Too close for comfort...

 

Darn - well, much as I expected, this 'Round of 16' stage in the new Club World Cup has been very finely balanced so far.

I suppose the bookies made Palmeiras and Chelsea the favourites to go through from their ties - but only very narrowly. And the games were even closer than that. In the all-Brazil clash of Palmeiras against Botafogo, there was absolutely nothing to choose between them, with both defences on top more than the attacks, and an isolated goal from Paulinho clinching a win in extra time. That was particularly rough on the Botafogo keeper, John, who'd done heroic work between the sticks and deserved far more from the game.

Chelsea had been rather more on top in their encounter, but couldn't convert dominance into goals against an excellent Benfica defence, and also found themselves going into extra time after their opponents conjured up a last-gasp equaliser. The way they roused themselves from that setback to go on and win comfortably in extra time was most impressive, and should lend their campaign good momentum going forward into the quarter-finals.

Although Bayern had a slightly easier time of it, Flamengo showed a lot of threat, and briefly had the German giants a bit rattled when they twice clawed themselves back into the game by reducing the lead to a single goal.

After all that excitement, I'm wondering if we might have an upset or two in store somewhere in the remaining four games. I said the other day that I think Juventus could certainly beat Real Madrid. But Inter Milan, Dortmund and Manchester City aren't by any means invulnerable, and I fancy Fluminense, Monterrey and Al Hilal - who are on a bit of a high from their performances so far - could at least give them a stern test. Let's see.

[Much as I'd love to see an underdog victory in one or more of these games - particularly against Pep's City! - it would completely screw my own Fantasy campaign! I played my Wildcard in the group stage, so I am entirely dependent on correctly guessing how the bracket will pan out if I am to avoid having to pay points for additional transfers to rebuild a decimated squad. And I didn't bet on any of these less-fancied sides.... except Botafogo, which didn't work out for me. Oh, woe!]

'Mystery Chips' - a BAD idea!

 

I mentioned yesterday that I really dislike the idea of 'Mystery Chips'. I may have been prejudiced somewhat by the truly godawful one they visited upon us in FPL this year, but.... I really think they're a bad idea in general.

Here's why:

1)  Fantasy games like this are essentially about planning. So, it is absolutely counter-productive, destructive of the purpose of the game, to introduce elements which prevent players from planning ahead. Introduce new chip ideas occasionally, if you must (I'd really much rather not, though, thank you!) - but at least tell us what they are, before the start of the competition.

2)  This idea of concealing the nature of the new chip for a while necessarily entails that it will have a shortened period of availability, only being launched part-way through the competition. And this causes intolerable congestion, possibly confounding the rest of one's chip strategy. This was ultimately my biggest gripe against FPL's novelty 'Assistant Manager' Chip last season. That only became active in Gameweek 24, so there wasn't that much time left in which to play it; and most Fantasy managers would have kept their 2nd Wildcard and their Free Hit and both the bonus chips for use in that latter part of the season as well. (In fact, the FPL case was even worse, because the new chip had a bloated three-week duration. And, moreover, an expected Double Gameweek for Liverpool was yet to have its date confirmed, and since this was likely to be a prime opportunity to use the Triple Captain chip on Mo Salah [which did indeed pay off handsomely!], nobody could play the new extended chip until they knew for sure which gameweek they had to keep free for that possible TC play.) In effect, many people found they had barely a third of the season in which to try to use up six or seven weeks of chip options. There's a similar problem here in Fantasy Club World Cup: most players will have kept all their chips (except perhaps the Wildcard, which can be worth punting on early, in the group stage), and now have to juggle using a chip in every round.

3) All chips - well, 'bonus' chips, anyway - are unnecessary gimmicks, superfluous to the basic gameplay. They merely introduce the thrill of additional uncertainty - appealing to the gambling addicts out there, but frustrating the majority of serious Fantasy managers who are only seeking a test of their judgement of teams and players. Shifting the stakes of selection decisions with chips like these creates an uneven playing field in individual Gameweeks/MatchDays: you can't really compare your score against other people's when some are playing highly valuable bonus chips and some are not. And having such rare and one-off additions to the game increases the chances that a few players will get absurdly lucky with the chips, and obtain a massive but scarcely deserved advantage from them. Double-points for the captain selection is fine, because that happens every week, and freak instances of luck, good or bad, should generally balance out over the season as a whole. Allowing people to get even more from their captain just once in the year..... is simply betting on a die-roll.

Having said all that, I don't in fact hate the new chip they've introduced in this Fantasy Club World Cup game: the 'Qualifcation Bonus' for players who make it through to the next round. If you're being smart, you should be choosing your squad based on who you think is most likely to qualify for the next round (and the one after that!), and this is - to an extent, anyway - reasonably predictable.

What I don't like about this chip is that, together with the others in the game, it makes the latter stages of the tournament overcrowded with chip options. They should have introduced the 'Qualification Bonus' to replace one of the other two bonus chips.

And 'keeping it a secret' until half-way through - WTF is the point of that?? It's just childish.

Now.... it gets REALLY interesting!

"You won't like me when I'm angry..."

Well, as I mused after the opening batch of games in this inaugural Club World Cup, the group phase didn't turn out to be nearly as straightforward as most people (including me) had expected before the tournament kicked off.

Porto were put out by Messi's Inter Miami, Atletico Madrid (who were really bad...) by relatively unfancied Brazilians Botafogo (who managed to nick a win off a very lacklustre PSG in their second game), Argentine giants River Plate by the far less illustrious Mexican team Monterrey, and RB Salzburg by the Saudi champs Al Hilal. While the first and last of those might have been anticipated as very possible outcomes (the bookies had actually made Al Hilal very slender favourites to qualify over Salzburg, and put Miami - perhaps a little over-generously - within 14 percentage points of Porto), the other two count as pretty major upsets; the bookmakers rated Botafogo a full 25 percentage points less likely to qualify than Atleti, and Moneterrey more than 60 points behind River Plate. Moreover, Chelsea finished second in their group behind the Brazilians Flamengo, and even mighty Bayern Munich slipped up, to finish behind Benfica; while Inter Milan and Borussia Dortmund, both far below their best so far, were also made to struggle a bit to come out on top of their groups. Only Manchester City and Real Madrid cruised through the opening phase relatively comfortably - but even Real were held to a draw by Al Hilal.

Though the weaker clubs took some time to adjust to the pace of the tournament - perhaps overawed by the company they suddenly found themselves in at first - they all showed a fair amount of both grit and flair, and got better as the tournament went on. Only Seattle and Urawa finished without any points, and every team managed to register at least one or two goals.

My pre-tournament sentimental 'outside bet' picks (not to win the thing, but perhaps to qualify for the knockouts, or at least get close to that) didn't quite come through for me. I honestly think Egyptian champs Al Ahly deserved to go further: they're probably better, really, than Miami, and maybe even than Palmeiras - but they were let down by unaccountably terrible finishing in their first two games. My South African darlings, Mamelodi Sundowns, had the opposite problem: if they could defend anywhere near as well as they attacked, they might have toppled Dortmund.

The upshot of some wayward performances by a few of the big names in this first phase (and some dubious weighting of the bracket in the first place...) is that we now have a very unbalanced draw for the knockout rounds: the right side of the draw gives us likely quarter-finals between PSG and Bayern (the two biggest favourites to win the title): and between Real Madrid (or Juventus) and Dortmund (or Monterrey) - possibly the three or four other strongest teams left in the competition, after Manchester City.

In knockout tournaments like this (I've played Fantasy versions of the Euros and the World Cup for some years now), although you get a fairly generous increase in the number of transfers through the later stages of the tournament, which should enable you to get by without needing your Wildcard (which is usually better spent trying to optimise your squad to take advantage of the most mis-matched fixtures in Round 2 of the group phase [and drawing on what you've gleaned about form and selections from the opening games]), you have to limit yourself to players that you're fairly confident will progress to the next round. And you have to be careful how you spread your selection across clubs, to try to make sure that you can't have too many players eliminated, even if you suffer a few results that go against your expectation.

