Lush Gutters

The Rat Pack were an absolute gift to this season.

Manager Scott Worthington somehow managed to create a team that seemed to exist in a parallel dimension. When we look at the end-of-year records this man is absolutely everywhere, in stunningly contradictory categories.

The Rat Pack led the Classic Grand with the most frequent lowest gameweek score by a huge margin, and yet no team suffered more defeats by three or fewer points. He managed the lowest overall ranking and yet won more Team of the Month titles than all but one other player. He notched the season’s heaviest defeat, and also the biggest points jump. He scored the league’s second lowest gameweek score, and also the 3rd highest. He was so bad at choosing a captain that he came second-to-last in terms of points earned by his skipper, and yet was adept enough at picking scorers that he was the only player to net a goal in every single week of the season. He scored the 3rd most goals, but kept the second fewest clean sheets. He lost when an opponent scored 21, and won when his adversary bagged 80. He flushed his bonus chips down the toilet, scoring the lowest of any team that played all three, and yet snagged the second highest one-off gameweek ranking.

I mean … make sense of that.

Basically Scotty was either awful or magnificent. There was no middle ground. Nobody else played the season like he did. He was a maverick, redefining the word ‘ridiculous’ over and over.

So what why so low in the table?

Well, on one hand he was unlucky. He lost a league-high eight games by three points or fewer – less than a striker’s goal. Clearly he suffered more than his fair share of misfortune.

However part of that misfortune came from the fact that Scotty liked to throw money around like a Wall Street pimp.

Scotty liked to spend. Scotty liked to spend big. Like … Qatari sports conglomerate big. The difference being that when Manchester City spend big it doesn’t cost them any league points. The Rat Pack, meanwhile, blew one-hundred and eighty-four points on transfers. That’s more than everything he earned from his bonus chips times five! The next highest – FC Aubamaschlong – spent less than half that. Way less than half that. In fact if Scotty were to add half his transfer spend to his overall total, he’d immediately jump two places in the ProMax World Championship. When it came to trades, Scotty was like a kid in a sweet shop. He chucked away points like they were radioactive.

However, what most forget is that the beginning of this madness came a good way through the season. Scotty’s early days were quite modest, cautious even.

And entirely bollocks.

In the first six gameweeks he made only three trades, incurred no points deficit, and played all three bonus chips. Despite this he racked up the worst August and September of any other team. It was almost impressive. 

In gameweek 5 he started from scratch, playing his first Wildcard. The following weekend he achieved one of his lowest scores of the season. Something had to give. And so … Scotty took his gloves off, rolled up his sleeves, and decided to play his way. And his way meant setting off some fireworks!

The second six gameweeks yielded 16 points lost on nine total transfers. The six after that saw forty points fly out the window and seventeen new players arrive. It was f**king carnage.

Nobody was safe. Raheem Sterling arrived in GW15 and was out the door by GW20. Vardy: in GW31, out GW32, back in GW36, back out GW38. Salah was shown the door three times in six weeks. Over the course of the season Paul Pogba was brought in on no fewer than four separate occasions. Champions League finalist Lucas Moura managed to be transferred in and out in the same gameweek!! On January 15th, joint golden boot winner Pierre-Emerick Aubameyang was transferred out at 8:42am, was back in at 8:43am, and then back out again at 11:29 am. Arsenal weren’t even due to play for four more days!!

Scotty also managed to find a home for some players so unrecognisable that their own relatives would struggle to pick them out of a lineup. In came nobodies such as West Ham’s Arthur Masuaku and Huddersfield’s Collin Quaner. My personal favourite was some anonymous schmo named Viktor Gyokeres, whose existence I learned about solely because of the research for this article. Mr. Gyokeres began his season in GW12 with Brighton and proceeded to score exactly zero points, mostly because he played exactly zero minutes. He lasted two weeks before Scott showed him the door too. Which isn’t bad when you consider that one of the Premier League’s three top scorers didn’t make it from breakfast til lunch. On a f**king Tuesday.

I recognise that Scotty was trying to find some discount substitute picks so as to boost the star power of his starting XI. The problem was that any advantage he gained was tossed out the window by the exorbitant transfer costs. He spent a record 36 points on swaps in GW12; in GW23 – literally one week after playing his second wildcard – he spent another 28. The four weeks after that cost him another forty. It was fearlessness on a suicidal level, maddening and utterly, utterly beautiful.

But here’s the thing.

A consequence of this cavalier attitude to swaps may in fact have been the formation of a steep and impressive learning curve. Think about it; a relative novice to Fantasy Football could have started clueless and been too afraid of a points hit to rectify his situation and find his footing. Scotty, however, began the season without a single sh*t to give. Thus began the rollercoaster ride that was his 2018/19.

Scotty enjoyed the third best October. The worst November. 6th best December. Third worst January.

The worst March.

The best April.

Lessons, though expensive, were learned at break-neck speed. By the season’s end things had started to fall into place. The final five weeks of the season saw him average a staggering 83 points per gameweek, at an average cost of four points a pop. His highest score of the season – 99 in GW34, the 3rd highest score of anyone all year – was achieved without costing him a penny. Clearly something was starting to click.

It wasn’t enough to save him from the wooden spoon in the World Championship, but it did propel him above Nial Taylor’s Marching On Together in the Classic Grand, and his trajectory by then was very much upward. When you consider his numerous narrow defeats, all of a sudden his season looks a lot less like a wacky ACME-powered cartoon misadventure and more like a man who’s lost his keys and decides to get in by smashing his car through the front room wall. Sure there’s bricks everywhere, the car’s f**ked, and it’ll cost a fortune to fix … but he got in, didn’t he?

Let’s face it, by the season’s end you really didn’t want to be drawn against him. The Rat Pack won four of their last five games of the season, and the game he lost was – as happened so cruelly often to Scott this year – by fine, fine margins, as Dom Wilko’s subs bench cavalry rode in to rescue Zordon’s Rangers by a mere three points.

Yes, the year was often harsh to The Rat Pack. But be warned: this year was just the beginning. We may never see the likes of it again. We are witnessing an evolution. Scotty, once the joke of the league, had come to treat the division as his own personal petri dish, a constant series of experiments, poked and prodded and examined, until finally, after weeks and weeks of trialling, erroring, fiddling, fixing, f**king up, spending, trying again, failing again, failing better, figuring it out, sticking with it … he achieved what he’d set out to achieve all along:

He would be feared.

Watch this space. This could get messy.