FANTASY FOOTBALL COMPETITION UPDATE

Hello!

I realise it’s been awhile between updates, but it’s hard to write on anything for 38 consecutive weeks. That includes things I like. Then there is this competition. It started out as a great idea in theory, but the Guardian’s defensively-biased scoring system and difficult website navigation with limited stats has meant there isn’t that much to talk about or enjoy.

Now that I have the excuses out of the way, here is the good news… prizes will still be forthcoming! If I do not deliver prizes may Scotsman permaban me, Detective Hamrick steal my credit card info, and someone creepy (probably Taff) mail me a dead hamster. I will deserve nothing less.

To remind you of the fabulous rewards for success in this competition:

1st Prize: EPL team shirt of your choice.
Value: Becoming more expensive for me every day based on exchange rate fluctuations. Fuck you, world economy. I’m thinking this will cost me $150AUD easy. Or one weekend without “Weekend Bender”

2nd Prize: Old Everton shirt from my personal collection.
Value: Sentimental/intangible.

Encouragement Award (GB & NI excluded): Random football related crap TBD.
Value: Probably $20-$30 at a garage sale.

Charitable Prizes
Scotsman has said that for the top three placegetters he will donate $50 each to a charity of their choice.

Also the Guardian website has 50,000 GB & NI pounds worth of prizes too!

It truly is the competition that keeps on giving.

There have now been 16 rounds of competition and the table looks like this:

At the top, Hamass still leads and in fact has made his lead ever larger. By round eight, he had a 28pt break. In another eight rounds that has extended out to a whopping 130pts! Hamass has also had the highest score for about half the rounds in the competition, including the last three. What a cunt.

2nd place is some lurker who can fuck right off.

3rd place (actually 2nd place) is Dr. Mort. In the last eight weeks he has moved from 29pts behind yours truly to 78pts in front. This means my beloved Everton jersey I was hoping to retain could be finding a new home in South Korea or Thailand or wherever.

The best of the GB&NIers was Slappy in the early days, but he has dropped five places. Tucho has been the big improver, up four places. He is just behind Dirty Hun, who is now the best of the GB&NI crew. And Rach is still beating Taff.

At the bottom, Kender seems to have proven that his randomly selected squad is better than Guapo’s randomly selected squad.

Now for some statistical analysis, as I’m writing at work and feel by including this I can justify it as work-related activity rather than slacking off on the company’s time…

We are 16 weeks, or roughly 3/7ths, through the season. If you had picked a starting XI before week one and made no transfers since, keeping within the rules (specifically three players max per team and using a proper formation) this is the best possible lineup:

S Carson (West Bromwich Albion) – 168pts, 10.50 points per round (ppr)
Carson is the best goalkeeper, but ultimately the man between the sticks isn’t that important. You’re only dropping around 3pts every week picking the worst performed 1st choice goalkeeper. Which England fans will be interested to know is Paul Robinson.

M Laursen (Aston Villa) – 263pts, 16.44ppr
M Turner (Hull City) – 255pts, 15.94ppr
A O’Brien (Bolton Wanderers) – 231pts, 14.44ppr
J Carragher (Liverpool) – 224pts, 14.00ppr
T Bramble (Wigan Athletic) – 221pts, 13.81ppr
Like I mentioned at the top, this game is a tad biased towards the men at the back, so the best possible side has five of them. In fact, these five defenders are the five highest scoring players overall. Interesting that since round eight, Laursen has overtaken Turner as the league MVP, presumably because Hull City have stumbled slightly from their shock great start to the season. The scary part is Titus Bramble in 5th. I mean, really? This is a defender who has a four minute blooper real dedicated to him on YouTube! Really? Bramble? Even more scary is that Bramble has missed two games, so his points per game average is actually almost as good as Turner’s! Seriously now? Bramble? Really? Titus Bramble? Come on. This game is retarded.

N Denilson (Arsenal) – 216pts, 13.50ppr
G Barry (Aston Villa) – 214pts, 13.38ppr
Maintaining the ultra-defensive outlook, these two are comfortably the two best performed defensive midfielders in this game.

