c4countdown

Lasted 14 weeks. It's been fun.

Top of the league again!

Martin Long wrote:Top of the league again!

And somehow, I'm top of the Head-to-Head league. This is just total Redcar domination.

Very tight at the top now! Just one point separating the top 3!

Can someone link to the league for nosy parkers plz?

Michael Wallace wrote:Can someone link to the league for nosy parkers plz?

Here it is. Dunno if you have to be registered to access it, probably not.

Oh, and also here for the other one (that I'm not doing so well in).

JimBentley wrote:

Michael Wallace wrote:Can someone link to the league for nosy parkers plz?

Here it is. Dunno if you have to be registered to access it, probably not.

Oh, and also here for the other one (that I'm not doing so well in).

Cheers. (I have a team of my own, but like to keep my number of Fantasy football leagues relatively low to make keeping track of things easier.)

Michael Wallace wrote:

JimBentley wrote:

Michael Wallace wrote:Can someone link to the league for nosy parkers plz?

Here it is. Dunno if you have to be registered to access it, probably not.

Oh, and also here for the other one (that I'm not doing so well in).

Cheers. (I have a team of my own, but like to keep my number of Fantasy football leagues relatively low to make keeping track of things easier.)

Lol @ manually comparing leagues with links and screenshots and dual windows and shit as being "easier"

Matt Morrison wrote:Lol @ manually comparing leagues with links and screenshots and dual windows and shit as being "easier"

Haha, fair. (I just mean if I actually 'play' in too many leagues I can't then give them all enough attention (from a strategy perspective).)

That's deep. Never thought about adjusting strategy per league. Maybe too deep.

Matt Morrison wrote:That's deep. Never thought about adjusting strategy per league. Maybe too deep.

Yeah, it's not really that important for the most part, but obviously can have implications if it's getting close towards the end of the season.

Garbage week for me last week, looking to make up for it this week. I think I've got a really strong line up for this one so looking for an enormous points haul.

Some extremely high scoring this gameweek, well done to Oliver and Jen!

My team finally delivered a decent points haul this week but has probably come too late for a title challenge.

Still, I'm going to have at least 8 players playing twice in gameweek 36, which could be useful.

Looks like a two-horse race now!

Eoin Monaghan wrote:Looks like a two-horse race now!

Carroll's nowhere near the top scorers?

Eoin Monaghan wrote:Looks like a two-horse race now!

Good luck. They'll be saying that you lot "won't Findus in here".
Don't run over your Lidl ponies...
Are any of your horses red and prancing?

For the first half hour of Villa v Sunderland, Oli was only 1 point behind me - a Benteke hat trick, Sessegnon red and Mignolet conceding 6 later and I'm 20 ahead. It's a funny old game...

Jennifer Steadman wrote:For the first half hour of Villa v Sunderland, Oli was only 1 point behind me - a Benteke hat trick, Sessegnon red and Mignolet conceding 6 later and I'm 20 ahead. It's a funny old game...

That match really screwed up my chances of getting anywhere near winning the league.

I have a good team for next gameweek but it won't be good enough to catch up I reckon. I need a 50 point swing at least in my favour (like in gameweek 34) but can't see it happening. Despite having 9 players playing twice next week (ones not playing twice are Mignolet and Van Persie), some of the selections are pretty big gambles so I'm definitely not guaranteed a massive points haul.

In the C4C League, gg wp Jen, ul Oli

Meanwhile, in the league everyone really cares about (the vastly superior C4C H2H league), a massive congratulations to wonderful me on an amazing FIRST PLACE!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

Well done to Jen, the better player definitely won! Well done Ed too! But we must give massive congratulations to Michael "Raccoon" Wallace, who came 55th IN THE WORLD this season. Quite incredible!

Oliver Garner wrote:Well done to Jen, the better player definitely won! Well done Ed too! But we must give massive congratulations to Michael "Raccoon" Wallace, who came 55th IN THE WORLD this season. Quite incredible!

(Just goes to show what a statistics PhD and wasting far too much time on Fantasy Football can achieve...)

1 female. 22 males. And only 1 winner... and it's meeeeeeeeeeeeee! #GirlPower

Just as well my deeply misplaced judgement call in benching Lukaku in favour of Maloney didn't matter in the end! Well done to Paddy McBellface for winning the H2H league and being a solid (if not Invincible) Assistant Manager, and commiserations to Oli for being beaten by a girl. (Actually, commiserations to everyone for being beaten by a girl ... ) Kidding - very unlucky, your comeback in recent weeks has been shredding my nerves!

EDIT: Cheers Oli! And well done Michael/Raccoon. Awesome achievement!