And now there's extra pressure on this first knockout round selection from the fact that the game has announced its 'Mystery Chip' (god, I hate that concept....) is to be a 'Qualification Bonus', where you get 2 points extra for every player who gets through to the next round. (I'll probably have more to say about this new chip a little later....)

In theory, the 'Round of 16' ought to be the best time to play such a chip, because there are likely to be more fixtures where you can be really confident of the result - than in the subsequent rounds, where we expect to find only the best teams still in the competition.

However, things might not have worked out like that this time. Well, there's always a lot of anxiety about these selections in a knockout tournament, because there are few if any completely foregone conclusions. But in this Club World Cup 'Round of 16', I'd say only Manchester City and PSG really look locked-in to progress. The other six match-ups are all a bit too tight to call with any confdence. Juve are certainly good enough to unseat Real; and I think Flamengo have a decent chance of giving Bayern a fright, if they have a little bit of an off day.

So - it's a very tough call whether to use the 'Qualification Bonus' in this round (or one of the other bonus chips instead...). And it's very, very tough to pick who's likeliest to go through between..... Chelsea and Benfica, or Palmeiras and Botafogo, or Inter Milan and Fluminense.

GOOD LUCK, EVERYONE!!!

A little bit of Zen (48)

"This would be the best job in the world… if there weren’t any games. Defeat is suffering; victory is… happiness? 

No. Unfortunately, that’s not true. It’s a relief - for a few days, you’re calmer. 

But then, suffering is part of your work, what keeps you alive: the pressure, the stress.” 

Carlo Ancelotti

Nice, while it lasted

 

It's not long ago that I was boosting DAZN's streaming service for the Club World Cup games, complimenting how fast, sharp, and trouble-free I'd been finding it.

Of course, all good things must come to an end. For the past week, their stream has been unusably crappy for the live games, and I've been having to make do with short highlight reels only. Bah!

There are three likely reasons for this: 1) DAZN's capacity is getting stretched by increasing demand, as the tournament starts to attract more attention and excitement; 2) DAZN is deliberately degrading its free streams to try to goad people into paying for a subscription; or 3) It's just that the Internet in general can sometimes be a bit useless in my country of residence - to which I have just returned after a long 'working holiday'.

I suspect it's a combination of all of these. 

Then again, it might just be that the Internet service at the two guesthouses I've been staying in has been particularly poor... (Although I appear to be the only guest at the place I'm in at the moment. And I don't think the manager - heavy though his TikTok addiction is - can be maxing out the bandwidth on his own!)  I must hope that things may improve again when I finally return to my own home this afternoon.

[Well, thank heavens, things are again tickety-boo in the old homestead. Turns out the small but very touristy town I was staying in a few days ago has a notoriously ropey Internet service.

However, DAZN have been getting a bit grumpy about people enjoying their 'free stuff' too much. The annoying pop-ups goading you to subscribe have become a bit more frequent - as has the exasperating tactic of hiding the free content in amongst a whole bunch of paid options that appear identical. Moreover, I found a couple of times when I was being lazy, getting up even after the start of the 'late' game, and long after the 'early' one should have finished, and launching both streams to try to make sure I didn't lose either of them,.... well, they really didn't like that at all. The niggardly bastards started interrupting my feed every couple of minutes - or, even worse, resetting it to the end, forcing me to have to try to scroll all the way back to he point where I'd left off - and occasionally putting up dire warning messages that if I was suffering a terrible streaming experience, it was probably my own fault.... for doing something verboten, like using a VPN, or trying to keep open an expired stream, or using too many streams at once. 

Oh well: what do you want for nothing - rubber biscuit??]

WHO designed this abomination??

 

While I said a few days ago that I really rather like the new Club World Cup tournament, and even the streaming media coverage of it,... I am finding FIFA's Fantasy game derived from it a 'Trail of Tears'.

It is one of the worst-designed game interfaces I've ever seen. Here are just some of the things that absolutely bug the crap out of me about it....

1)  Hideous appearance! A black background - really?? And even the 'pitch' behind your team display is in a depressing charcoal-grey.... WHY?! And unneccessarily huge menu bars at the top take up more than a third of the available screen area. Good grief!

2)  No country leagues?  Not listed as such, anyway. Rather surprisingly, the 'Leaderboard' page gives you an option to search by 'country of residence'; so, in effect, there are - they're just a bit hidden. (And you can only really check the top handful of positions.)

3)  No 'public leagues'?  In the Fantasy Premier League game we're more familiar with, we've grown used to automatically being entered in a giant 'Broadcaster League' based on who has the main TV rights to the EPL in our country or region; and we can opt to enter randomly generated small leagues created by the game; and many other entities - FPL tips websites, and media outlets like Goal and FourFourTwo magazines - also have their own leagues, which are open for anyone to enter. There seems to be none of that in the FIFA game. Or if there are such leagues, they're impossible to find. The search function in the 'Leagues' section produces absolutely no results - not even for leagues that I know exist, not even for leagues that I'm actually in. WTF?

4)  No help in identifying the teams!  When many of the participating teams are unfamiliar to a general audience, it would be nice to be given just a little bit of assistance in recognising who's who. I mean, some easily accessible background information on all the participants would help; maybe even a thumbnail 'team bio', or at least the full name of the team, in a small pop-up window when you hover your cursor over the team crest or abbreviation? But no, none of that. And they don't even use commonsense abbreviations for the team names. The two East Asian sides end up being the easily confusible UHD and URD. And who outside Brazil is going to have any clue that SEP might signify Palmeiras? Who, anywhere (even in Portugal?), is going to readily understand that Benfica are SFB rather than BEN? [Aha, I discover Benfica's acronym is actually SLB... I had been thinking 'Futebol' must be in there somewhere.]  (And a friend has just told me that on the mobile app, they've recently switched to showing player portraits rather than the team strips?! Sigh.)

5)  A perversely unhelpful UI all around!  If you're opting to take advantage of manual substitutions during the course of the MatchDay, it's really important to keep track of who's playing when; but the option to display the match date for each player is removed once the MatchDay is underway - so, you constantly have to refer to a separate fixture list to remind yourself of the substitution options. When making transfers, it would be nice to have the next opponent and the match date and the player price all visible simultaneously - rather than having to repeatedly toggle between different view options. Selecting one of the 'Booster' chips is only possible by clicking on an icon - whose significance is non-intuitive, and which they do absolutely nothing to draw anyone's attention to (I would bet that a significant proportion of managers will fail to use some or all of their 'Boosters' because they didn't know how to access them), I could go on and on.....

6)  No non-availability flags?  OK, I can see that trying to keep abreast of the full injury situation in such a big tournament (especially when manager press conferences seem to be few and mostly rather uninformative) might be a bit more trouble than they're willing to go to. But we've had several players pick up bans for receiving a red card or two yellow ones - and I haven't seen any indication of that in any of the in-game displays.

7)  Horrendously clunky player search!  The ability to even set search terms when trying to review transfer options is hidden: there's a weird and entirely non-intuitive icon you have to click to open a search box. Once you've found this, it can be vexingly fiddly to select the options you want: sometimes it takes multiple attempts to check or uncheck a box. And then the bloody thing is continually resetting the search parameters by itself. And that righthand sidebar area is constantly being obscured by an annoying dropdown from the menu bar above (inadvertently activated by moving your cursor anywhere near it??).  I simply don't believe it...

8)  No 'match reports'/player points breakdowns?!  Nope, there is no information at all offered within the Fantasy section of the FIFA website about how the games actually went down, apart from the scoreline. If you even just want to know who scored the goals, you have to dig out a match report elsewhere! If you want to know who got points for what in a match, you have no recourse but to laboriously search for every individual player and click on their profile to find out. (And I'm not sure if that works for players you don't have in your squad...)  Absolute INSANITY!!!

9)  No tabulated player stats??  Again, if you're trying to make smart transfer choices, it's nice to be able to compare the full roster of available players across a number of different metrics. But FIFA Fantasy has no 'Stats' page - so you can't compare players by anything other than their total points return shown in the transfer selection list.

