Even after an encouraging midweek tally, I’m resigned to the fact that my season is now about managing expectations. I have to shift my sights – forget about catching the Ramsey-carrying juggernauts, already established in the top 10k and instead attempt to win private battles and hit more modest targets.
It’s not an easy thing to admit and is undoubtedly a factor that leads to estimates that over 50% of Fantasy Premier League players become inactive by the turn of the year. Presumably, many of them find themselves cut adrift in mini-leagues, castaway from rivals and struggling to salvage motivation for the rest of the campaign.
That’s obviously not something I can entertain. Instead I have to believe I can close some gaps and rescue some respectability – I’ve never finished outside the top 30k – I’ve got believe I can somehow maintain that record.
This season’s trends to this point don’t make it easy, however. I look to my own “contributors league” and Evs at the top. He’s surely one of the very best FPL managers around (our own Hall of Fame certainly says so), his squad looks to be without an obvious weakness and, more significantly, completely unobtainable even if I sat here this morning toying with a Wildcard.
Such a situation is not just down to the emergence of the bandwagons – Ramsey, Yaya Toure, Mesut Ozil, Luis Suarez, Sergio Aguero – it’s been their continued strength week-to-week. This has led to these players climbing in price at pace, leaving those without them to hope that their output will stall. It simply hasn’t and, sitting here staring at Gameweek 15’s fixtures and beyond, I really can’t say with any assurance that those five won’t continue to maintain their impressive rate of scoring – they certainly have the class to carry it off.
The midweek hauls were a case in point. I only signed Luis Suarez and Sergio Aguero in Gameweek 13 – costing me far more than Evs paid. Had I not belatedly embraced the Suarez bandwagon, however, I would have been devastated by Wednesday’s events. And yet, those returns only helped me keep up – I can’t hope to make up ground on the top rank managers by being forced to adopt the same key players and paying more money for the privilege.
So, of course, I need to find something different. However, this season is not only typified by the strength of the bandwagons, it’s also seen a marked failure in players emerging to threaten the template. My stubborn resistance to adopt Ramsey continues and has seen me turn to a string of differentials – all, except Hazard, have failed me. I’m still waiting for Michu, Theo Walcott, Philippe Coutinho and David Silva to come along and truly shake things up – they’ve flirted with the idea but they’ve not delivered and it’s made it far too easy to sit on the established forward line and snuggle up to Toure, Ramsey and Ozil in midfield.
I have to believe that this will change. That somewhere along the line I’ll catch one of these emerging bandwagons and ride it for ten weeks while others stay clinging to the likes or Ramsey and Toure while their output stutters.
For now, I could settle for another Gameweek win over Granville, or perhaps even a few points back on Evs. In truth, however, it’s best to ignore their lineups. That’s coveting the unobtainable and setting unrealistic goals. I need to be content with small victories and hope that, eventually, the bandwagons will falter and that new opportunities will arise and that this time I’ll have the sense to pounce on them.
