greenland or Iceland or Ireland, so I was its first port-of-call; and I didn't really know anyone less far away than China - so, we'd got it more than half-way home in just two hops! I never heard if the CD successfully completed its circumnavigation, or if it went astray - like poor Amelia Earhart - somewhere over the vast Pacific.

Anyhow, I played it a few times before I posted it on, and was so enchanted by it that I sought out my own copy at HMV. This piece, Kaung'a Yachee, is apparently a religious song - praying for strength to resist the influence of Sin in the world. You really can't tell: it has such an irresistibly joyous lilt to it. (This Youtube upload appears to be a concert performance rather than the original studio recording I owned on the CD.)

Whenever I fancy listening to some music with a spiritual dimension to it, this is one of the first albums I always think of. It has been a 'mellow Sunday morning' staple of mine for nearly three decades now.  [It's the kind of music I'd like to have played at my funeral, to stop anyone feeling glum.]

Having a lie-in - Monday Music Break No. 5

Paul Heaton is one of the great English songwriters of my lifetime - not only a crafter of clever, quirky, memorable lyrics, but a composer of some startlingly beautiful melodies too; and a master of many different styles and moods. (We are of rather similar age; but he's done something with his life.)

He must be loving the footie this year, as Hull is his adopted home, and he famously insisted on naming his first group's debut album London 0 - Hull 4, a joking assertion that his group The Housemartins were only then the fourth best band in Hull, but still better than anything London had to offer.

This track, one of my particular favourites, a celebration of the glorious indulgence of the lie-in, is From Under The Covers, the third song on Welcome to The Beautiful South, the superb debut album from his second band, The Beautiful South.

Many of the songs from these two bands of his were particularly dear to my heart during a period from the late '80s to the mid-'90s. I happened to hear a performance of his memorably macabre The Woman In The Wall at an open mic event recently (it was supposed to be a celebration of Van Morrison's birthday, but they'd run out of Van's songs to cover, so threw in this one of Heaton's towards the end); and it brought back a flood of memories.

"Died in the arms of Big Ted..."

("'Tis a consummation devoutly to be wished...")

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.

FPL feels like a 'bad romance' - Monday Music Break No. 3

Postmodern Jukebox started off as a hobby project by American pianist Scott Bradlee around 15 years ago, where he'd occasionally assemble a few of his musician friends to showcase his penchant for crafting novel arrangements of recent pop hits in more retro styles like Motown or Big Band Jazz. But before long it would explode in popularity and grow steadily to become one of the biggest music channels on Youtube, with more than 6.5 million subscribers today. (He still runs his own much smaller self-named channel, where he mostly posts solo piano performances.)  PMJ, indeed, is now a global brand, with many dozens of amazing vocalists and musicians acting as regular or occasional collaborators on the project, and multiple touring groups performing its most popular creations live all around the world. And new videos continue to drop around once a month. (They were more like twice a month in the early days, perhaps even weekly for a while; there are now just over 500 videos posted on the channel. I shall probably be returning to them often for inspiration in this new weekly series of mine of musical asides.)

I happened upon the PMJ phenomenon mid-way through its history, about 7 or 8 years ago; and I made it one of my 'Covid projects' to work my way through the channel's entire back-catalogue (which probably makes me one of a fairly small percentage of their millions of fans who've actually heard every single thing they've done). This is one of my absolute favourites, a reimagining of Lady Gaga's mega-hit Bad Romance as a 1920s jazz number, performed by the fabulous cabaret singer Ariana Savalas (daughter of the popular Greek-American actor, Telly, best known as the titular detective in the long-running 1970s cop show Kojak) - with one of the best whistling solos I have ever heard,.... and the additional bonus of some spirited tap-dance breaks from the effervescent Sarah Reich. Pure joy.

But damn, FPL is a classic bad romance, isn't it? We devote so much effort to it, we give it all of our attention, we want so desperately to gain its favour,.... for it to be nice to us. And again and again it spurns us, dismisses us, slights our efforts, makes us feel wretched and worthless. We come to hate the thing we love; and yet, somehow, we still love it.

Watching the world go by...

 

One of the nicest things about just watching the world go by.... is that sometimes... it doesn't go by.

I was back in Phnom Penh last week. It is a densely populated and tumultuous city. And yet, from time to time, everyone somehow disappears, and even busy streets right in the heart of town will seem strangely deserted for an hour or two. And my regular guesthouse has this tiny but comfortable little balcony, allowing me to look down on whatever is happening, or not happening, in the street below. One of my favourite spots in the world at the moment. 

A comfy chair, a refreshing drink, a book to read, and a restful view - what more does one need from life?

A better-than-blank from your FPL captain once in a while would be nice; but it's not an essential part of the 'good life'.