10)  Screwed-up budget/player pricing!!  I know, it might seem perverse to complain about being given too much money; Fantasy managers traditionally moan about the opposite. But it is, I think, another sign of how badly this game has been put together. Now, OK, maybe the game's developers did not anticipate that Mbappe and Dembele would be injured at the start of the tournament, or that the likes of Kane, Haaland, and Vini Jnr would have a relatively subdued start - but perhaps they should have! And even if these premium-priced players had all been at the top of their game, there would often be a case for preferring a less illustrious attacker facing a very weak opponent, and/or offering the opportunity to earn the very valuable 'Scouting Bonus' for a low-owned player. The few very expensive players are not - at least in the early part of the competition - all that compelling; and there are far too many good alternatives at low and mid-prices. And how does a very capable goalkeeper who's first-choice at one of the clubs who are favourites to qualify out of their group get priced at only 4.0 million??  Franco Armani was a budget-enabling windfall for everyone - but his ludicrous pricing was an egregious mistake. In a Fantasy game like this, you really should not have 5 or 10 million left unused. For me, this was another sign - one of many - that this game has been put together with a mix of haste and idiocy.

11)  No information about participation levels??  There is no display anywhere on the FIFA Fantasy pages about the size of the global leaderboard; and I can't find anything about that anywhere else online either. Given that my 'home' country apparently has less than 2% of the participants we typically see in FPL, and that I've mostly been up in the top 10,000, which is considerably better than I've generally managed in FPL,... it would be reasonable to assume that the total number of managers taking part in FIFA Fantasy Club World Cup is only 100,000 to 200,000.  Which leads me to my final point....

12)  'Unsearchable' global leaderboard! It is quite laborious to search the global rankings in FPL; but at least they're divided up into 'pages' of 50, so you can select a page number in the URL in the estimated range you're interested in looking at. In this game, you can only click a 'See more' button at the bottom of the list, allowing you to keep increasing the length of the scroll. It only shows 20 places in each 'reveal', so it would take an inordinately long time to to get to the bottom of the league. But, of course, that's just not possible anyway, because such a long 'page' eats up too much memory - and either the site freezes or your browser crashes before you can get anywhere near even 10,000th place.

I am loving this tournament. And I am enjoying following it with the Fantasy game. But damn, they have made it unreasonably difficult to play!!!

Rise of the Minnows

 

Well, damn, I thought the 2nd Round of the FIFA Club World Cup was poised to get interesting,... but I didn't anticipate quite how interesting that latest tranche of games would be. It's almost like 'Night of the Lepus'....

The big boys of Europe continue to sputter,.... while the rest of the world - some of them, anyway - are looking more and more dangerous.

We saw the first proper upsets of the competition, with Inter Miami nicking a late win they scarcely deserved over Porto (thanks, inevitably, to a trademark Leo Messi free-kick going straight in), and then Flamengo somehow did the same to Chelsea (not quite such an apparent mismatch in class there, the sides perhaps quite evenly balanced in fact; but Chelsea looked to have been absolutely dominant in the first half, yet somehow failed to build on their early lead; then had a stone-cold penalty turned down [the story of their EPL season still continuing....]; then conceded two silly goals; then had Nicolas Jackson get himself sent off [although the straight red was a bit harsh: it was a case of lightly raking his studs down an opponent's shin as he misjudged where to put his foot down, rather than steaming into the guy at full pace with a raised foot - only really a yellow card infraction]). And European Champions Paris St Germain went down rather tamely 1-0 to Brazilians Botafogo (one of the less fancied South American sides in this competition), leaving them quite likely to only qualify second in Group B.

Boca Juniors scored first, and made mighty Bayern toil to a narrow win. Al Hillal toughed out a draw against Salzburg, just as they had in their opener against Real Madrid. Monterrey put up an impressive peformance in a goalless but entertaining draw with the much higher-rated River Plate. And Esperance de Tunisie, one of the least talked-about African representatives, bagged themselves a win - albeit against a fairly woeiful Los Angeles.

Even some of the weaker teams went down fighting, with Wydad Casablanca, Urawa, Pachuca, and even the Seattle Sounders all coming up with a goal (to scupper our clean-sheet hopes for the round!!); Ulsan managed two, briefly putting the wind up Fluminense! And the Mamelodi Sundowns - my sentimental favourites, who I would dearly love to see squeak into the knockout phase - were constantly dangerous against Dortumund: scored three, could have scored more,.... might have won the game but for some suicidal goalkeeping/defending.

Even the two most out-classed teams in the competition (after poor little Auckland), Al Ain and Al Ahly, showed a lot of improvement. But for a couple of catastrophic goalkeeping errors gifting Manchester City a comfortable lead within 25 minutes or so, and then a very soft penalty awarded against them on the stroke of half-time, Al Ain might have done a lot better in the game. It wasn't until the last 20 minutes or so that City really began to ratchet up the pressure and push for the additional goals they needed to be able to finish top of the group with only a draw against Juventus on Thursday. For much of the match, the Abu Dhabi team were well in it, often catching City out with quick breaks; Chadli, in particular, had two or three excellent chances to score. And Egyptian champions Al Ahly actually look a very decent footballing side, but they've been let down twice now by some atrocious finishing (they really should have put Inter Miami to bed by half-time in the tournament opener).

Contrary to pessimistic predictions before the tournament, NONE of these teams are absolutely terrible (not even Auckland: I believe they've still got it in them to pick up a goal or two, and give Boca a bit of a scare), and many of the non-European sides have actually proved themselves pretty useful. Auckland, of course, and Al Ain and Al Ahly (although these latter two surely haven't yet produced their best in America), and Seattle and Los Angeles and Miami (apart from glimpses of the magic of Old Leo, and the superlative form of their veteran Argentinian goalkeeper, Oscar Ustari, they look pretty pedestrian too) are the only teams that look well out of their depth. But Miami could well sneak through to the Round of 16, thanks to the Messi Factor (and the fact that Porto have been so poor). Almost anyone else could still produce a bit of an upset. And 24 of the 32 teams still have at least a hypothetical chance of qualifying for the next stage. Not many people predicted that.

Bring it on!!  (Come on, Sundowns!!!!!!)

A little bit of Zen (47)

 

"Ignorance more frequently begets confidence than does knowledge."

Charles Darwin

Now it's getting INTERESTING....

 

As 'MatchDay 1' has just drawn to a close, I am putting together some further thoughts on FIFA's new club tournament, as it unfolds before us.

And I have to say, I am favourably impressed. 

There was a lot to carp at about this new venture: it's probably too big a tournament, at least for the first iteration; the selection of participating teams was subject to some unfortunate chicanery (inevitable with FIFA, alas: and anything that has Gianni Infantino's smug, unctuous visage associated with it is automatically tainted...); and it's been very poorly promoted over the past year (I work pretty hard to stay on top of football news, but I don't think I even knew it was happening until about six months ago, and had to do a lot of digging to discover basic details like when and where it was to be held and who the participating clubs would be); and of course, one worries about the toll on the players (exhaustion and increased susceptibility to injury likely to be a problem for some at the start of the new domestic season in a couple of months). But... I think the idea is admirable: a larger, more inclusive tournament than we've seen before, to provide a stage for leading clubs from all regions to test themselves against each other. (Some of the clubs from nations that are less developed - economically and in their footballing infrastructure - are inevitably not going to be able to make much impression in the competition at this stage. But they will one day. And experiences like this will help them get there.)

However, it had been commonly supposed - and I had fallen prey to that pessimism myself - that the group stage of the tournament would be largely redundant, as few if any of the teams from other continents would be able to compete with the might of the big Europeans sides. And that hasn't entirely been the case. With the inevitable exception of plucky little Auckland - part-timers providing token representation from Oceania - and El Ain.... and, yes, the US clubs.... everyone else has put up a respectable challenge. 

Perhaps the Europeans just haven't hit their stride yet. I feel that Bayern and PSG cruised to easy wins against weak opponents without really playing all that well; as did Manchester City and Chelsea, winning less emphatically, but still quite comfortably. But Salzburg, Porto, Inter, Dortmund, Benfica, and even Atletico all performed rather poorly in their opening games. While even some of the less fancied South American teams like Botafogo, Fluminense, and Monterrey have all looked quite handy. (And I'm starting to get moderately excited about the prospects for my dark horse favourites, South Africa's Mamelodi Sundowns.)

