Fantasy Football

With but a few weeks remaining until the end of a dark football-less summer (for those of us who can't stretch a budget to an ESPN subscription to watch the Copa America, and who's internet isn't quite quick enough to be able to stream the games) its the time where fans up and down the country should be starting to take notice of the transfer movers and shakers, do their research on the the promoted teams and assessing the season just past...for now is the time to think about selecting your valiant steeds who are going to guide you to success on the Premier League's Fantasy Football.

For people who don't indulge, it is yet another aspect of the beautiful game which baffles, I mean just how interesting is it selecting a squad of players from around the premiership to try and gain more points on an artificial scale than the rest of the country...for those people I feel sorry.

Until you have fully immersed yourself into the game you can't hope to know the roller coaster of emotions that a budding manager will go through over a season.  From the euphoric highs of seeing your weekly transfer scoring a hat-trick to rocket you to the top of the league to the depths of despair seeing a fellow player in your mini-league open up a seemingly unassailable league through an unprecedented good week, or when Jeff Stelling informs you that your captain has just been sent off having already missed a penalty and scored an own goal.

Usually a typical season for me follows this pattern...firstly I spend hours agonising over my team, what formation shall i adopt, who is going to be the surprise package this year, who will be my Charlie Adam, my Jamie O'Hara, who is going to be the defender who pops up with a goal or two, who will captain my team and most importantly who will partner Emile Heskey up front?  Having answered these questions and chosen my boys who, in my eyes, will fight for their manager and spill blood for the shirt, its a waiting game for that opening weekend of the season.  The first few weeks will consist of tweaking the team based on the quick starters, probably the deployment of my wild-card.  The weekly tweaking will continue (hopefully with me residing around the upper echelons of the mini league, and in the top few thousand of the overall) for a few weeks until the inevitable downturn...it is at this point I usually give up.  Once I'm more than 100 points off the lead I don't care anymore, basically I'm a really bad loser, so by stopping playing I haven't lost, I've chosen not to play anymore, lets face it, I'd definitely have won if I'd carried on...

But this year will be different, this year I'm going to take it seriously, I'm going to do my research, I'm going to make my own luck, and I shall bring home the big prize.

To help me do this, I'll be blogging weekly updates on the team, the mighty Balfour Warriors...so watch out, the Warriors are coming.

Balfour Warriors team photo 2006/2007 season.