S Ireland (Manchester City) – 209pts, 13.06ppr
M Arteta (Everton) – 191pts, 11.94ppr
Ireland has scored six goals this season, and also tracked back to make a lot of tackles and interceptions. The secret to Arteta’s success has been firing in more accurate crosses than any other midfielder going about.

N Anelka (Chelsea) – 181pts, 11.31ppr
The lone striker in the best possible XI is the temperamental Frenchman, whose 13 goals this season is 5 more than the next best. Although both Robin van Persie and Robinho have been racking up impressive stats after missing parts of the season.

So there it is. Try to enjoy the rest of the season and I’ll try to provide another update on how much Hamass is winning by in a few weeks.

Manager Results
I won this week. 126 points. I’m now in 3rd place for the season. Hamass, Catmando, I’m coming for the lead.

Of course, the really big news last week was that Taff forgot to add in the tables to this column. At least 80% of the comments referred to this minor oversight, which makes me wonder why I bother with actually writing anything.

Anyway to avoid more outrage~! in the event of the tables not being here again, here are some helpful instructions:

1. Log-in to Guardian Fantasy Football
2. Click “Friends’ League”, then under No Pants Provided click “View Leaderboard”. This gives you the overall table.
3. To see the weekly results, choose “Week 7″* for the drop-down menu and click “View Leaderboard” again.
4. Nobody likes a complainer.

*The Guardian site has 7 weeks instead of the correct 6 because it includes a bye weekend. And is retarded.

Now back to the scores, and Lucas came 2nd this week. It appears Lucas has ignored his team all season, and then suddenly made 5 transfers and/or substitutions. The result was 123 points! Lucas moves up to 14th overall.

Behind this Southern Hemisphere domination, the next best was Dr. Mort, while the very consistent Mr. 78 was the best from GB&NI.

Our overall leader Hamass was only 9th for the week, but he only dropped a handful of points to most of his closest rivals, and so maintains a lead of 4 points over provisional competitor Catmando and 63 points over yours truly and Pete Moss. In fact, Moss only scored 90 points for the week, and thus lost ground on the leaders.

At the bottom, THE WORLD’S STRONGEST TEAM leads Kender’s Offenders by 1 point.

Player Results
I’ve come to the conclusion that this part is not particularly useful and involves too much time and effort on my part. Besides, people can come up with statistics to prove anything. Forty percent of all people know that. So unless there is some unlikely protest to bring back this section, I’m going to think of something else to fill this space for next week. And by think of an idea, I mean steal one from somewhere else.

View From A Manager

This week our guest manager is Tucho, who proves that fantasy football ain’t all sunshine and rainbows…

—————————————-

I’m going to come out and say it straight away, I’m starting to hate this league.

I’d talk about my subs but I’m don’t know what their point is yet.

—————————————-

Poor TWOSHOW. Thanks for the contribution at such late notice. Good luck to everyone else for the weekend.

Manager Results

We are now seeing some real consistency between the weekly manager results and the overall season results.

Five managers cracked 100pts this week – Hamass (121), Pete Moss (115), Rob el Gordo (107), Cheekbone (104) and Catmando (100).They are all in the top 6 managers overall.

The only non-centurion for the week in the top six overall is Scott Hun. In the last two weeks he has gone from the overall lead to a massive 82pts behind Hamass and 4th place.

At this point I would like to remind everyone how after the first week, I predicted the GB&NI crowd would soon start going shit. It’s happened even earlier than I expected. The worst of them is Scotsman in 15th place, although I don’t know if he’s trying.

Anyway here’s the table from last week:

And here’s the table for the season:

Player Results
Since I neglected this section last week, I’ll make up for it this time.

First up, below is the “perfect” squad, assuming no transfers during the season…

Goalkeepers: S Carson (WBA), P Cech (Chelsea)
Defenders: M Turner (Hull City), N Nosworthy (Sunderland), C Davies (Aston Villa), M Laursen (Aston Villa), L Barnett (WBA)
Defensive Midfielders: N Denilson (Arsenal), G Barry (Aston Villa)
Midfielders: S Ireland (Man City), S Petrov (Aston Villa), S Wright-Phillips (Chelsea/Man City)
Strikers: A Zaki (Wigan), K Davies (Bolton Wanderers), J Defoe (Portsmouth)

A few comments on the above:

The goalkeeper generally doesn’t matter, so long as they are playing every week.

