Welcome to my FPL Hell

Beep……beep…….beep……beep. That’s me, all laid up in the FPL hospital; comatose. Immediate family members all gathered around my bed, heads down, whispering, sobbing and consoling one another. “I saw him just the other day; he seemed fine.” “I just can’t believe that’s him; I talked to him on the phone just a few hours ago.” “God really works in strange ways sometimes.” “Can’t believe he started the season with Dzeko and Lukaku.” “Did you see what happened after he used his wildcard!?! *stifled laughter*”

If you’ve followed my 2013-2014 FPL journey so far, part of this will be a refresher on what not to do with your FPL squad. If you haven’t, you’re in for one hell of a ride my friend. Let me start off by saying I’m an idiot. Just want to make sure we have an established baseline regarding how dumb I am compared to you. Let me follow that up by telling you right off the bat that I’m going to curse more than I should or that you may deem necessary (both here and on Twitter), so if you don’t like that, click the “Close Window” and Unfollow buttons now. Save yourself the hassle of shaking your head and murmuring to yourself or someone else about how foul-mouthed and angry I come across. I don’t give a shit what you think about that; it’s part of the total package you get when reading my stuff.  If I want to get overly emotional about a make believe game and get enraged when players on a team that could never ever happen in real life don’t score a lot of made-up points that often have nothing whatsoever to do with the score of a real football match, who the fuck are you to tell me it’s wrong? On top of all that, my FPL season so far is worse than the worst nightmare I’ve ever had about the worst FPL nightmare ever. That’s right. So fuck off if you don’t like the way I talk. If I want to let off some steam by using offensive language, that’s my prerogative. It helps me heal;)

I wish I could say that what you’re about to read is a roller coaster of a ride; that you’ll come along as I share the happy smiley chug-a-chug-a-chug buildup towards exciting peaks and the slow, arduous slide into the disappointing valleys of my FPL season to date. It’s not. There are no peaks; it’s just one long, steep dip after another. Wish I could say it was different but that would be a lie.

Oh, don’t get me wrong; things started off GREAT. I was as excited as I’ve ever been to start an FPL season. If you haven’t yet, you can read all about my excitement here.  Before we get into a bunch of numbers and labels, let’s establish that last year (my second FPL season) could be described as relatively successful. The lowest/worst ranking I held at any point during the season was 730,000 or thereabout and I finished a respectable 33,000.  Pretty good for an American football fan a few thousand miles and a five hour time difference away from the action.

So bring on 2013-14! Looking back now over the past 6 weeks, the Tuesdays, Wednesdays, Thursdays and Fridays have all been AWESOME. I don’t have a single complaint about any of ’em. The fucking weekends have been shit though. Let’s go back now and catch up to speed with a little frolic down memory lane and through the first few gameweeks:

Gameweek 1: Me and 2,500,000 other FPL managers start the season with visions of glory. I nail a 68 pointer with a gameweek and overall ranking of 983,632. I’m left a little rattled by Jose’s decision to play Lukaku sparingly in both CFC fixtures, and although I feel pretty good to have grabbed a respectable score I’m not real crazy about my gameweek ranking, which will end up doubly sucking for me (because I don’t know it yet, but I have peaked). FPL Diagnosis: Fresh and ready, warmed up, buzzing for GW2.

Gameweek 2:  Me and 983,631 others start GW2 with visions of glory. Lukaku doesn’t play a single minute against ManU after blasting them for a hat trick at the end of last season (What the fuck, Jose, now you’re really starting to piss me off!?!)  I score 48 points (3 above the gameweek average) thanks to Chester auto-subbing for Lukaku and have a gameweek ranking of 1,069,249. Not crazy good and not depressingly sad, but I feel a little bit of a gutpunch nonetheless.  FPL Diagnosis: Scraped up elbow and a slight black eye.

