“Football is a simple game made complicated by people who should know better.”
Bill Shankly was not wrong there, and I’ll admit it, I’ve been waiting to use that one. Just pop ‘Fantasy’ to the left there and it fits, looking back to our first Double Gameweek.
I certainly got caught up in the hype: two teams doubling was enough to pull focus from the Fixture Ticker long enough take a flyer on Kai Havertz. Havertz! The punt who would doubtless have rocketed Lateriser and me up the ranks if he’d kept fit, if he’d played just the one game. This was Captain Hindsight’s shining moment: not the should-haves or the didn’ts but the intervention of the Fates, their crafting of our hapless German’s Double Gameweek destiny as a zero-minute benching left no room for agonising, no lingering regret over not getting in that mad Swedish goal-scoring golem whom I wouldn’t have picked anyway. On another timeline, it was a brilliant choice.
And yet it left me torn. I’m not certain Gameweek 27 even happened, Real Life having got in the way as it likes to do, which is how I’m going to spin being a bit dejected over a red arrow piercing the green-arrowed idyll that’s been my year thus far. We put a lot of time into this Fantasy game, most of us, and it would be absurd to suggest that the results of our team selections don’t matter. It’s how we get on with those red arrows when they interrupt our upward trajectories that truly affect the game and, sometimes, perhaps often, our lives.
‘Learning from failure’ is an on-trend management catchphrase that I’m regularly battered with on my socials and wouldn’t go too wrong in Fantasy. I may even have read an article or two, so please indulge me any Pollyanna vibes here, but why did I pick Havertz over Viktor Gyökeres? There’s plenty to learn from that debacle of a decision but, thank the Fates, the result is merely a data point in hindsight. Had he played a minute or three, I’d have a heat map ready for the inevitable inquisition.
I hope it’s gone well for you over the past couple of weeks. Consult your oracles. Blanks and beaches coming soon.