Defenders are cheap and worth loads of points, especially those playing for crappy teams that have to do lots of defending. Or for Aston Villa.

The two defensive midfielders above are miles better than anyone else so far this season.

Midfielders and strikers score lower points than defensive outfield players. This is the opposite of typical fantasy games. I suspect The Guardian has tried to balanced points across the pitch and gone too far to one side, in much the same way that their hard news stories go too far to the left.

And what about the other end of the scale? Plenty of players get zero, because they aren’t playing, but these guys are a bit special. Here are six of the worst…

B Myhill (Hull City) – The best goalkeeper has 49pts, the 19th best has 32pts (and has played one less game). Then there is this chump with only 24pts. No wonder Hull also have the highest scoring defender.

J Terry (Chelsea) – England national captain and general douchebag, Terry is also the worst performing defender of those to play every game this season.

A Traore (Portsmouth) – At his current points-per-game average, would need 26 matches to pass Turner’s season best tally achieved in 5 matches. And it’s not just the 6-0 result last week, because the other Portsmouth defenders did alright out of that game.

K Nolan (Bolton Wanderers) – 5 games, 25 points. In one game, Nolan picked up just 1 point – 2pts for playing 90 minutes, 1 for a tackle, minus 2 for a yellow card. I guess he did a lot of little things you don’t notice

L Modric (Tottenham) – Apparently the best player ever on Football Manager. Shit in real life.

R Keane (Liverpool) – The big summer signing from Spurs hasn’t scored a goal yet. So he has half as many points as Robinho… in 2.5 times as many games. In fact, there are strikers that have played one match this season with more points than Keane from five!

View From a Manager
I’ve had to do everything myself this week, so I’m doing the manager view…

Last season I won the fantasy competition, but I’ll let you in on a secret – I don’t know that much about English soccer. I mean I do know more than Hamass, who is doing an excellent job by the way, but a great deal less than someone Taff.

There were two main elements to my ignorant success.

Firstly was picking players I know and like, then whenever one got injured, suspended, or stopped playing, I would transfer in the best player based on season stats I could afford. This is easy and similar to the Hamass approach.

Secondly was that the fantasy league last year told you which players were injured or suspended, and automatically substituted those not playing, so even if you made an error with team selection it wasn’t that bad.

This season auto-subs don’t happen, and so in the first week I had five players not score points, while my entire bench did. Whoops!

Since then you can see I’ve done a lot of tinkering, and last week it finally paid dividends as I had all eleven selected players register points for the first time. Considering two of them were playing for a team that lost 6-0, I’m pretty happy to be 3rd for the week, and now in 6th overall.

Now that I’ve mastered picking a fully-fit team, I’m looking to get a little more advanced with my tactics.

Like this week I’m benching the two attacking Everton players in my side because the Toffees are playing one of the big four clubs. And I’ve changed my formation to the super-defensive and possibly imaginary 5-2-2-1 to reflect the fact that defenders score a lot of points.

I also got rid of Luca Modric, because he’s a cunt.

Further Info
Transfer limits reset at the start of each month, so if you need to, use all the existing ones by the 31st. And you can view injuries at that link I had in last weeks column. Good luck!

Manager Results
I haven’t been able to see the week 4 results table all week, as it appears to be perpertually updating. However, I can see the September one, which is the same thing for now. Or close enough.

For this month so far the best performed manager is Dan, with his team Catmando United clocking up a massive 155pts. Catmando United also leads overall with 441pts for the season. Catmando discovered NPP thru Cap’n Andy’s fantastic RAW recaps and at this stage his place on the table and eligibility for prizes is provisional – going to have to see you make some posts on the forums throughout the season before I send you the prize champ!

The best thing about Catmando being in the lead is that Hamass isn’t, because it was always going to be difficult to put up with nine months of gloating someone who resembles Ellen DeGeneres… without the wit or attractive girlfiend. Hamass – I’m just yanking your chain, you’re alright kid. Hamasses tally of 142pts last week and 429pts for the season is outstanding and good for 2nd place. It also proves that you can succeed in this competition with minimal soccer knowledge and research, giving hope to all Americans in the competition.