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...

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....

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.

And now.... a pause... A REST!!

 

I noted a few days ago that the FPL website is up-and-running for the new season again; but I also warned that it is a very bad idea to get dragged into obssessing about the game - or even thinking about it at all - until a few days before the first deadline (this year, on the evening of Friday 21st August).

After the excitement of the World Cup, I shall be aiming to take a complete break from the game.

My regular Friday series of bons mots will continue, and I might post the occasional video I find interesting; but there won't be any other new content on here for at least a couple of weeks.

I'll probably start re-posting some of my classic 'How to...' basics on selecting the initial squad just before the Community Shield game, and then attempting some more in-depth preview stuff on the season ahead in the final week before things kick off.

Enjoy the downtime!!  It is a rare treat!!

Thoughts after the 'Round of 16'

The Balogun fiasco

First off, I can't see why there was any whingeing about the original decision, or any discussion about its being potentially 'harsh'. That was probably the worst foul we've seen in the tournament: the US striker came chasing after Bosnian defender Tarik Muharemovic and crashed into him, bringing his foot down with full force just above the opponent's ankle and folding his foot over sideways. It might have been 'accidental' rather than 'malicious' (though that is far from clear; if there wasn't an element of conscious intent in it, it was very, very clumsy), but the severity of an 'endangering the opponent' offence now takes no account of presumed intent, only of the possible severity of the consequences. That was a potential leg-breaker; and it is a small miracle that Muharemovic doesn't even appear to have suffered any serious ligament damage either, but is largely unscathed. It is probably the most clearcut and unarguable red card offence I've seen all year.

But then, yes, the notion that FIFA's Judicial Committee can arbitrarily suspend a red card (properly awarded!), without even giving any rationale, at a couple of days' notice, in the middle of the world's biggest tournament... is utterly outrageous. Red cards in the World Cup are unappealable: that is the way it has to be, to ensure some clarity and certainty and consistency in the disciplinary sphere. Some red cards may be harsh, some may be savagely unfair; but once they've been awarded, we just have to accept them. FIFA's ridiculous action here - apparently again just pandering to Trump, whose lackeys complained to Infantino that he wasn't pleased about losing the US team's star player - sets a disturbing and potentially very disruptive precedent: national football associations might now be forever challenging suspensions issued to their players. A dark day in football history, and one that slightly blights what has otherwise been a terrific tournament.

The one positive note in the story, really, is that we're all spared any more immediate embarrassment over this madness because the USA promptly crashed out of the competition, thrashed by Belgium. One wonders if the US team just died of shame - because it was a shockingly lacklustre performance from them, far below the standards they'd shown in the previous four games.

A decline in the refereeing standards?

Well, maybe. I've said a few times here on the blog recently, and elsewhere online, that I've been generally very impressed with the standard of the officating at this tournament. And complaints in this round have been greatly over-exaggerated, I feel. There were only two games with rather poor officiating; and even there, it wasn't absolutely terrible (in fact, the problem was more with the VAR team; and that might be down to protocols about thresholds for intervention, as much as the competence or otherwise of the particular officials); and it might have been just a statistical blip.

People who got up in arms about what a bloodbath the Paraguay v France match supposedly was are obviously Millennial 'snowflakes' who've never seen a genuinely dirty game of football! The stuff Mbappé jokingly referred to afterwards - and he was being fairly light-hearted about it! - was mostly gamesmanship and shithousing, not violent play. Yes, there was something amiss in the fact that only French players ended up with bookings, when Paraguayans had committed at least as many, and rather worse fouls. And because the referee had let too much go in the game, there was a danger of gradual escalation, and tempers were getting frayed towards the end. But nothing really bad kicked off, no punches were thrown, no-one had to leave the pitch injured. All a bit of a storm-in-a-teacup. While the on-pitch referee Ilgiz Tantashev was at fault in not being a bit more stringent and a bit more consistent in his issuing of yellow cards, the larger problem lay with the VAR team backing him up, since many of the niggliest incidents were happening off the ball, and were inevitably missed by Tantashev. 

There was a similar problem in the Mexico v England game. Nico O'Reilly clearly appeared to have flicked his elbow into the mouth of Jorge Sanchez just as the players were going to the second-half drinks break; but the referee apparently missed it, and we were not informed that the VAR team had looked the incident over or discussed it with their on-pitch colleague - although O'Reilly was then booked over the confrontation, so... somebody must have seen something. And then in the closing period, when England were pretty much continually under siege in their penalty area, our defenders were shamelessly grappling with their Mexican counterparts every time there was a set-piece delivery into the box - but nothing was ever said about it. Again, if things like this are being missed by the on-pitch referee - as can easily happen in such a busy game! - the VAR team needs to step in; but they're not doing it. That was why these two matches fell so far below the high standards we've enjoyed in most of the rest of the tournament.