It certainly looks like we could have some more exciting and unpredictable clashes in prospect over the next two group rounds than we had anticipated. And there does seem to be a chance - still slim, perhaps, but far from negligible - that a few 'surprise' teams will make it through to the knockout phase.

For me, the one team who've looked really good so far were Juventus. I would be amazed if young Francisco Conceição (above) has not shot up to being one of the most-owned Fantasy players in this tournament by the start of MatchDay 2.

The media coverage provided by DAZN has been pretty impressive too. I found the sign-up process surprisingly swift and painless: regiestering a phone number was glitchy, and of course you had to click through a few distracting attempts to upsell you to one of the paid subscription versions of their service - but it really wasn't too bad at all. (I got up half an hour before the opening game, anticipating - on the basis of similar hellish experiences in the past - that it would probably take me at least that long to navigate the minefield of  'freemium registration'; but it took barely two minutes. So.... I was able to watch almost the whole of the pre-game show! Talk about a mixed blessing....)

Their streams seem very fast and stable, and have very good resolution. This is way the best online coverage I've ever watched - just the gradual advance of technology, I guess. (And NO - I'm not being paid to say this.)  The commentators are required to plug upcoming paid events on the channel occasionally; and you do get banner ads popping up around the edges of the screen once in a while - but you have to expect a little of this sort of thing with a free service, and I'm really not finding it unduly intrusive.

The problems, however, arise with non-lve viewing.... The highlights reels promoted in my sidebar on Youtube are almost invariably in Spanish. (I presume this is a sign that the tournament has a big following in Latin America, and so Spanish versions of the highlights are posted first... and/or made more 'prominent' to the platform in other ways)  Finding an English option takes a bit of digging around. The Youtube 'search engine', never great, seems to have become extremely artificially stupid in the last year or so: despite suggesting via auto-complete 'in English commentary' as a useful tag for improving search results, the search engine appears to be ignorant of what this means, and still usually directs you to highlights in every language other than English. You can root out some English clips eventually, but it's a little bit of a rigmarole. And they always seem to be very short - whereas some of the Spanish compilations last for 12 or 14 minutes (I'm scraping the rust off the little bit of Spanish I learnt in my schooldays....).

I do find it slightly vexing that the DAZN site itself implies that full 'as live' re-runs are available to non-subscribed viewers, but.... when you click on these options, you find that they're only brief highlights. They appear to be labelled as 'Full Replay' on the control bar at the bottom of the screen, but this turns out to be a cruel deception: when you hover your mouse-cursor over this description, you discover that it is in fact a rolling menu - with 'Full Replay' and 'Extended Hihglights' revealed as 'locked' to non-subscribers when you click on them. I suppose this is the kind of low trickery they need to resort to try to squeeze a few new subscriptions for themselves out of the interest in this tournament, but.... it is mightily vexing.

The 'workaround' I've discovered is that while a match/programme is still in progress, you can select the option to view it from the beginning. This certainly seems to continue to be available while the post-match discussion is going on (half an hour or so after the game has ended); and it might possibly continue to be so even after the show has ended..... though probably not for very long? Anyhow, in my timezone, this means that I can get up at around 7am to watch the match that started at 5am (on UTC+6) by 'rewinding' to the start (and you can use the slider bar on the bottom of the screen to fast-forward through the ads and studio bits); and then do the same again for the 7am game a couple of hours later, joining at the very end, and scrolling back to the start. (Again, this is much better - and more conveniently timed - coverage than I am able to enjoy with Premier League games!)

And the Fantasy game itself...?  Well, that's a right pain-in-the-arse, isn't it?  But that, I think, will have to get a post all of its own.... soon.

5 Favourite Sports Bars in SE Asia

 

I have been 'on the road' for about three months now. And I am such a sorry addict for my football that I do actually plan my itineraries very largely around trying to be somewhere there's a decent sports bar when there's a particularly tasty tranche of games coming up. Unfortunately, in East Asia this is not at all easy....

But these were some of the main stopping points I'd lined up on this latest odyssey:

1)  Rusty Keyhole 2, Kampot, Cambodia

This is about as basic and 'divey' as you can get (basically, a bar in a shed) - but I like that. The name's a bit unfortunate, since it was originally an offshoot of a weirdly popular but not-at-all-good riverfront bar/restaurant - the original Rusty Keyhole. There has been no connection to that other venue for many years now; but, unfortunately, the original Rusty's - though long defunct at its first location - has haphazardly opened up a number of other venues in recent years, all with some slight variation of the name,... which seem to get frequently confused with dear old Rusty 2: all the bad reviews for this pub on TripAdvisor have pretty obviously been posted there in error, carelessly mistaking it for one of these similarly-named Cambodian-run places. These days, there's a Brit owner at Rusty 2, I believe; and consequently, they make very decent 'Western' bar food (surprisingly good pizzas, and one of the best Sunday roast lunches to be found in the region, never mind just Cambodia). They have a few big-screen TVs, and can usually hook up almost any game you're interested in, with English commentary. And the beer's very cheap. What more do you want from a sports bar?

[An honorable mention (frequent alternative haunt of mine) in Kampot is the splendidly named Couch Potatoes. It's a bit small, and the beer is a tad more expensive than at Rusty's, and you have to order out if you want food (a once-upon-a-time plan to offer baked potatoes foundered on not being able to find large enough spuds locally....). And the place is so accommodating of niche interests that you might often find a Championship game rather than Premier League on the main screen. Also, the affable owner, Jem, runs it as a one-man-band hobby project, and he has another gig which often takes him away for days or weeks at a time - so, opening is extremely hit-and-miss. But if Rusty's is looking a bit too boisterous for you, this is often a great fall-back.]

2)  Cheers, Nha Trang, Vietnam

One near-unique achievement at this joint is that not just the Brit owner but also his local staff know how to navigate the hundreds of viewing options swifly and accurately - so, you're never left missing the opening minutes of a game while someone hopefully clicks through multiple menus failing to find the right channel. Also, it's a dangerously convenient 5-minute stagger from the hotel I usually like to stay in when visiting Nha Trang! And, as with Rusty's above, most of the bar food is very good; in fact, their Sunday roasts are probably a bit better (dauntingly huge!); and their Full English breakfast is, I reckon, the best to be found in the region - decent sausages and proper back-bacon (rather than that awful crispy-strip stuff the Americans seem to favour). It is very small, though; and usually only draws quite modest crowds. I like that quieter vibe, though if you crave 'atmosphere', you might prefer the nearby Red Buffalo, a multi-level, open-sided local bar that gets a lot more raucous (but I'm not sure if they ever shut off their screechy cover band to play any commentary, even in Vietnamese...).

3)  Arin's, Siem Reap, Cambodia

Arin's is - was - like a larger, less grungy version of Kampot's Rusty 2: an open courtyard under a large tin roof. Again, foreign ownership (never met him myself; Aussie, I think I heard?), so good bar food (occasional Sunday roasts, though that got a bit haphazard in recent years). Its challenging location, somewhat remote (down towards the far end of the Soksan Road, a mile or so out of the centre of town) and hidden (tiny, inconspicuous entrance, almost completely obscured by nearby shop signs and trees...), meant that it attracted almost entirely an expat crowd, rather than any tourists (which isn't a great thing, for me; Siem Reap's expat community has got much bigger and more sleazy over the past six or seven years, and I don't find the majority of them very congenial company), but cheap beer, good food, and big TV screens showing the games with English commentary - that's tough to find in these parts; you have to be grateful for any place that's offering this.

Alas, I discovered on arrival that Arin's had foundered sometime around the end of last year (shortly after my last visit: I often worry that I'm a bit of a jinx - so many of my favourite hangouts fail to survive for long). My main fall-back in SR would be Harry's Bar (somehow rather more airy and cheerful than its parent establishment in Phnom Penh): quite small, and seems to attract an overwhelmingly Aussie crowd (which may make it hard to get EPL games shown, if there's any cricket or rugby league on at the same time....), but they too have some very good bar food (the beef stew is very rich, and a generous serving). I don't hate Goaaal! either (not sure if I got the right number of vowels in that...), a new-ish place (maybe three or four years old now?) right in the centre of town: they usually manage to show every available game on their multiple screens, the staff are pretty good, and it's fairly cheap for a city-centre bar. The only problem with it is that it's open-sided.... and slap-bang in the middle of the godawful 'Pub Street', so, eardrum-lacerating noise pollution from neighbouring bars may compromise your experience of a game.