3rd place is Slappy’s Soldiers, who has been consistent all season. All four weeks of it.

Hun has fallen from a 1pt lead to 48pts behind Catmando and 4th place. I would say this is the biggest fall except that the imaginary couple of Taff and Rach have dropped to 10th and 12th respectively. I’m guessing the toll of pretending to be two people and maintaining two fantasy squads is proving two difficult for Taff.

Meanwhile the biggest climber this week was yours truly, who racked up 133pts this week (should have been 152… ) to jump to 8th place overall.

At the bottom the randomly selected squads of Kender and Guapo are having a close battle for last place. Catmando last week managed just 8 points less than Kender has all season!

Player Results
No meaningful player stats from me this week as the Guardian fantasy site is so frustrating it makes me want to jump out the 5th floor window (I’m writing this at work) while even the e-mail this week was devoid of much info. I’ll make it up to you next week baby, ok?
————————-

A View From A Manager

This was my first really good week in imaginary land, but only because I’ce started copying the top boys in midfield.

If you look at my previous selections, you’ll notice that I’ve already been through the complete 10 transfers available thus far (and my team selection only leaves me with £1.1m in the bank). My initial selections were a little on the hopeful side, as I banked on Ronaldo to recover early and I had visions of Owen scoring 35 goals in the league.

The turning point came when I realised that thinking too hard about things is not my strong point, and I would be much better off just piggybacking my way to success (kinda like HHH). So I had a look at the top 10 overall teams and the player points rankings and realised that the key to success lay in three simple choices.

1) Pick the best defence on the stats. This is a combination of Chelsea and Arsenal. Other teams will have players who will have the odd good week, but those defenders will consistently score 15-20 points per week. I’ll leave the goalkeeper up to you, but Cech has the best save percentage in the league over the last 3 seasons, so…

2) Midfield is all about the workers. Deco would be a good choice, as would Lampard and Ronaldo, but a good rule of thumb is to go for players who represent the inventive spark in the team, like Barry. Old man Denilson will probably end up top overall at the end of the season, provided he stays healthy. Don’t go for the DMs who break up the game (like Mikel) as the game rewards personal performance, not team impact.

3) Strikers is a lottery. I don’t see any striker breaking 20 in the league this season, so genereally go for those who are likely to create a lot for their teamates (as opposed to the selfish ones like Abonglahor) as they’ll score more overall. Amir Zaki will likely be the dark horse this season, and he leads the line, so he’s a solid and cheap choice.

So that’s it. I know this is very dry by the standards of this site, but I’m really quite annoying when I do well at something, and a little lecture really makes me feel all warm and fuzzy in my pants (kinda like what HHH must feel like as he buries someone).

————————-

One last thing!
That helpful link to injured players I’ve placed in almost every column has changed. It is now:
http://www.physioroom.com/news/engli…jury_table.php

Manager Results

Scoring was generally lower Week 3, as you’d expect with 9 games instead of 10. The best performed manager was CliffX, whose Seeds of Hatred team managed exactly a century.

2nd for the week was Taff’s imaginary girlfriend Rach with 96 pts. She is the guest author of the latest edition of A View From The Manager.

Dirty Hun finished just 11th for the week, but with 78 points he wasn’t that far off the pace and is still 1st overall. However, his lead is just a solitary point from Hamass, while Slappy, Pete Moss, Rach, Tuch… actually I think the top 9 could all realistically jump to 1st with a good weekend. It’s that close!

Bender’s Offenders are 11th, not that close

Kender’s Offenders are still in last place. I think Kender may have entered a random team and lucked out. Although with 35 weeks remaining there is plenty of time for Kender’s random selection to turn things around. Of for Kender to, you know, spent 10 minutes making some random substitutions and transfers.

Player Results
I find the fantasy site too difficult to trawl for stats – you can’t even view performance by week –so I lifted this from the weekly e-mail. Enjoy!

Buy! Buy! Buy!
In what was officially the craziest week in football since Spurs announced a desire to crack the Big Four, we’ve got a host of new players for you to tinker around with. Robinho is a snip at £8.1m, while Roman Pavlyuchenko is slightly less at £6.9m. And if you’re caught up in the credit crunch, how about Hull City’s new glamour boy, Daniel Cousin, at a fantasy friendly price of £4.8m?