I was distressed to see that Thomas Tuchel was suddenly slagging off the refereeing in the tournament yesterday. He really has no cause to do so, as the only beneficiary of the poor refereeing in  Sunday night's game was England! Of course, he omitted to give any specific examples in his remarks, to try to avoid getting into trouble with the organisers, but... he must surely have meant the Quansah sending-off and the penalty given away by Kane. And those were both absolutely 100% unarguably correct decsions. When a manager comes out and says shit like this, it looks as though he is just doing it to curry favour with the more rabid elements of the England fanbase, whose delusional tendencies I was ruing the other day. That kind of pandering is not a good look for Tuchel; I wish he wouldn't do it.

And of course the online dingbats are having a field day with the unfortunate denoument of the Argentina v Egypt game last night. It was a most unhappy coincidence that a late Argentine breakaway for the decisive goal in stoppage time should have started with two potential fouls on Egyptian players, one of them Salah, in the Argentine penalty area, and thus potentially demanding a probably decisive penalty award to Egypt. But both incidents were thoroughly innocuous, and rightly dismissed by the VAR team. It was even more unfortunate that an earlier breakaway goal in the first-half by Egyptian forward Mostafa Ziko, which would have been one of the great team goals of the tournament, and possibly even the best goal of all, had to be chalked off because VAR discovered that Marawan Attia had clearly committed a double foul on Lisandro Martinez right at the start of the move. The only cause for discontent there is with the current framing of the rules themselves, that it is perhaps excessive and inappropriate to insist that VAR screen all possible fouls in the build-up to a goal, even those that may have happened 20 seconds prior, at the far end of the pitch. But that is the rule we have in place, and it was properly applied: no room for any conspiracy theory nutjobs there. 'Unfair' as these two incidents may appear to have been to many - well, obviously to all Egyptians, and to a great many neutral supporters who were rooting for an underdog win - they were both perfectly correct, and actually pretty straightforward and uncontroversial. But you'll never persuade the legions of online dingbats of that.....

The best World Cup game ever??

It is, I think, a great pity that those two inflammatory talking-points to arise from the Argentina v Egypt match may detract from a simple appreciation of what a thrilling spectacle it was. It was truly a match that had everything, skill, physicality, drama, constantly swinging fortunes, big refereeing decisions, and lots of fantastic goals. I was still a lad during that legendary 1982 semi-final between Brazil and Italy; and I was enraptured by that, I didn't think I'd ever see it topped. But that game last night.... I think it might just have done so. It's certainly got to be well up there amongst the top handful of most fabulous games of football ever played.

Sleepytime for me...

As I noted at the weekend, the relaxation of the game schedule from here on is a welcome relief to me. I had been full of good intentions that I would now diligently watch every single minute of every single game from here on, and as much of it as possible actually live, but... the USA v Belgium game yesterday morning defeated me! Either my alarm somehow didn't go off, or I managed to sleep right through it: 9 or 10 hours of solid slumber.... for the first time in three-and-a-half weeks: blissful.

Unlucky Alf

We must spare a thought for poor Jordan Henderson, who has just etched his name into football's history books in the most unfortunate manner possible - by becoming the first-ever player (surely?) to pick up a yellow card and a serious injury at a game in which he was not even participating. I half-suspect Tuchel had just asked him if he fancied starting at right-back in the Norway game, and it was a sudden surge of joy that impelled him to try to vault over that advertising hoarding...  [For the title reference, if unfamiliar, refer here, and here.]

The rise of the 'slow starters'

Apart from the excitement of Egypt so nearly taking down mighty Argentina, this round has seen the almost as great - though, frankly, not nearly so unexpected - excitement of Norway putting out Brazil (who, apart from the sensational form of Vinicius Jnr, had looked severely under par in this tournament). Switzerland holding their own against the impressive Colombia (and nicking the tie on a penalty shootout), and Belgium trouncing the previously rather formidable-seeming USA were also somewhat surprising results. And, frankly, not many people had been making England favourites - certainly not strong favourites - to get a win at the Azteca. So, for me, the 'theme' of this round has been the striking improvement of teams who'd almost been written off after somewhat faltering starts to the tournament. Belgium had laboured to impotent draws in their opening games against Egypt and Iran, while Switzerland had likewise struggled to a 1-1 with Qatar in their opener, and England had made heavy work of beating a poor Croatia and then got embarassingly held to a goalless draw by Ghana. I confess, my hunches went against all three of those teams in this round (although I'd held off on taking players from them, or their opponents, because I'd judged these fixtures too close to call with any confidence). But often this slow building of momentum is a good sign in a tournament: sometimes teams need to struggle to find the right solutions, to battle against adversity, in order to grow - to develop more resilience, determination, confidence, fluency. I would not have risked my money on England or Belgium a week ago, but now.... I just might. (Not favourites for the win, but suddenly with a much better chance of reaching the semi-final or the final than I'd thought before. Switzerland were always one of my 'dark horse' picks for the tournament - belatedly starting to earn my belief in them.)

