Tom Barklamb, if his fantasy league exploits are anything to go by, is the kind of guy who’ll serve up a perfectly succulent Beef Wellington, with a side of rich, creamy pate-de-fois-gras and a crisp, home-grown salad for dinner … and then for dessert will chuck you a sticky, crumbled, month-old Musli bar found down the back seat of the car.
He was this close to getting in your pants.
Tom, alongside Nial Taylor, began the season as one of only two managers with any meaningful FPL experience, and for the most part it showed. The man displayed an impressive tactical savvy, as demonstrated through his dominance in some key statistical tables, one in particular:
Goals. The bread and butter of football. Tom f**king loved a goal.
Barry Fry Up notched comfortably the highest goals tally of the season (108), the only team to reach triple-digits. Only once did they finish a gameweek without fielding a goalscorer, the second best tally of all competing teams (behind the perpetual chaos machine that was Scott Worthington’s Rat Pack). And boy did he know what to do with the armband! Tom’s skippers amassed a staggering 591 points, forty-one more than Glenzo Woods’ Oh Canada in 2nd, and a whopping one-hundred-and-thirteen more than World Champion Max Selby and Classic Grand winner Amy Lewis, both tied for 3rd. The man knew how to pick ‘em!
It doesn’t stop there: Tom’s chip use was similarly exemplary, finishing 2nd for most points gained from them behind Oh Canada. He knew how to time a run too: his 45 points for triple captaining Sadio Mane, the 2nd highest-scoring triple-captain pick behind Amy Lewis’ practically clairvoyant GW2 selection of hat-trick hero Sergio Aguero, propelled him into the bronze medal spot in the ProMax World Championship after weeks of waiting in the wings. It wasn’t outside the realms of possibility that he could’ve snagged the title.
What’s not to admire? The man can pick a captain, has a knack for selecting goalscorers, and knows when to play his chips. Add to the equation a modest transfer spend (5th highest) and few points left on the bench (6th highest) and he’s a sure fire winner, right?
So here’s the question:
…
… why did he finish 5th?
Tom Fulcrum
So one side of the see-saw soars, the other side similarly suddenly sinks.
If you’ll permit me a risky and disturbing analogy, one that Mr. Barklamb will surely adore, Tom was the Classic Grand equivalent of Hugh Heffner: scores all the time, but as a result his sheets are anything but clean.
Tom’s Gollum-like fixation on hitting the target wasn’t enough to compensate for a defence that, to put it mildly, was a load of old wank. Barry Fry Up may have topped the goalscoring charts, but his defence ranked dead last, scoring the fewest clean sheets of any team in the league. The four teams that finished above Tom in the Classic Grand all ranked in the top five for the same stat. Clearly a stout defence mattered.
Those chip points also warrant closer scrutiny. Whilst Tom may have bagged the second highest chip tally in the league, he managed to do so despite not even using all of them. For some inexplicable reason, he neglected to deploy his bench boost. There’s that musli bar again.
In truth that particular oversight might not have mattered all that much. Nobody notched more than twenty bench boost points (Glen), and the second highest was a mere fourteen (Elys). Clearly this wasn’t a make-or-break decision, but it does emphasise Tom’s knack for self-inflicted wounds, and this is where the head-to-head format becomes a headache for him.
In the World Championship, small slip-ups like this don’t necessarily amount to a hill of beans. Points are points, and if you get ‘em you got ‘em. But in the dog-eat-dog world of the Classic Grand, things aren’t so straightforward. Timing is everything, and sadly for Tom, his team had all the timing of a Paul Scholes slide-tackle.
Silence of the Barklambs
Only once all season did Tom manage more than two wins in a row, a run of five victories between gameweeks 25 and 29, and even this was sandwiched between three-match losing streaks. This inconsistency is illustrated well by his end-of-season win-loss record: nineteen wins, eighteen defeats, one draw, almost perfectly average. That solitary draw typifies the sort of luck Tom endured, 64-64 against the only other team with a game-week score that could match his own, Max Selby’s The Rhythmic Schism. Any other opponent and Tom would’ve taken home the win.
Tom, a vocal, scathing critic of the Classic Grand format, won’t be comforted by the knowledge that his averages over the course of the season were among the best in the league, and showed consistent improvement, rising by at least four points-per-GW over each third of the season. Across the campaign’s middle third Tom boasted the highest GW average score of any team in the Classic Grand (55.8 points). Yet somehow – inconceivably– this coincided with his worst run of results; in those twelve games* Tom managed a paltry four wins, losing seven times and drawing once. The man just couldn’t catch a break.
(* For this statistic I grouped the season into three uneven thirds, as 38 does not divide by three. Therefore the first and last thirds consists of thirteen games, with the middle consisting of twelve. This allows for a decent sample size for each section of the season – beginning, middle, and end)
Many of those defeats were agonising. Tom ranked tied for 2nd in terms of the frequency with which defeats came by three points or fewer, or in other words less than a single defensive clean sheet.
Oh, Tom.
Additional thematically relevant Tom Barklamb pun
Luck is a fickle mistress, and Tom must have said something to offend her. Those for whom last season was their first meaningful attempt at Fantasy Football have since figured out this ProMax lark, and wont be easily ignored. If we compare each team’s average score over the first and last thirteen games of the season, only F.C. Aubamaschlong saw his decrease. Two of the four managers that finished below Barry Fry Up in 2018/19 saw their averages rise by more than double digits. It will get messy.
However, it should be noted that even with the advantage of experience, Tom Barklamb’s own average, across the same period, rose by 9.2. Indeed, Tom’s 5th place finish doesn’t even begin to tell the whole story. A bronze medal in the World Championship is evidence of a strategic acumen that few in the Classic Grand can match. Should he get just a little more fortunate, and perhaps pick a defence a little less porous than a gauze Titanic, it’s not at all unlikely that he’ll be sat top of the pile come May 2020.
No more Musli bars, Tom. You’re better than this.
Lush Gutters 