4)  3 Dragons Sports Bar (No. 2), Hoi An, Vietnam

Not completely sure why, but I much prefer this venue to its riverside sibling. I think it's probably that the larger space, and the outside seating for people to enjoy the river view, at the 'main' location seems to position it as more of a 'restaurant'; not sure how many TVs they have, either - it's just never felt like a place I'd like to go to try to catch a game. The second venue, though, a little bit more centrally located, towards the eastern edge of the quaint 'old town', is a 'sports bar', pure and simple. Pretty good bar food again. Alas, a little bit on the expensive side (not outrageous; but much the most expensive of my recommendations on this list). The branding is apt to confuse, though: I don't think the signage outside makes any distinction between the two locations (no 'No. 2' to be seen; on my first few visits to the town, I thought it must be the only one; then, when I found a same-named place by the river, I assumed it must just have moved a few blocks during Covid); and this 'second' one doesn't seem to have any online presence at all (although, the search function on TripAdvisor has got so bad, maybe it has a listing that's just impossible to find...).

5)  The Parrot, Phnom Penh, Cambodia

I rather preferred the memorable silliness of the original monicker, 'The Pickled Parrot', but 'Pickled' somehow got dropped in the bar's latest move a year or so ago (it hopped around the city centre three or four times from its original spot in the post-Covid chaos). Quite a big venue (by Phnom Penh standards, that is), with a little bit of pavement seating at the front too. It also boasts nice staff, decent pub grub, a good pool table - and a long wooden bar. It is pretty close to my personal vision of pub perfection; but it never seems to have many customers when I visit, and I fear for its survival. Fingers crossed that you're still hanging in there when I next make it back, dear Parrot!

Footnote: The bar pictured at the top is another near-perfect paradigm of my ideal sports pub, a place called Tully's Irish Bar (in Vientiane, Lao P.D.R.). Tragically, it lost its lovely original location - right in the heart of town, only a stone's-throw from the riverside Night Market - to a rent hike a few years ago, and has relocated to a bigger but rather charmless venue, miles out of the centre. Even worse, from my point of view, they felt they had to pivot during Covid towards attracting the young Lao crowd - who crave 'beer towers' and barbecue skewers, and nothing else. That model proved so successful for them that that's now ALL they do! Well, I think their 'Western' menu still nominally exists (it did last time I visited), but cranking out 'beer towers' is very labour-intensive; when they're busy, it keeps every single member of staff continuously occupied, just rinsing and refilling these plastic monstrosities - so, good luck even trying to order anything else! I'm happy for the owner that he managed to find a way to stay profitable and keep his staff employed during difficult times, but... fans of the old Tully's can't help but shed a few tears for a great bar that died.

The Club World Cup - a few thoughts

If I were going to have a bet on the likeliest winners of the new tournament, I think it's pretty much a two-horse race. PSG looked untouchable in the Champions League Final a couple of weeks back, but perhaps that remarkable success will have taken the edge off their appetite a little - and now the talismanic Dembele is struggling with an injury, and seems likely to miss at least the group stage of this competition. And I suspect Bayern, after another relatively disappointing season, might be hungrier for it.

Manchester City, going through a rebuilding phase, and Real Madrid and Inter Milan, stuggling to onboard new managers on the very eve of the tournament, are looking much weaker prospects than they normally would be. 

The other European clubs are all strong favourites to reach the quarter-finals, with Dortmund and Chelsea probably having the best outside chance of going further. Flamengo, Palmeiras, and River Plate currently look the best of the South American sides, and should qualify from the group phase, but are unlikely to do much more. And I'll be intrigued to see if Al Ahly and Mamelodi Sundowns - dominant in their Egyptian and South African leagues - might be capable of causing a small upset somewhere. The US teams, I fear - even Messi's Inter Miami - are just making up the numbers.

The big pain with this tournament, with such vastly mismatched fixtures in the opening phase, is uncertainty about who's going to play. FIFA was supposedly 'taking measures' to try to ensure that participating clubs would field full-strength sides, but I haven't seen any detail on that, and I suspect it's more in the way of facilitation and encouragement (things like allowing an early, pre-tournament transfer window, and providing for short contract extensions to enable players to stay on at a club for the final stages of the tournament in the first half of July) rather than compulsion. If clubs want to rest top players, it will be easy enough to claim they have a 'knock' keeping them out. And even if a sceptical FIFA were to threaten big fines for such a show of bad faith,... the big clubs would probably be happy enough to pay them, rather than risking their prize assets in a nonsense game. This tournament is likely to be so uncompetitive that the European big dogs could probably sail through the group phase with second-string players or youngsters promoted from their academies. There must be a danger that a few big names might not feature at all; certainly, there's likely to be heavy rotation, with most players getting less than full minutes. So..... we'll need a good bench.

Chelsea look to have the softest group - so, it will be interesting to see if Cole Palmer can rediscover his best form,... and if new signing Liam Delap might have an immediate impact for them up front.

Group A might be one of the tightest groups, with Egyptian champions Al Ahly possibly capable of causing Porto and Palmeiras a few problems. And the bookies actually rate Inter Miami as the group's third strongest prospect, although that's probably just down to the fact that fans in the host nation and Messi idolaters around the world are the only people betting any money on this tournament so far. I suspect that, as with the last World Cup, FIFA will be bending over backwards to try to make sure that Messi goes as far as possible in the tournament, and we can expect his team to be almost immune to picking up cards in the group stage and almost certainly receiving one or two very soft penalties. But will that be enough to get them through? I doubt it.

Group H could also be a tough one, with the star-studded Saudi outfit Al-Hilal (they have Neves, Cancelo, Koulibaly, and Milenkovic-Savic in their lineup) perhaps capable of edging out RB Salzburg for the second spot behind Real Madrid.

Let the games commence!

The 2024-25 'Sheep Picks' revisited

During the course of the year, I highlighted a number of unduly popular selections - 'sheep picks' - that I thought were misguided and unpromising, for a variety of reasons. Now that the season is over, I thought I'd quickly review those disrecommendations, to see if I was badly off-the-mark on any of them.

My first nomination, going into Gameweek 2, was Everton defender Michael Keane, who was a popular 'budget-enabler' early in the season - as one of the few 4.0-million-pound players who was actually getting a start. However, you don't want to be having to use transfers to replace such a low-value squad-filler; for that sort of spot, you really need someone you can rely on to be at least a starter all season; and Keane was obviously only ever filling in short-term for the injured Jarrad Branthwaite. Now, Branthwaite's injury kept him out a bit longer than first expected, and then quickly recurred; so, Keane actually played a full match in 9 of the first 10 games. And he did bag 2 excellent - but, for him, extremely untypical! - goals in that spell; so, people who had bet on him got rather lucky! Everton predictably took a battering from Spurs, leaving Keane with a nul-pointer in the first game after I warned against this pick: and they were so ropey at the start of the season that they couldn't beat Villa either,... or even Leicester - giving Keane just a solitary point in two of the next three games, before Branthwaite initially returned. 31 points over the next 9 games - including a 14-point bonanza for his screamer of a late winner against Ipswich - turned out to be a pretty decent return for a cheap defender; but over the 4 or 5 games immediately following, it was much less so. He was not objectively a good pick at that point, even for the price (people like Wout Faes and Taylor Harwood-Bellis were playing better, and were looking much more nailed starters for the season).

The following week, I called out Noni Madueke - a classic case of 'chasing last week's points', as nearly 1 milllion managers rushed in for him after his hattrick and 20-point haul against Wolves. Another goal - for a 10-point week - against Forest in GW7 dragged him up to 22 points over the next 5 games, which would be a barely adequate return, perhaps; but then he blanked in the next 6 games after that, quickly dropping 200,000 in price again. It was always pretty obvious that he was unlikely to become a regular goalscorer.

