A Tribute To Simon Humber

Tributes have been paid across the Fantasy Football community to Simon Humber, who has passed away. Simon, who was a regular poster on Fantasy Football Scout under the name Absinthe, lost his long battle with ocular melanoma this week.

When the news was posted last night the volume of tributes and strength of feeling showed what a popular member of Fantasy Football Scout he was.

Mark was among those to leave a personal tribute saying: “He was someone I met in person in a previous job, years before FFScout started, and we became friends on Facebook as soon as he turned up on our pages. I was very proud to have him contribute to the community.

“In my limited time meeting Simon and from his posts on our site, he was clearly a very smart and funny guy and we’re all going to miss him in our little part of the world.”

Community poster Smarty Pants was another to post as he recalled Simon’s first announcement of the severity of his illness two years ago. He said: “Almost two years ago, reading through pre-season transfer talk, I was shocked by a message from him announcing that he’d just lost one eye due to cancer.

“But he mentioned that his second eye was not in danger and has always been making an impression of a positive person since then, so I thought that that was it. And now it turns out that there was way more behind that… that’s a tragedy… rest in peace, Absinthe.”

Earlier last month Simon posted to tell the community that “sadly it looks as if my time is coming to an end.”

Another of our community Gnu described this heartbreaking post as “one of the saddest things and perhaps most humbling” he had read adding that Simon “still retained that sense of humour in what must have been a dark & difficult time.”

This strong sense of bravery and good humour carried through to his penultimate post last month asking the community to “help a potentially dying man” with his latest transfer decisions. He even managed to make transfers as recently as last week.

Over his four years commenting on Fantasy Football Scout he made more than 2,000 posts and many were regularly flagged up as key posts, offering advice on a range of issues. When we launched our community articles he was amongst the first to leap at the chance to offer advice to a wider audience, with his look at the defences among promoted sides prior to the 2014/15 season just one of a number of his popular articles.

It wasn’t just amongst our community that he will be sorely missed. On Triggerlips Transferhub blog further tributes were paid this week.

But most heartbreaking of all is that his son no longer has a father and his close friends and family no longer have a much loved man in their lives.

His final post on Fantasy Football Scout earlier simply read “cheers all.” On behalf of everyone at Fantasy Football Scout, cheers to you Simon for being such a vital part of our community and friend to many.