Bye! Bye! Bye!
“It’s my opinion that a manager must have the right to manage and that clubs should not impose upon any manager, any player that he does not want.” Too right, Kev. Now’s the time to transfer Andriy Shevchenko, Didier Drogba and, erm, marvellous Marlon Harewood out of your squad. With a combined total of zilch points, even dear old Kevin Davies trumps the trio, currently on 28 points.

The Omen
David Healy has failed to score for his club on the past three occasions after returning (and scoring) for his country. Wigan away next Saturday may be a good time to rest the Northern Ireland striker.

Other
It’s a standard full round of fixtures following last weekend’s inactivity due to World Cup Qualifiers.

Don’t forget you can check injuries at http://www.physioroom.com/news/engli…jury_table.php

Also I don’t think I ever mentioned there are other prizes besides the crappy ones I’m offering. They are:

Guardian FF Champions 2008-09 (Most points over the season)
First place: £25,000
Second place: £10,000
Third place: £3,000
Manager of the Month (Most points every calendar month)
£1,000

Manager of the Week (Most points every game week)
A signed shirt of your favourite Premier League club
A View From A Manager

Perhaps this post will quash any theories that I actually exist as Taff’s girlfriend. And since he asked me nicely, I thought I’d enlighten you all with how I became (as of right now 5th) in the NPP Fantasy Football League.

Let’s get this out of the way; I don’t know jack about football. I don’t come from a sporting family and have never backed a team. If someone held a gun to my head and made me choose a club I’d quietly admit to being a Birmingham City supporter – being a Midlands girl – although the person holding the gun would eventually shoot me out of shame…you see, it turns out Birmingham City are a little bit shit. Needless to say, my knowledge of football (or soccer for some of you) is on a par with the Americans on here. Selfishly, I have confidence in the fact that someone might know less about this game than I do.

In spite of this, I was unusually excited to take part in these Fantasy Football shenanigans. I was even more excited to discover that I’m actually doing well. By doing well, I clearly mean beating all the people who follow football regularly, and took time and care over the team they picked.

So, what are my tactics? My strategies for winning? It’s quite simple; my initial team consisted purely of players I’ve heard of in the news, or those I like the name of. Not to mention, a few West Bromwich Albion players thrown in as subs in a dedication to the Homeland.

It was only this week that I discovered I actually have to keep on eye on my team, and make transfers for players who are a bit crap or find themselves injured. It was also only two days ago that I found out this is going to consume my life for a whole eight months, by which time I make no secret of the fact I’ll have probably lost interest.  It’s already at a point where I only check on it when I receive an email reminder. This doesn’t bode well for the rest of the season.

However, once this came to realisation something clicked and I went into full Fantasy Football Manager mode. I listened intently as Taff shared his vast football knowledge. I then proceeded to ignore everything he said and went with my own instincts.

Since I don’t post on this forum and have no chance of actually winning a jersey (a fact I’m still quite bitter about), I felt no shame in stealing the players of those who are doing better than me. Think of it more as imitation being the best form of flattery. Taff told me the posters he would respect the decision of, and those he’d be embarrassed if I stole their ideas. From there, I took note of the players who might actually get me some points and keep me at least in the top five. Since my time is better spent keeping up with the latest happenings on PerezHilton.com or updating my Facebook status, I find half-inching the good ideas of other people much more beneficial.

I’ve made a couple of transfers since my first team. But don’t ask me who. Maybe it’s the thrifty person in me, but I also like to keep a few million in the bank for a rainy day.

Overall, I feel pretty confident with my current line up. I’ve got a few goodies in there, such as Frank Lampard, Jonathan Woodgate and David James and some who’ll probably be out on their ear in the next couple of weeks.

Being the good sportswoman that I am, I wish everyone good luck with their teams. Although naturally I hope I win so I can spend the rest of my days blowing raspberries at Taff…

——————————————

If youd like to make any changes to your team you can at this link. And if youd like to write next week, or any future weeks for the “View from the Manager” then send Taff or robelgordo a PM.