Gameweek 3:  Almost everyone starts GW3 with visions of glory (I’m starting to wonder if I am still in that category). I make two transfers prior to GW3. Lukaku doesn’t have a fixture (so Jose can’t piss me off again) and either does Hazard so I offload them both for Sturridge and Silva. I captain Dzeko for his home game against Hull and he shits the bed, getting yanked at halftime. 2 pt captain – YAYE!  I end the gameweek with 38 points, a gameweek ranking of 2,017,991 (yes, that’s 2 MILLION) and plummet in the overall standings to 1,349,876; almost twice as low as I ever was the season before. I’m dizzy, my mouth is dry, my stomach is in knots, I can barely speak, type or tweet, and people stare at me in a confusing way as if they’re not sure whether to speak to me, grab my hand and slowly sit me down on a bench somewhere, or call an ambulance. I wrote about it here  FPL Diagnosis: Bruised ribs, loss of breath, bleeding contusion on chin and both cheeks, slight concussion, inability to accept reality and minor memory loss.

International break between GW3 and GW4: Perfect two-week opportunity to try and forget the disaster that was GW3. I activate my wildcard, invest in price risers, bag some loot, and get my head on straight as GW4 arrives. After a few initial days of confusion and disbelief, I snap back and put a lot of effort into planning the perfect wildcard to get me through to January. As the memory of GW3 fades and the promise of GW4 grows, I feel better and better, as written about here

Gameweek 4: I looked up and ahead of me, cheering on my friends who still had visions of glory; hoping to gain a little respectability for myself, along with the beginnings of what I hoped would be a steady climb up the table and out of Embarrassmentville. I got it all wrong though. Here’s how it went down:

ManU-Palace: Sat down to watch the early kickoff hoping to get a great start with Captain Robin van Persie. He played ok and I was the fortunate beneficiary of a generously called red-card offense by Dikgacoi. I honestly don’t think Young was inside the penalty box at the moment of the foul, but fuck it, I needed some points and I wasn’t about to complain. 6 pts x 2 = 12 captain points. Plus Vidic brings me clean sheet points. 18 pts total. Excellent start.

10 a.m. kickoffs: Aston Villa-Newcastle, Fulham-West Brom, Hull-Cardiff, Stoke-Man City, Sunderland-Arsenal, Tottenham-Norwich. Not much in these games for me and my squad. News of Benteke goal via Twitter feed brings another smile to my face (things are looking GOOD) Walcott doesn’t do much vs Sunderland which bums me out, but not too much since RVP and Benteke had already delivered. Chester doesn’t bring me the clean sheet pts I hoped from the home side vs. Cardiff but no big deal there either. Zabaleta clocked in with an expected cleanie as well in what to me was a surprising 0-0 draw with Stoke. Still feeling mighty fine.

12:30 Everton-Chelsea (and here’s where the cursing starts). Jose fucks me for the 3rd fucking game week IN A ROW! I can’t believe my eyes. After three 90-minute fixtures in a row, no Lampard. I start to get that feeling stirring around in my gut; that feeling that something bad is about to happen and there’s nothing I can do about it. With Barkley and Coleman tucked deep on my bench I watch the second half as Everton go up 1-0 at home and Chelsea look like they’d have a hard time scoring against a pickup squad of 40-year old janitors. Lampard gets the call late on but Chelsea look like shit and don’t really threaten. Instead of the 3 Barkley points or the 8 Coleman points, I also hear word that Hernandez is out with a hamstring pull, sending Turner from Cardiff into my squad and leaving Lamps’ 1 fucking point in place of the 3 I could have gotten from Barkley had Lamps not played at all. Somehow, Mourinho seems to make my life hell at every turn. I curse him angrily under my breath and out loud. My wife and kids do not understand how or why my mood has all of a sudden turned so sour. Fuck you Jose!!

