Lush Gutters

It’s important that we take a moment to appreciate exactly what we’re about to get ourselves into.

Fantasy football is all about planning ahead. The season is lengthy enough that long-term plans play out, and short bursts of disorganised good fortune are evened out by the laws of averages. This effect is exaggerated the more that other players stop paying attention, and let their teams roll over from week to week without changes to line up or captain. For every time we’ve gotten lucky and the unchanged lot have fared well, we can all remember four or five times when we, say, would’ve moved the armband to Mo at Anfield vs some bottom-feeder and doubled that massive haul of his. Everybody else did…

So, yeah, if you’re paying attention, and not blowing a fortune of transfer points making panicked last minute decisions week in week out, you’ll likely win the damn thing. But long term plans mean nothing this season.

What we’re about to experience has no precedent. Slap bang in the middle of the season, as the league traditionally starts swinging into gear, picking up steam as it climbs towards the fixture bonanza that is the holiday season, we hit an iceberg. A huge chunk of the league’s superstars, from the glitterati to the workhorses, are smashed loose. They will, in just over a week, be asked to balance the weight of their nation’s hopes on their already over-worked shoulders, pressing legs that have hardly had a day off since Project Restart, two long years ago. They’re heading for the Middle East.

Some will be home early, their nation out in three. We imagine there will be a few, unbeknownst to us now, that will pick up injuries in the run-up, and miss out entirely. For this reason the Premier League, finally following in the footsteps of its European counterparts, is allowing five substitutes per match. Player rotation, already a maddening endeavour when it comes to the likes of Manchester City, will become even more pronounced and widespread as club managers look to squeeze the most out of their star assets without leaving them spent for planet earth’s biggest showpiece. They, after all, have their own agendas.

The first contact is a rumbling under the waterline. That’s strange, captain Kane isn’t starting in that October home-banker against a struggling Fulham. Conte’s hoping he won’t need him, and with the game settled at half-time, he doesn’t even come in for a fifteen minute stretch of the legs. All of a sudden you’re hoping you remembered to do your vice captain. You haven’t, and Saka’s away at an impressive, in-form Chelsea. Two points doubled to four. Not for the first time. Does anyone else feel that?

Suddenly there’s a huge crash. We lurch to a stop, and all we can do is watch. The tournament begins, we start taking on water. What happens now?

With each passing week these players will gradually be sucked back in dribs and drabs, in variations of disconsolance, to patchwork teams. I imagine a few will want to return via their home countries for some time to grieve. Any momentum their team had enjoyed entering November is gone; any freefall suspended in mid-air. They, like the rest of us, can’t help but carry on watching those still toiling away in the desert. Some of them we figured we’d see gone for some time, but some will be unexpectedly sweeping their home nations off their feet. As we hit December there will undoubtedly be many superstars on various beaches jealously watching their far less celebrated counterparts. My guess is that many a Premier League coach will be secretly hoping that certain countries don’t run on too long. Not all will get their wish. The whole structure is imbalanced.

The lightbulbs start to flickering and die out. With the festive lights blinking, normally a time when every player is working, now barely anyone is. The clubs are helpless, and with every fresh batch of heartbroken players that return, the murkier it gets. One week before Christmas Day there’s a chance that two or three of the players that form the backbone of your team will be engaged in a spectacle watched by more eyes than any other occasion that has ever occurred on planet earth. They will likely be exhausted, and what follows be remembered for the rest of time. Some will come home forever scarred, others euophoric by the fulfilment of a lifelong dream. Some of the biggest domestic clubs will welcome back players from both sides of this eternal divide. We’re going down.

And then the machine that is the Barclay’s Premier League will reassemble its billion-dollar cogs, and grind back into motion, and then overdrive, plunging towards the icy depths. That player, whose penalty miss cost him his dreams, and those of a nation, has to be back at work in eight days. You’re away at Arsenal, who currently clutching that last Champions League spot. The boss has asked you to play. Can I?

Some will, some won’t, likely not in the order we were expecting. There’s debris everywhere; for some teams the World Cup shake-up couldn’t have come soon enough, and all the data we’d collected, all the received wisdom from the FPL season up to that point, is suddenly worthless. Now people are going nuts for Villa defenders. Glen’s gone for two. Suddenly he’s up to second in the Classic Grand, and next week he’s playing top. Although that week Villa are away at Ten Hag’s United, who have been dominant at home, although have misfired more than once this season. But, of course, a now god-like Cristiano Ronaldo is available again. Fernandes is reborn a legend.

Or they could both be broken.

Everything matters this season. Everything is intertwined. And you can’t spot patterns on a blank canvas.

None of this comes as a surprise; unlike those on the Titanic, we have always been aware of our fates, knowing nothing we can do can prevent our destiny. As the new year approaches, we know now that we’ll soon be clinging to flotsam, flapping about the wreckage as we all scramble toward that one, very small liferaft. All we’ll have is what we grabbed before we went down.

That something could be the difference between life and death.

That something could be Tyrone Mings.

This is the 2022/23 ProMax Fantasy Football Season. Start scambling.