And in Gameweek 4, I went for the low-hanging fruit of poor Dominic Calvert-Lewin. Over 200,000 managers piled on him after a good game and a double-digit haul against Bournemouth. Now, he did actually score again against Villa in the next game, and perhaps some FPL managers would be satisfied with that. But he followed that up with 9 blanks in a row, and only scored once more all year - just before succumbing to a season-ending injury in January. Everton were in pretty awful shape at that point, and Dominic has never managed to produce sustained goalscoring form - so, it was a clearly daft selection.

For Gameweek 8, I picked on Rayan Ait-Nouri. He'd just notched up a goal and an assist against Brentford, but Wolves's defensive form was so abject at that point that this performance had only earned him 9 points, and barely dragged him above 20 points for the first 7 games of the season. Wolves had City up next; and even though the Champions were just starting to stutter a bit, there was no way Wolves were going to beat them. Ait-Nouri did in fact come up with a goal in the following game against Brighton, and then managed a clean sheet against Southampton two weeks after that - for a so-so return of 14 points from 4 games; but a miserable run after that yielded just 4 net points from the next 6 games.  And even with the sharp upturn in Wolves's results after Vitor Pereira took over in mid-season, Ait-Nouri was still often being used in a more purely deefensive role, and he only produced 1 more goal and 4 assists - and 85 points - in 20 games under the new manager: pretty good, but still not great; and that didn't start getting going until the end of December, nearly three months after this post.. His return of 18 points from the next 10 matches from here was dismal.

In Matchweek 11, I queried the choice of Dominic Solanke. Again, over-excitable FPL managers were responding to an excellent performance against Villa in the previous game, where he picked up 2 goals and an assist,... and to the prospect of facing promoted Ipswich next. Of course, he blanked in that following game, as Spurs were well beaten by the plucky East Anglian side; and he only produced 1 assist in his next three outings. Postecoglou's Spurs were floundering, and Solanke was mostly playing an unselfish facilitator role rather than being a primary goal outlet for them: he only managed 3 more goals and 3 assists, and a fairly modest 42 points, over the 11 games before he picked up an injury in January. I rate Dominic very highly as a player; but in that team, in that moment,... he was clearly not a strong FPL points prospect.

In Matchweek 12, I cast doubt on whether we should get too excited about the prospect of a 'new manager bounce' for Manchester United under Ruben Amorim, and whether his first really good haul of the season could be taken as the beginning of a 'hot streak' for Bruno Fernandes. Just as with Spurs in the previous week, Ipswich proved not to be a pushover, battling to a draw in front of their home fans, as Fernandes blanked. And although he picked up another 2 assists in a good win against still floundering Everton the following week, he would blank 8 more times over the next 12 games - as United failed to find any consistency under their new coach. Maybe some Bruno adopters would have been happy with three 9-pointers from him over the next 5 games (but he did follow that up by getting himself sent off against Wolves in December); but his return from Gameweeks 12 to 25 was a modest 56 points. In recent years, this has tended to be the problem with Bruno: like Son Heumg-Min, he will produce several decent hauls - and probably a few very big ones - every season,... but there will be long runs of blanks in between these, which make him hard to justify as a long-term hold. It would have been great if you could get on him for his run of 46 points from 4 games from Gameweeks 26-29; but for the season as a whole, he was not a good pick this year.

I nominated Bruno again in Gameweek 30, when over 1.25 million had bought him either side of the preceding game against Leicester, when he did indeed produce his season's best haul of 17 points. However, Manchester United's form was in a death-spiral by that point. Bruno had been trying to keep them afloat single-handedly, but he couldn't keep doing that forever. The Leicester match was in fact the end of a 4-game run of big returns; after that, he only managed 22 more points over the last 9 gameweeks.

In Gameweek 13, I turned my scepticism on Matheus Cunha - a great player, and one I have sometimes had in my own squad over the last two seasons. But it seemed crazy that over a million managers were scooping him up after two big hauls back-to-back towards the end of November. Those achievements were only against Southampton and Fulham, so not necessarily strong evidence of better prospects against the majority of forthcoming opponents; and although the immediately upcoming fixture-run looked quite promising, after Christmas they were facing a really brutal succession of opponents - and indeed, despite a strong improvement in performance under new coach Pereira, they only won 2 games in 10 in this sequence, and Cunha only produced a haul 3 times in that run. My main argument against him at the time was, why would you use transfers on a striker who probably only represents a good points-prospect for a short run of games - particularly when he's now become quite expensive, and there are so many cheaper forwards also in good form? Cunha's prospects didn't look strong enough to be worth swapping out whoever you currently had in that position. And in fact, despite facing that series of weak opponents in late November and early December, Wolves lost all 4 of these games, and Cunha only returned in the last of them, against Ipswich. And that was the game in which he got involved in some ugly argey-bargey with an Ipswich steward, and was looking likely to receive a LONG ban (it was amazing, and frankly, unjust, that he did not). Two more good hauls immediately following the Ipswich game - when, by rights, he should not have been playing - fortuitously made this look like a good pick for a while; but again over the longer term, Cunha's returns disappointed: his temperament was a recurring problem, as he caused tension in the dressing-room and with his coach, getting rested or given only short minutes a few times, and picking up another extended ban for fighting Milos Kerkez. He got a fairly healthy 46 points from the next 7 games after I queried the rush to buy him; but only another 67 in the second half of the season. And despite a very decent December for Cunha, there were other forwards who did about as well - and would continue to do so for longer.

Ahead of Gameweek 26, I questioned why over 1 million managers had snapped up Omar Marmoush in just a few days. Of course, it was because he'd just bagged an excellent hattrick against Newcastle. But City's form was still looking flakey, and it looked like Haaland was going to be out for a little while with another injury; and they had Liverpool up next, and a few other potentially tough fixtures approaching too. I was favourably impressed with Marmoush's potential, but I wasn't convinced how regular an impact he would have with this season's struggling City side. And so it proved: he blanked in the next 3 games, and then managed only 4 more goals and a solitary assist over the final 10 games of the season.

In Gameweek 29, I poured my scorn on the nearly 500,000 managers who'd brought in Erling Haaland. Admittedly, that was the big Blank Gameweek of the season, so a lot of them were probably only doing it on their Free Hit, because so many of their usual big-hitters were missing that weekend. But neither his nor City's form had been that great (3 defeats in the previous 6 games, and 3 blanks for Haaland); and they were now facing Brighton, who can be a very problematic opponent. And so it proved: the visitors battled to a 2-2 draw, and really should have won the game. Haaland at least yielded points for converting an early penalty, but didn't do much else in the game. And he went down with an injury the following week, which would rule him out for over a month. I didn't anticipate that, of course; but there had been good reasons for doubting he'd get big points in that particular game. And his record of 70 points in 12 starts over the second half of the season, as City slowly improved again, though extremely respectable - is a long way below peak Haaland.

In Gameweek 30, I called out Palace's Ismaila Sarr for being a daft pick. Now, he's a player I like very much; he's a hard worker for the side, but without ever looking likely become a regular or prolific goalscorer. He'd just bagged 3 goals - and 26 Fantasy points - in the previous 2 games, and he had a pair of Double Gameweeks approaching. But he obviously isn't the kind of player to repeat that kind of scoring feat too often, and the two double-fixtures weren't all that inviting. He provided 3 more assists over the season, and came up with another goal on the final day against Liverpool; but he only returned 7 points and 3 points from his two double-fixtures in GWs 32 and 33, and only 36 points over the last 10 games of the campaign. His teammate Ebere Eze, clearly a much stronger prospect from Palace in this period, produced 17 points from the back-to-back doubles, and 62 points over the last 10 games. This is the most clearcut one of the lot! Why would anyone choose Sarr over Eze??

In Gameweek 35, I warned against Ollie Watkins. Another pretty baffling one. Again, a very good player - but neither he nor Villa were showing any really solid form at that moment (they'd ground out a good sequence of wins over the past couple of months, but without actually playing very well: most of them were narrow and/or rather lucky victories, and mostly against weaker teams). Ollie did in fact manage a goal and an assist in the remaining games, for a respectable but hardly world-shattering 18 points from 4 starts. However, while not a resounding return - surely, far less than his new owners had been hoping for - it was actually pretty good in the context of the other leading forwards: though few might have predicted this, every other forward player faltered to some extent over the last few weeks of the season, and even the best of them - Isak, Wood, Marmoush, Welbeck - only managed around 13, 14, 15 points from the last 4 games, while the likes of Cunha and Mateta finished really poorly. Somewhat surprisingly, Watkins turned out to be not a particularly great pick here, but the least worst.