Sunday: Southampton-West Ham  A potential biggie for me; I’m rolling with Boruc, Lambert, and Ward-Prowse, the young midfielder who has played all 270 minutes of Southampton’s season while cementing his place in the starting sq….. uh, not so fast. Whattayaknow, he’s all of a sudden lost his spot! Who would ever guess that that would happen NOW; THIS WEEK, after I’ve used my wildcard to bring him in to my squad as a value mid seemingly assured of strong minutes!?! I get that feeling in my gut again; more shit about to go wrong. I look up into the sky, too nauseous to eat, wondering if I’ve committed some type of cardinal FPL sin that will follow me around like a black cloud for the rest of the season (or my life). How could I be so wrong? After picking my midfield specifically based on certainty of minutes, 3 of my 4 fucking “nailed on” guys don’t even fucking start and one of them has picked up an injury likely to sideline him for another week or more. NOW WHAT!?! That’ll have to wait til later; I still have a lot of nausea, confusion, dread and bemusement to get through (a friend of mine on Twitter used that word this week and I love it; it works perfectly).  It’s a nice, soft, comfy sounding word for “How the fuck can all of this awful, terrible, horrible shit happen to me all at once and what have I done to deserve it?” I know I literally walked around the rest of the weekend confused as hell in a complete daze. To top it off, Lambert did nothing special. Thank God for Boruc; my single Southampton shining light, who pulled in the cleanie and was nice enough not to add to my misery. He was my Sunday hero.

Monday: Swansea-Liverpool: Fuck that shit. With Hernandez out and still reeling from the bad decisions/bad luck/cosmic bullshit that obliterated a wildcard that is one of the most precious commodities in the world, I recorded the game but hung around on Twitter since a) I no longer gave a shit and b) I was feeling like one of those sad people in a horror movie who feel like danger is stalking them around every corner and they’re only safe in crowds. I later deleted the game from my DVR without even watching it. That’ll show ’em…that’ll make things better!! I was actually too sick to my stomach and was trying to convince myself that football and FPL weren’t as important as I made them out to be. That’s the kind of stuff you do when you really suck at something you really want to be good at, right?

Wildcard fallout: 48 gameweek points, gameweek ranking of 1,352,994, and overall ranking of 1,276,422.  Since gameweek 1 I had not finished a single gameweek amongst the top 1,000,000 for the week. And, yeah, you’ll love this; the biggest drop of all was still to come. I just didn’t know it yet. I feel like vomiting even now as I type this.

FPL Diagnosis: Broken femur, stomach ulcer, infected toenail, damaged psyche, Deer In Headlights Syndrome, early onset depression, torn anterior cruciate ligament, bloody nose, lacerated elbow and bruised rib. Rehabilitation Therapy suggested.

Gameweek 5: I limped my way into gameweek 5 still having not recovered from the Wildcard beating I had taken the week before. I had knee-jerk tendencies almost every hour on the hour to give at least 8 of my guys the hair dryer treatment and send them packing (along with taking a 16-20 point hit). Each time, I took a deep breath shortened only by the pain of my bruised rib and resisted the urge to clean house and do something crazy. In fact, I calmed myself down so much so that in the end, I ended up going the entirely opposite direction. Attempting to take the unemotional, calculated approach that went completely against the sheer terror and panic I was feeling, I calmed my mind and slowly asked myself, “What would a reasonable person do in this situation?” I settled on a simple move of taking the injured Hernandez out and replacing him with Victor Moses. No hits whatsover; I was in it for the long haul, ready to grind out table-climbing surpluses of 2-5 points per week if that was what it would take. After all, despite the fact that I was falling apart at the seams, I still had 34 gameweeks to make up the 1,342,000 spot hole I was in. So I put on my FPL poker face, tried to act like a big boy, and woke up on Saturday ready to climb my way back up the table. I was extra buoyed by the certainty that there was no way my bad luck streak could possibly continue. Doing the smart thing and my long term plan of taking small steps back up the ladder was about to pay off. Let the games begin!

