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Game-Weeks 15/16 Captain Salah-vation Fake News

A FANTASY FOOTBALL NIGHTMARE — But You Never Wake Up

An advice column for the bottom seven million Fantasy Premier League managers

By BC Pires

Game-Weeks 15/16

27 December 2020

The most important decision any Fantasy Premier League manager makes every week is the captaincy. The manager on top of our neighbourhood mini-league has 938 points, 121 more than my team, BC FC; he’s just fallen out of the top ten in Barbados and I’ve just risen to #631! And, last week, he got half the point difference between us, fully 60 smackeroos, from just three players: Jack Grealish (10); Bruno Fernandes (17); and he captained Mo Salah for 32 points.

All 11 of BC FC’s players managed 64.

And, last week, in our family & friends mini-league, my brother-in-law knocked BC FC out of third spot. A busy man, even under lockdown, because he has three sons and an executive job, my brother-in-law decided, in game-week one, to save himself time by never changing his captain. His rise from number seven the week before to number three last week, then, is unsurprising when you hear he named his team Toss the Salah.

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TGI Christmas

CHRISTMAS MORNING and Y’Boy there by he one, sit-down by the Christmas tree. The Madam ent up yet and them two chirren not here at all, them in two different time zone and all. The youth-man in Montreal, in a ville named Rigault, which benefit from the French translation becaw, in truth, is not much more than a village, really, whereby the only important product of Rigault is Y’Boy son’ gyul, which is the reason the youth-man there in Quebec: is love.

And Y’Boy daughter, the onliest female grandchild on the both sides of the extended family, on the next side of the Atlantic, she there in London, suffering under Bojo the Clown & the Vote Leave government incompetence, whereby nobody social distancing and must be only half the people wearing masks.

All o’ we in the same storm at sea, but not in the same boat.

And Y’Boy know that, as the boats and them going nowadays, he seaworthy. Even if Y’Boy ent have no gardener to mow lawn and wash car, at least he ent have no landlord or mortgagee to chuck him out on Old Year’s Night.

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The LOSER Apprentice

THE APPRENTICE was my favourite reality TV show. And I far preferred the common or garden Apprentice to the Celebrity version because, for me, those genuinely formerly famous morons, like Meatloaf and Gary Busey, took away from the show’s real attraction, which was the wannabe celebrity apprentice himself, Donald Trump.

I loved everything he did, no matter how small or stupid. When he flubbed the introduction to one of the silly competitions, I cheered. When he made an ostensibly knowing comment that revealed his pig-ignorance, I snickered. When he fired, usually, the wrong person, who’d had the least to do with the losing team’s failure, and his idiotic offspring bobbled their heads and complimented him on his acuity, I cackled.

Every week, I was in front of the TV before the first guitar note of the O’Jays For the Love of Money theme twanged out. I sat through advertisements rather than miss a moment that might contain Trump.

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Game-Week 14L Too Much Football, Maths

FANTASY FOOTBALL NIGHTARE — But You Never Wake Up

An advice column for the bottom seven million Fantasy Premier League managers

For football lovers, Christmas is a dream: three weeks of games crammed into two, with goals galore. For the fantasy football manager, though, it’s more like having Ramadan and Lent in the same month; for fantasy managers who generally stumble around the outskirts of mediocrity, like me, the period between now and New Years Day won’t be so much wine & roses as sackcloth & ashes. You’ve got barely enough time to recover from one week’s dreadful decisions before you’re forced to make some more.

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GW13 - Time is NOT on My Side

A FANTASY FOOTBALL NIGHTMARE — But You Never Wake Up

An advice column for the bottom seven million Fantasy Premier League managers

By BC Pires

Though my players managed to score only two points more than the global average of 51 in game-week 12, my Fantasy Premier League team, BC FC, held on to its number three spot in our family & friends mini-league.

It’s small beer when my real team, Chelsea, lost, but in these days, we take small sips.

And, with three game-weeks crammed into a fortnight, we have to take them fast.

But I can still take a moment to take some pride in acknowledging that the team in number four, my brother-in-law’s Toss the Salah, is at least picking a team week-by-week, unlike his eight-year-old son, who has slipped from position four to # five with the same players he’s had since game-week three or four, I think.

You can work really hard to figure out a strategy, like me, or you can forget about your team entirely and, going into game-week 13, be separated from an eight-year-old by one half-decent performance from KDB.

But at least I’m not asking for extensions of time, like Boris Johnson; and at least sinking back to BC FC’s natural cellar position of number ten will be less painful than Brexit.

There’s also solace in seeing my wife’s Most Handsome XI lose the top spot. Her decision to replace Kyle Walker, he of the too-carefully-groomed beard, with Jannik Vestergaard, he of the jawline that launched a thousand hips, paid off, but not highly enough.


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