Tough week for the managers. Brendan Rodgers sacked. Graham Potter sacked. Steve Cooper and David Moyes dangling by a thread. Frank Lampard, so full of hope ahead of the next humiliation. What a brutal game it is sometimes.
These men, these brave warriors, they’ll get nothing but sympathy from this corner. For I know their troubles. I too have spent the week looking at my team and wondering what the hell has gone wrong. I too have made massive, season-blitzing mistakes. I too deserve to be run out of town on a rail.
Yes, this is a column about my Fantasy Football team. And I write it in the full and secure knowledge that there is nothing more tiresome than somebody droning on about their Fantasy Football team.
It is absolutely the online equivalent of a golf bore wittering on about the bad bounces he got on his back nine. I get that, I understand it on a deeply-ingrained level and I apologise in advance. You are welcome – urged, in fact – to read the other stuff in the paper instead. There’s coverage of a golf tournament you might want to catch.
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For those still on board, I’m going to take your continued presence to mean this is a safe space. You know what I’m talking about. You recognise the terrors and traumas of this deeply stupid game.
You understand the things it can do to a person, the violent urges it can provoke in you towards a perfectly innocent Brentford left-back. You are not one to judge. And so you are welcome.
Here’s the problem. I was going well. Like, ridiculously well. Historically, ludicrously, phantasmagorically well. The Fantasy Premier League game is the biggest one on the planet – at last count it has 11,337,717 players worldwide. Of those 11.33 million players, I started the week in 330th place.
This was a ridiculous state of affairs. I was standing atop a pile consisting of 11,337,387 players. That’s the population of Cuba, more or less. I was basically Castro, if Castro made Erling Haaland captain every week.
Estimates as to how many of those 11.33m players are based in Ireland generally come in at around the 400,000 mark. I was ninth. I’ve never been ninth in Ireland at anything.
For years, I was full sure I came 16th in the Community Games pitch & putt tournament at Mosney but I’ve since been informed that our team came 16th and that only 20 counties entered and that I wasn’t, to put it mildly, the Shane Lowry of our little quartet. So to be ninth in Ireland in Fantasy Football was something.
As will become achingly clear, this is not me boasting. If I had reached those heights through methodical nerdery, relentless research and a deep well of innate fantasy acumen, I wouldn’t be writing this column.
There’s only one thing more annoying than somebody going on about how crap their fantasy team is and that’s the lad who is keen to talk you through the underlying data he uses to decide that Bukayo Saka is any good. Civil society must have no room for those people. They are to be shunned.
No, the weird thing about my inexplicably powerhouse showing in this season’s fantasy league is that I haven’t done anything differently.
I’ve been playing it on and off for 15 years or so and I’ve given it the same amount of time this season as always. I check out FantasyFootballScout the odd time but that’s about the height of it. I haven’t been listening to any of the troublingly abundant podcasts on the subject. I don’t have a heap of dedicated Twitter accounts on the go.
And now it has come back to haunt me. Somehow, in some dark web version of FPL that I’m not privy to, the memo clearly went around the globe last week that it was time to play the Bench Boost card.
For the uninitiated – and jolly well done for hanging in this long if that’s you – this is a bonus chip you can play that allows you to use 15 players instead of 11 in a given week. And since last week had loads of teams playing twice, pretty much everyone played their Bench Boost.
Not this genius. Oh no. I had already done so, a couple of months back. Can’t even remember why. It wasn’t a particularly splashy week or anything. And I think one of my lads didn’t even get a game if I remember rightly. It was a complete waste of time.
This is what I’m trying to say. I’m generally a useless Fantasy player. In fact, I’m the worst kind – a useless one who thinks he knows a bit. Who tries to get a little bit too clever and a little bit too cute and pretty much always comes a-cropper.
And so it has proved. I had a shocker last week without the bench boost and dropped like a stone. I’m down among the 3,300s in global terms and 142nd in Ireland. My lead in our Irish Times league has halved. I already have the prizemoney spent. Shit.
If I was an actual football manager, the fans would be outside my house with pitchforks and torches. And they’d be completely in the right. This was rank mismanagement, a hapless omnishambles that I’m somehow just about getting away with. This must be how Lampard feels every day.
There are nine weeks to go. I’d love to say I’m confident of seeing it out. But the awful truth is, I don’t know what to do next. Is Ollie Watkins the answer? Does anyone know if Haaland’s injury is fixed? Should I consider triple captaining Kaoru Mitoma?
This has suddenly become all too serious. I don’t like it one bit.
