Fantasy Football tips: believe that it’s someone else’s fault and it will become someone else’s fault

For the happy people, with their places to be and their people to see, fantasy football is just a game – easily forgotten once the going gets tough. But for the tortured souls with unattainable goals, there’s nothing easy about giving up on another Fantasy Football season.

Hate begins at home when you use up the last days of your holiday building up the fantasy team that will inevitably ruin your whole football season. Every hour you put into the selection process is an hour you’ll later put into despising yourself for it. There are so many things you’d rather be doing, but you’re on your laptop, working out that Luka Modric is a good player, but not a player that scores a lot of fantasy football points.

It’s more depressing because you know that you’re choosing players that will inevitably betray you. You aren’t the one in two-million who’s going to win the cash, you’re the one who puts ten hours into choosing your team only to watch on in horror as Didier Drogba is declared fit at the last minute and scores a hatrick. You’re still waiting on that apology from Didier and Chelsea.

Things go from bad to appalling and you still carry on. Three months in and the fair-weatherers have dropped off, but you’re still waking up at 3am on Saturday morning realising you haven’t made your changes yet. That’s why you’ll win and they won’t, you tell yourself, before looking at your utterly mid-table performance so far and realising that you’re the real loser – in this and all other things. Losing badly is one thing: there can be excuses and retributions. Doing fine is worse: things didn’t go that badly wrong, you just weren’t good enough, and guess what? No-one cares except you.

It sounds like a sob-story, but it doesn’t have to be. There are some things you can do to rescue the situation (depending, naturally, on your definition of a rescue.) I can help you.

 

Step 1

Your Fantasy Football failure may be your fault alone, but there’s nothing stopping you from blaming others for it. The secret here is to commit to it: believe that it’s someone else’s fault and it will become someone else’s fault.

The practical application of this step is easy. Remember when your flatmate/family member/burglar walked through the room as you were updating your team? It put you off, okay? Yes it did.

It’s also a given that all the players you chose were working against you

Step 2

Sometimes it’s not enough to convince yourself that you were cheated. Sometimes you feel like it’s necessary to convince everyone else as well. They won’t want to listen, but you can make them:

Trap them in a car or midway through a DVD that they’re enjoying. Explain, with repeated digression onto your other important opinions, that you’ve been done and how. Occasionally you’ll need to shout.

 

 

Step 3

Dear Richard (Scudamore),

After some months of playing YOUR Fantasy Football game, I have come to the conclusion that it is rigged.

In exchange for keeping quiet, I want The Signed Shirt – yes, you know the one; the one you give away to the winner. Have it on my desk by Monday or I’ll blow this whole thing open, you scumbag.

Kind regards,

Ethan

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N.B. My definition of ‘rescue’ is: to make a problem far worse.