In Gameweek 36, I wagged my finger at people rushing to buy Josko Gvardiol. Folks were again under-estimating bottom-of-the-table Southampton - who did here rouse themselves to a heroically obstinate defensive effort and hold their illustrious visitors to a goalless draw. (At least Gvardiol picked up yet more clean-sheet points; but I think there had really been a pretty good chance Southampton could have scored in this one - if they'd had the guts to go after the game a bit more.) Their final two opponents after that, Fulham and Bournemouth, weren't at all straightforward, either; although, fortunately for City, both played quite poorly at the close of the season. So, Gvardiol's 2 clean sheets in 3 games here was very much at the upper end of what might have been hoped for from him in these games. However, my main argument at this point was not that he was definitely not worth having, but that it was ridiculously late to be joining the party: many people had owned Gvardiol all season; I'd been wary of him at first, because I doubted he'd be scoring a goal every other week, knew his defensive points weren't likely to be that great with City; and also, he didn't seem likely to be an ever-present, since Pep's defenders almost never are; but he had in fact become one of City's most nailed-on players this year, and he'd grown into a much more persuasive pick as City's defensive performances slowly improved from the turn of the year onwards. In the 7 games prior to this, he'd racked up 5 wins, 2 draws, 4 clean sheets, and 32 Fantasy points - people really should have bought him a month or so before this.

Finally, in Gameweek 37, I raised doubts about going in for Ebere Eze so late in the season. Yes, he'd been looking gee'd up rather than physically and emotionally drained by his team's recent success in the FA Cup Semi-Final, and had managed 3 good hauls back-to-back in the league. But as with Gvardiol above, the argument this time was not so nuch that he wasn't worth having, but that his peak returns were most likely over, and it might not be worth using a transfer on him now. He did in fact get a goal that week in a spirited win over Wolves, despite only coming on for a short spell at the end - in the wake of playing a victorious FA Cup Final at the weekend just a few days earlier. But he was more subdued in the final game, and earned no bonus points for either appearance. 9 points in a pair of games isn't too shabby - but there were almost certainly far better things you could have used your penultimate Free Transfer on.

Sometimes The Sheep wind up happy. Michael Keane got a much longer first-team run than had initially been expected, and came up with two fabulous goals out of nothing during that spell; but Everton's defence was so leaky early in the season that he still didn't produce particularly good points. His owners may claim that he was only ever meant to be a bench-filler (though I saw a lot of people starting him!), but you don't want to have to use transfers to change your bench-fillers; ideally, they'll be set-and-forget for the whole season, or a good long chunk of it. Bruno Fernandes got 3 decent hauls in the next 5 or 6 games after I first warned against him - probably enough to keep his owners happy,... although his season-long returns definitely weren't. Ditto Matheus Cunha, who did manage a few good hauls over the month or so after I voiced my misgivings about picking him. Even Erling Haaland at least came up with a goal in Blank Gameweek 29, which was OK - for people who'd only ever planned to move him in for that one week. Josko Gvardiol, somewhat contrary to expectation, picked up 2 further clean sheets in a tricky run of opponents over the last 3 games of the season; again, not great, but probably good enough to content his recent purchasers. Even Eze scored in a 10-minute cameo off the bench, in the wake of his FA Cup triumph - again, hardly expected; really, rather an undeserved piece of good fortune for FPL managers who'd brought him in only that week. And Ollie Watkins, while not lighting any fires, got a slightly better return over the final few games of the season than any of the other forwards.

Even here, the 'good' outcome was surely far less good than the adopters of these players had been optimistically expecting at that moment in the season. And in most cases, these returns didn't come immediately, in the next game - the one for which their new owners obviously had such high hopes - but just a little bit later. And in each case, I would say, there were a number of interlocking factors at play which combined to produce a highly fortuitous, far-from-expected set of events. Sometimes you get lucky; sometimes, very, very lucky; but that doesn't retrospectively make a rash decision into a wise one.

I'm very happy that so many of these posts of mine this season criticising over-popular picks proved incontestably correct: Madueke, Calvert-Lewin, Ait-Nouri, Solanke, Marmoush, Sarr. But I'm also pleased that some of them proved to be less clearcut: I think those potential 'grey areas' are places where there's scope for more interesting analysis and debate. But ultimately I feel equally vindicated in most of those more challenging instances: even though they performed well above what should have been a good average expectation of them in the coming fixtures,... it still wasn't quite good enough to justify the pick. Moreover, they usually didn't do very well over a longer run of games; and in many cases, they didn't do as well as some cheaper alternate picks.

'Collective action', 'group mentality' is all too often sadly deluded. I wouldn't advise never going for a suddenly popular FPL pick; but I would say - you should always question it very, very carefully; because popularity, on its own, is perhaps more often a bad thing than a good one.

A little bit of Zen (46)

 

"We are here on earth to help others; what on earth the others are here for, I don't know."

W.H. Auden

The 'BAD Picks' revisited

 

At the start of the season, I wrote a couple of provocative posts, here and here, criticising some of the most widely popular initial squad picks as being, in my view, non-optimal. I already did a quick review of how these views had panned out, about a third of the way into the season (which was the appropriate frame of refence, since I had been considering these mainly in the context of early-season prospects in the initial squad; although many of their owners had clearly been hoping that they might be not just long-term holds but season-long holds...).  Now, at season's end, I thought I'd revisit those opinions for one last reassessment.

I kicked off my first batch of 'ones to avoid' with a pair of goalkeepers, Matt Turner and Mark Flekken. Turner, of course, was only ever seen as a 'budget enabler', but I maintained he was a bad pick even in that context: he obviously had no hope of ever getting a start this season (wasn't even second choice at his club), and hence brought no value whatsoever to an FPL squad, and indeed, was likely to lose squad value. He bled owners every single week, losing more than half of them by season's end - but the sell-off was so slow and gradual that he didn't drop in price until the middle of the season, and only fell by that solitary 100k step (which was much better than I'd expected). But it was a silly pick. Fabianski, also priced at 4.0, obviously had prospects of getting some starts over Areola at West Ham; and there were other 4.0 keepers, like Dubravka, who were at least first back-up at their club. The only explanation for the pick was that naive managers were noting that Turner - who'd started some games for Forest the previous season - appeared to be the highest-points-earning cheap keeper; though he clearly wasn't going to be again this year.

Flekken was much improved this year (he'd had a sigificant negative delta on his performance between the sticks, an xGC figure well below his actual number of goals conceded the previous year), and, because of Brentford's vulnerability in defence, he was able to rack up a huge number of saves - which compensated for his paltry tally of clean sheets. He'd actually sneaked up into the Top Five keepers by the end of the season. However, 'Top Five' is nothing to get that excited about. Sels had performed far better for the same price; Henderson had performed much about the same, and in general more consistently, for the same price; and Pickford once again emerged as the best FPL keeper, having only cost 0.5 million more at the start of the season. My main misgiving about him, actually, had been the fact that Brentford's opening five fixtures looked really tough; but in fact they pulled off a - very lucky and undeserved! - surprise win in their opener against Palace, and didn't get spanked as hard as might have been expected by Liverpool, City, and Spurs (although they were spanked); and Flekken picked up some nice saves points in all of those games. But that would have been crystal ball stuff; there were no reasonable grounds for expecting that he'd produce decent returns from that run of fixtures. Flekken might have been a decent second-choice keeper for the season, but he never should have been anyone's No. 1 pick: he did a lot less badly than might might have been expected, in that opening run and over the season as a whole; but he didn't really do well.

Ezri Konsa is a decent defender, but was never going to be anywhere near a top pick for FPL; yet over 10% had gone in for him at the start of the season, and his ownership remained strong throughout, having only just dipped to 9.5% at the end of the year. He only barely scrabbled above 100 points, and only just made it into the Top 20 4.5-million-pound defenders for the year - outscored even by Dean Huijsen, who'd only played two-thirds of the season.

