There’s a wild party kicking off across the way as I write this. One that neighbours will talk about tomorrow. Carloads of revellers piling in, screaming laughter reverberating down the road.
A festive backdrop, then, to the end of a wild week, in which sports pages bristled with sibilant shouting over someone’s ‘selfish’ soliloquy, San Siro squad-list speculation, and other players of last-initial ‘S’ getting amongst the points.
Much was made of one player’s lamentations, and though genuinely anguished they may have been, you’d have been forgiven for wondering if, on £400,000 a week, the word ‘team’ is in fact spelt with an ‘I’.
It’s the pursuit of my own team’s Fantasy points that has me home of a Friday evening but it was Fantasy pounds that went wild this week.
An absurdity of free transfers arrived as promised — one AFCON-bound player in particular missing from most of our Fantasy teams — and the market duly went mad: 27 players changing price just 13 hours after kick-off and 44 hours before the final whistle. Caution to the wind, perhaps, but the way this season is going, those taking hits to manage festive mayhem may just outscore the dullards among us who’ve set aside a few of those frees.
These few paragraphs later and my neighbourhood has gone quiet again. Yet the chat here keeps flying past, all of us together in the same green-bordered lane of ask and answer, joy and woe, the common pursuit of helping managers we’re ultimately competing against. It may get quieter in the comments as the season goes on. But here, at least, when someone rage-quits, their stratospheric salary never comes into it.
Whether making transfers over breakfast or you rushed in early doors, I hope your tinkering pays dividends. I’m off to pay the premium for waiting on my transfers this week.
