Welcome back. Nice to have FPL to think about again, isn’t it?
Hope you’re well, and the weather in your postcode is better than the Andy Gray-evoking-Britannia-Stadium sort of stuff coming down outside my window. Proper football weather. Meanwhile, your faithful scribe has picked up an orange flag: ankle injury, 50% chance of lining up for the run I’d entered this weekend. A detour around some dog-walkers and an uneven pavement did for me, and what does it say that I almost prefer this sort of plight to the sight of five flags bristling from my FPL team three weeks ago?
Gameweek 28, flags everywhere, five yellows for me and more for some. But the odds paid out for my XI, with most of the maybes in the points: three noughts on the bench looked almost intentional.
Those coloured flags and their owners’ odds of playing were in my mind last week while mired in some world events comments, numbers lobbed back and forth like truth grenades of questionable manufacture. It’s no secret that I’ve one foot firmly in the Eye Test camp; why bother with xG when Player Y’s purple patch is in full bloom? Those unicorn weeks when second-string defenders or academy call-ups look a dead cert against opposition with a Schwerpunkt in its left defence or right wing or set-piece nous, someone you wouldn’t consider unless you’d been ensorceled by those clever-looking punts paying off time and again? Love them, look for them, get lucky with them perhaps too often.
That said, I’m comparing players in the Members’ Area or looking at Opta’s pretty charts more often than I’m cheerfully ignoring a striker’s bargain-bin xG. It’s what you see when you’re looking at it that gives you the edge, ‘you’ being me, anyway, and maybe how you read into what other players say on here, or don’t say, or the football news you consume. Magnus Carlsen might play FPL on data alone but he’s got the advantage of having Magnus Carlsen’s brain.
Years ago, a book called “How to Lie With Statistics” changed the way I received information. Everything from the scale of a line graph (Shocking Sign of Societal Collapse [Isn’t Really]!) to the way public figures rated both their own tenure and the world around them fell under scrutiny. There are lessons for FPL in its pages as well; ‘consider the source’ is a key component of a strategy laid out against being misled by seductive data points. My mate who knows ‘he always scores on a cold night in Stoke’ might always pass the vibes test, but my transfers and team selection want context, objectivity, making sense.
If I had Magnus Carlsen’s brain, I could give you a better TED Talk on statistics. But would he recommend that book, as well? I wouldn’t doubt it. Knowledge is power.
Stay safe and good luck this week.