Kobbie Mainoo, likewise, is a great player; but not much of a prospect for FPL. The 5% who piled in for him at the start of the season must have been unduly swayed by his eye-catching performances for England in the Euros,... or were perhaps just diehard, delusional Manchester United fans. Of course, his season was cut short by injury; but in the half he played, he barely averaged more than mere 'appearance' points.

I was sceptical about Kai Havertz also. Of course, his season too ended prematurely. The 10% of managers who'd gone for him at the start of the year were feeling pretty smug when he bagged a big haul in the opening game against Wolves. And he continued to look very sharp for a while, producing 3 further goals over the next 6 games. But it was never a devastating rate of return; and it soon began to peter out, even before his injury. My argument had been that people were failing to take enough account of the fact that Havertz was newly reclassified as a 'forward' in the game, which would massively reduce his points return for the same number of goal contributions he'd produced the season before. There were also legitimate concerns about whether Arsenal were about to bring in a specialist forward, and about whether Havertz might not play some games in midfield rather than up-front, even if they didn't. Again, I have nothing against Havertz: I think he's a fine player, and has been very important for Arsenal - but he's just not a great FPL prospect as a forward (as it turned out, particularly this year, when so many of the cheaper forwards performed really well).

I was tempting fate rather more with my second batch of disrecommendations - as I acknowledged that these were all in fact very good players, appealing picks, and might do very well... well enough, indeed, for their owners to feel satisfied,.... and be very reluctant to entertain the thought that their selection might still have been non-ideal. Some of them, in fact, did so well that they might have challenged my initial assessment. (Nearly, but not quite....)

David Raya was by far the season's highest-owned keeper (nearly 20% at the start of the season, up to an incredible 32.6% by the end) - yet he was nowhere near the season's best keeper: that's a sign of something going very wrong in people's decision-making. He ended up as the third best keeper in FPL, but quite a long way adrift of Pickford and Sels, and only very narrowly above Flekken and Henderson, who cost 1 million less. My rejection of him might have looked particularly suspect early on, as Arsenal started a little shakily, and were strangely vulnerable at the back a few times - which allowed Raya to earn 7 saves points from the first 5 matches. His team recovered something of their previous solidity thereafter, but he still recorded nearly twice as many saves as in the previous season - which is not something that anyone had expected. But even with that small but handy unanticipated lift to his points total, Raya was not worth the money: there were at least 4 alternatives who could give you the same points or more at a lower price-tag (and Alisson might well have done better than any of them, if he hadn't suffered a couple of spells out with injury). And my main argument had in fact been that, even if he were to be the season's best goalkeeper (and I conceded that was possible, although I thought top three or four was more likely), he still wouldn't have been a great FPL pick because of the club quota restriction, and the fact that there were so many other players from Arsenal who might be more valuable to you. (Gabriel and Saka were pretty much essential at the start of the season; and you might well have wanted a second Arsenal defender as well,.... and possibly Arteta for the 'Assistant Manager' chip. and from time to time, another of their midfield options, like Trossard, Odegaard, Merino, Martinelli.)

Pedro Porro also threatened to make me look foolish (in the eyes of his adoring owners, at least!) by coming up with a goal in the opening game, and then managing a clean sheet against Everton in the second. However, he produced nothing else until the 4-0 drubbing of floundering City in Gameweek 12. Spurs, of course, had an uncommonly horrible season, plunging into the relegation zone. I won't seek any credit for 'foreseeing' just how bad things would get for them, because I didn't; I didn't anticipate that Porro would come up shy of 100 points for the season and finish outside the Top 30 defenders. My argument had been that he wasn't such a surefire source of attacking contributions as his backers supposed (most of his previous season's impressive haul had come in a handful of games where he was being played more as a wide midfielder than as a full-back; that's not his typical deployment), and that he probably wasn't quite going to be worth his premium fee - when there were alternatives like Munoz, Kerkez, and Robinson to consider.

But, oh dear, it does look like I was 'wrong' about Josko Gvardiol, who made a late run up the defender charts to claim 1st Place at the very end of the season. How can I say someone was a 'bad pick' when he was the Best Player in his position??  Well, I'd still dispute that he was really the Best Defender: Gabriel and Alexander-Arnold would have beaten him, perhaps quite handily, if they hadn't missed a bunch of games with injury; Van Dijk was right on his heels; and so were Milenkovic, Kerkez, and Munoz, all much cheaper. You don't want or need more than one or two premium defensive picks - certainly not in the initial squad, when budget is still uncomfortably tight - and it was probably wise to go for at least one option from both Liverpool and Arsenal as long-term holds, because they both have a much more solid defensive record than City. I admit, I anticipated that Gvardiol's season-haul would be quite a bit lower, and that he was unlikely to be among the top defensive contenders: but my reasons for expecting that were all perfectly sound - Pep usually rotates his defenders a lot, Gvardiol was only an (almost) ever-present this year because there were so many injuries to the rest of the defensive roster; he did eventually get shifted back into central defense, where his goal-threat largely evaporated (I thought this might happen sooner, more often; but it was an obvious, almost inevitable risk to his output); and I thought it was unlikely that he could repeat his level of goalscoring output from that hot streak at the end of the previous season (his owners were briefly getting their hopes up, when he bagged 3 in 5 games, from Gameweeks 6 to 10; but over the season, he only managed one more than he'd netted in a handful of games the year before). 5 goals for the season is excellent for a defender (and he had come close to picking up quite a few more); but 153 points is one of the lowest Best Defender totals in history, and very dubious value for a 6-million-pound spend. If you went for Gvardiol at the start of the season, and stuck with him - you got lucky: he performed right at the very top of - if not a little above - what could reasonably have been relied on from him for the season. But it still wasn't a great pick, season-long; and not objectively a 'wise' pick last August.

I got a lot of hate and scorn for including William Saliba in that list as well. But my argument on that was simply that he wasn't going to be as good a pick from the Arsenal defence as his partner Gabriel - and he wasn't.

I cited Cody Gakpo as well, because, although I rate him very highly, I couldn't see how he was going to fit into the Liverpool side. Although he was integrated more regularly and effectively in the second half of the season. he only started just over half of the year's games - and got very short minutes in a lot of those. His season total of 127 points was actually outstanding for the number of minutes he played. But, unfortunately, in FPL, you just can't take a chance on a player who isn't a guaranteed starter every week.

I also, at other times early in the season, called out the massive adoption of Harry Winks and Morgan Rgoers as 'budget enablers'. There was a decent case for Rogers, of course - a fabulous young talent who'd just graduated to a regular start with a top-half side and was rapidly establishing himself as their most important player... for only 5 million. Winks, though, wasn't even an invariable starter, and offered just about zero attacking potential - and was in a side who were obviously doomed to go straight back down to the Championship. The 5th Midfield spot is probably the most important 'differential' position in the squad, and you simply cannot afford to go light on it.

Rogers I commented on a number of times over the season. While his opening price-point was very tempting, I thought it was inappropriate, self-deluding to compare him only to players costing 5.0 and less; he should really have been considered in the 'cheap' midfielder category of 5.0-6.0 - and in that, there were a lot of strong alternatives. Rogers ended up being - narrowly - the best of the bunch (well, apart from Semenyo, who nipped ahead of him on the final day!) over the season as a whole. But he never managed to produce a run of high-returns together, just a string of solid performances with the odd goal contribution here and there. In any sequence of 5 or 6 games, there was invariably at least one of the other cheap attacking midfielders, often two or three or more, who out-pointed him; therefore, it was self-limiting to treat Rogers as a season-hold purely on value-for-money terms; it was a bad choice, although he's a great player (such paradoxes abound in FPL; the inability of many managers to recognise them is probably the main reason for under-performance).  The 5th Midfield spot is probably the most important 'differential' position in the squad, and you have to constantly rotate the most in-form options into that spot.

Many people, I'm sure, are still going to obstinately 'disagree' with all of these assessments. But I'm happy to stand by them: I think they were all accurate, remarkably prescient. Only Gvardiol surprised me a little; and even then, not enough for me to recant my original verdict.