Norwich-Aston Villa: Not gonna lie; felt really good about this one. Yes, Norwich are tough at home, but my main man Ben Techie (thank you @FPLHelper) is fixture proof and that is why I chose him as my Vice Captain. I had high hopes of again sneaking off to a great start right out of the gate with the early match. And things were right on track. You know how it goes; you have your smartphone and you walk around with it if you’re not sitting down watching the game. You steal glances whenever you can and when your wife and kids aren’t looking, or say Fuck It every now and then and take the heat even when they are. I was at the car dealership dropping off our van for some minor service when the first death toll of my gameweek rang. I remember seeing a tweet, shutting my eyes, taking a big gulp of air, opening my eyes back up, and rechecking my phone. Benteke off after 27 minutes. After 2-3 seconds of involuntary, nervous “Heh heh heh” kind of self-deprecating laughter, the nausea returned. I couldn’t believe my fucking eyes, my gaze turned to the heavens once again, my heart sunk, I steadied myself in my seat as best I could, and I just knew that I was royally FUCKED. I knew it with a certainty that scared and paralyzed me. Little did I know it at the time, but Bentekkers would end up being my active Captain for the Gameweek, again scoring me 2 FPL Captain points, just like my main man Dzeko did in GW3. YeefuckinHa. I was about to become the equivalent of a 130 pound weakling thrown into the ring to fight Mike Tyson in his prime.

10:00 Kickoffs: Liverpool-Southampton, Newcastle-Hull, West Brom-Sunderland, West Ham-Everton

I had 5 guys featured in these 10 a.m. (3 p.m. in UK) fixtures. Mignolet was my sure starter in goal, playing at home to Southampton. I picked him over Boruc, who of course ended up outscoring him and providing Liverpool’s first defeat of the season. Left hook to the ribs that sends me reeling back into the ropes.

Ward-Prowse was left on the sideline. After getting benched the prior week, he didn’t make it into my squad, and also for the second week in a row was not deemed worthy of a starting spot by Mr. Pinnocchio. LIttle did I know, I would later need him to come in for the injured Robin van Persie, but having being given only 15 minutes of PT, he’d chalk up a single, solitary point towards my score. Right upper cut to the chin.

Lambert was a wildcard. I didn’t want to spring for Lukaku yet, not knowing if he’d start for Everton right out of the block, so I decided to keep Lambert around. He was uncharacteristically yanked in the 65th minute after Southampton had already scored, solidifying the fact that I would get no clean sheet from Mignolet and also would not have the benefit of Lambert being able to make up the difference. This moment also confirmed with unequivocal certainty any thought I had of a cosmic conspiracy/vendetta that the FPL Gods had against me personally. I was a marked man. DONE DEAL. Head rattling right hook to the cheek. I’m seeing stars.

Chester, playing Newcastle away in a match where I expected Ben Arfa to do well, was on my bench. Didn’t stop him from getting hurt though and snapping a 40-plus match appearance streak. Yup, he’s expected to be out 6-8 weeks or more and won’t be featuring for me any time soon. Now that Hull have an awesome run of fixtures and is the part of the season when I looked forward to actually using him, his timing couldn’t have been more unperfect. What the fuck else is new. Low blow to the crotch.

Barkley and Coleman were finally featuring for my FPL squad, so surely wouldn’t concede to West Ham, right? WRONG. They conceded two, After 4 straight fixtures of scoring no less than 6 points, Coleman snags a single point in the only game I’ve used him. If  you aren’t convinced I’ve upset the FPL Gods by now, you’re just plain old ignorant and devoid of reality. Barkley came through with my best single-player score of the gameweek, notching 8, so FUCK YOU. I don’t know who I’m addressing that to, but I really just needed to say that. Wrestler’s clench with a few quick shots to the ear as we separate.

12:30 fixture – Chelsea-Fulham: Like you, I knew there was no way on God’s green Earth that Jose Mourinho would fuck me over again; not after the pummeling he’s given me every single gameweek so far in which Chelsea have played. After all, they’re my team, they’re at home to Fulham, and Frank’s ready to explode. I only kept him because I so maturely rejected my scatter-brained temptation to rid myself of any and all players who have burned me in the past, and most importantly, to never ever ever let Jose Mourinho fuck me over again. I was taking the high road, acting above my newfound FPL adversary. Well, I didn’t make the move; and of course he fucked me over. I gave him the opening, didn’t I!?!  Just for the record, FPL-wise, me and Jose are fucking DONE. D-O-N-E. Fuck that douchebag. I feel like the stupid kid who falls for the same lame magic joke time after time after mother fuckin’ time. Frank ended up playing 11 minutes, and I ended up screaming at Jose for longer than that. Fuck you, you arrogant Portuguese prick. No, calling him names doesn’t make me feel much better. A little tougher maybe though. Rib-breaking combination to the body (left and right ribs).