The great Quarter-Final conundrum(s)

With a number of moderately 'unexpected' results in this past 'Round of 16', most of us are looking at some rather alarming holes in our squads now. I had bet heavily on Brazil and the USA, so I'm now hurting for that. In total, I've lost 6 players to elimination. This puts me in a dilemma that's going to be rather typical for this quarter-final round: should I leave gaps on my bench, or spend points for additional transfers (beyond the rather niggly allowance of 4 Free Transfers we're being given for this round)? Answers to this dilemma will vary, depending on your view of the upcoming fixtures, how confident you are in your core players to return reliable points - and whether you still have your Wildcard available. 

Since extra transfers in this game only cost 3 points, rather than the 4 points we're used to in Fantasy Premier League, it is quite tempting to just spend willy-nilly on as many transfers as you need; particularly as MatchDays in this tournament have tended to be rather more high-scoring than a typical FPL Gameweek. In FPL, it's generally only a good idea to spend points on filling a hole in your starting line-up caused by injury or suspension or disastrous loss of form; but with the active in-game substitutions available in Fantasy World Cup, every player is effectively a member of your starting line-up, so there is just as much reason - well, almost as much reason - to fill in holes on the bench as in the original eleven. However, a player you're subbing out for a bench player has almost invariably earned you some points: rarely less than 2, sometimes perhaps as many as 3 or 4. So, it's not really worth spending points on a new player beyond the core eleven unless you have high confidence that they can deliver >6 points. And if you're planning to Wildcard for the semi-finals, there's no harm in leaving some holes on the bench in this round.

There's also a common dilemma for many about when to use the 'Booster' chips. [I wrote a little more on this the next day.] A lot of people still seem to have the 'Maximum Captain'; I think this will probably go best in the Final, In earlier rounds you can usually 'maximise' your captaincy return fairly well by just rotating the armband through different players until somebody gives you a decent haul: in the Final, you can't do that - and I think the advantage of definitely having your best possible return in that game will probably be greater than the usually low (or zero) advantage you might get in other MatchDays from having a perfect captain rather than a good enough captain (most people are settling on 10 or 12, and rarely having a later player get any more than a few points higher than that). In the quarter-finals, I'm set to rotate through Mbappé, Yamal, Bellingham or Haaland (haven't decided yet: coin toss!), and Messi - which looks promising. If you still have any of the other chips, you probably play them in whichever round you don't have to use your Wildcard in. I feel I can hang on until the semi-finals to Wildcard; others have been harder hit by eliminations already, and would like to drop it for the quarter-finals.

Although France, Spain, Argentina, and (much less strongly!) England are favourites in this coming round, they're all facing strong opponents who are well capable of causing an upset. I think we should probably expect to see at least one of those 'favourites' go out. I think I've got my squad pretty well balanced - but I have taken the gamble of going quite heavily for France and Spain, the two teams in whom I have the highest confidence. If either of them let me down, I'll be in quite a bit of trouble. If the results go as I hope/expect, I'll only lose 3 players, and won't have to worry about using my Wildcard at all. If things go badly, I could lose up to 10 players (with already a couple of empty spaces on my bench). I don't think they will go that badly, but.... that's why you save your Wildcard in a tournament like this.

Two final words of warning

I only discovered the other day that while this Fantasy World Cup game allowed you to roll 1 transfer from one MatchDay to the next during the group phase (when you'd almost certainly have no opportunity to do so!), for no good reason, it does not allow you to do so during the knockout phase (when that facility could be incredibly useful!). I find this really quite a huge pain-in-the-arse.

Also, I had thought that the 'Clean Sheet Bonus' chip supposedly extended clean sheet points to players who'd conceded up to two goals. I can't check on that now, because they haven't actually filled in the details of this chip yet on the 'rules' page, and the information is removed from the 'Booster Activation' pop-up window once you've used it! It would appear that in fact it only extends it up to players who've conceded a single goal - which is actually far more sensible; but I'm fairly sure it's not what the original description of the chip said, and it does make a hell of a difference.

So, the game is shoddily, incompetently put together, and we can't rely on it to treat us fairly, remember our team selections, or even (I fear, in my most paranoid moments...) count our points accurately. But hey, it's still a bit of fun, right?

But you have been warned!

BEST OF LUCK FOR THE QUARTER-FINAL ROUND, EVERYONE!!!