Sunday 8:30 a.m. fixtures: Arsenal-Stoke City and Crystal Palace-Swansea  False hope comes straight from the devil. It’s the most tempting kind there is but by definition is lacking in anything real, true or concrete. It’s like a mirage in the desert. Its ability to entice and tease makes it worse than real hope. Way worse.

Up against the ropes, having suffered inhumane beating and torture, staggered and dazed, I still had that false hope. 4 people left in my squad who were on the strongest teams in the land, and who each were capable of individually turning the tide of what so far was the disgrace of my FPL Gameweek 5 fortunes. First and foremost, there was the captain I had selected for the gameweek. A player who was so due for a good game it wasn’t even funny. And he was at home to Stoke; a team that he could potentially rip to shreds with his pace; Theo Walcott.

Like a replay of the Benteke news the day before, the news of Walcott’s injury came out of left field, took me completely by surprise, and had half of me laughing and the other half of me was finally killed off by the remaining FPL poison coursing through my cursed FPL veins. I may as well have been kicked in the face by a racehorse. I honestly didn’t know whether to laugh or cry. Nothing like this had ever happened to me before. I was in completely new territory. All of the horror stories I had heard from others, stories of FPL lore so crazy that the likelihood of them ever happening was so small as to be almost impossible, were now happening to me like clockwork. I had a bad taste in my mouth, I had an urgent need for oxygen, my vision went blurry, my speech started to slur, I had trouble putting basic, normally involuntary body mechanics together, and I felt a strong urge to sit the fuck down. Cue frenzied log in to FPL site to remind myself who I had selected as my Vice Captain, hoping it wasn’t the aforementioned early withdrawn Benteke. Then cue added disappoinment when realizing it was in fact Ben Techie. 10 punch combo to the face, core, head, ears and nose. Down for an 8 count.

Sunday afternoon, 1:00 p.m. Kickoffs: Cardiff-Tottenham, Manchester Derby (Etihad)

I gotta admit, by this point of the weekend, I just wanted the gameweek to be fucking OVER. I had taken too many punches, had the optimism and pride I felt at my conservative moves turn into nothing more than a catatonic stupor of pain, numbness and disconnect. I no longer cared and just wanted to find an outlet to vent my overflowing embarrassment. Like most, I turned the embarrassment into denial and venom. I haven’t even mentioned RVP being withdrawn on the morning of the game, my other potential high scorer demoted to nothing more than an injured piece of FPL 0-point piece of shit. I didn’t care about RVP and his injury at that moment, I was too busy feeling the imaginary pain of another right hand roundhouse nailing me squarely in the jaw. It was about me and what in hindsight looked like a run of FPL luck that surely couldn’t happen to anyone on our planet at any point in history ever again. It was too perfect; too sequential; too well-timed to hit me the hardest and hurt me the most at the time I most needed some hope to cling to. I looked up to the sky many times that day, asking over and over, “Is that it? Are you done yet? Have you not had enough fun already? Why me?”

Mouthpiece-dropping, fight-stopping left uppercut/right hook combo. TKO.

FPL Diagnosis: Busted lip, 4 broken ribs, 12-stitch cut above eye, broken jaw, 4 missing teeth, punctured lung, blood in urine, broken nose, dislocated shoulder, uncontrollable hysteria, paranoia, significant blood loss, blurry vision, memory lapse, body cast, FPL coma.

For Gameweek 5, the week after using my wildcard to set things right and get back on the right path, I scored 24 points, notched a gameweek ranking of 2,829,640 (not a typo), and finished with a current overall ranking of 1,901,955. Yes, you read that right. If 100 GW5 FPL managers were in a room with me, 96.1 of them would have scored better than me in GW5.

Where do I go from here? Honestly, I have no fucking clue.

WELCOME TO MY FPL HELL.

Coming Soon: Be sure to check back for another upcoming article where I introduce you to one of the best kept secrets in FPL: THE PILE.  New article to be posted soon.