Edward McCullagh wrote:In the C4C League, gg wp Jen, ul Oli

Meanwhile, in the league everyone really cares about (the vastly superior C4C H2H league), a massive congratulations to wonderful me on an amazing FIRST PLACE!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

tyvm. However, I do seem to recall this Facebook chat conversation from March 16th:

"12:02 Jennifer Steadman: you should just focus on trying to oust me in the H2H league, at least you've still got a chance there
12:05 Edward McCullagh: who cares about the H2H? "

Looks like someone had a change of heart...

Too lazy to look for a link but how did Jen win if MW came 55th?

Because he didn't enter the C4C league(s). Fortunately.

Yeah, I thought we'd already talked about this on here, but if we have it wasn't in this thread. I've been in a league with some friends for years, and I don't like to battle on more than one front because of strategy and stuff.

Michael Wallace wrote:Yeah, I thought we'd already talked about this on here, but if we have it wasn't in this thread. I've been in a league with some friends for years, and I don't like to battle on more than one front because of strategy and stuff.

I take it you won the league you were in with your "friends" then? How many people were in it in total? Is there any prize for such a good finish? Is this your best performance ever? How many hours did you spend on it?

Jon O'Neill wrote:

Michael Wallace wrote:Yeah, I thought we'd already talked about this on here, but if we have it wasn't in this thread. I've been in a league with some friends for years, and I don't like to battle on more than one front because of strategy and stuff.

I take it you won the league you were in with your "friends" then? How many people were in it in total? Is there any prize for such a good finish? Is this your best performance ever? How many hours did you spend on it?

Yep. 2,608,361. Nope. Yep (previous best was a rank of about 9,000th). I dread to think. Probably averaged something like 2 hours a week? Some weeks it was only about half an hour when I knew what I was doing, other times I'd spend a lot of time reading articles, looking at stats, etc. when things were getting complicated.

Michael Wallace wrote:

Jon O'Neill wrote:

Michael Wallace wrote:Yeah, I thought we'd already talked about this on here, but if we have it wasn't in this thread. I've been in a league with some friends for years, and I don't like to battle on more than one front because of strategy and stuff.

I take it you won the league you were in with your "friends" then? How many people were in it in total? Is there any prize for such a good finish? Is this your best performance ever? How many hours did you spend on it?

Yep. 2,608,361. Nope. Yep (previous best was a rank of about 9,000th). I dread to think. Probably averaged something like 2 hours a week? Some weeks it was only about half an hour when I knew what I was doing, other times I'd spend a lot of time reading articles, looking at stats, etc. when things were getting complicated.

Intriguing. What sort of articles? What sort of stats? What was your biggest mistake of the year and what was your boldest/best move? (Or is everything such a calculated risk that you can't have such an emotional response?) How do the other people who were in your league feel about you finishing in the top 0.003% of entrants? Do you find out who actually won? Are they usually geeky like you or are they a football geezer?

Jon O'Neill wrote:Intriguing. What sort of articles? What sort of stats? What was your biggest mistake of the year and what was your boldest/best move? (Or is everything such a calculated risk that you can't have such an emotional response?) How do the other people who were in your league feel about you finishing in the top 0.003% of entrants? Do you find out who actually won? Are they usually geeky like you or are they a football geezer?

There are various websites that post Fantasy Football advice, but I mainly use this one, which also has a 'members area' where for about £15 you get access to loads of Opta-generated stats that let you do pretty much anything you could think of (one of the most useful being a comparison tool that allows you to compare average playing position and per-match stats of players).

My biggest mistake was probably signing Danny Graham at the start of the season - he'd had amazing pre-season form that just didn't materialize in the Premier League, where he scored just one goal and got dropped to a substitute role during the 9 weeks I had him in my team. My best 'move' was probably saving my wildcard (which allows you to make as many changes as you want for free one week) until the antepenultimate week of the season, where a bunch of teams had two fixtures (rearranged because of cup runs) so I could easily just bring in loads of players who'd get twice as many games. No particular transfers stand out, although five minutes before the deadline yesterday I took out Silva for Coutinho, which earnt me 9 points (Silva was brought on as a substitute, while Coutinho scored and got bonus opints). Given how uncertain I was of the move it was a pretty nice result.

One or two of the guys in the league are a bit 'wtf?' about it, but I've won our league every year since it started, so I think they're just a bit sick of me now. I don't know the person who came top of the world, but obviously the overall ranks are public knowledge (the guy who came second had hat-trick scoring Lukaku in his 15-man squad, but didn't play him in his starting 11, which is pretty brutal). I get the impression most Fantasy Football people are actually pretty geezer-ish: obviously you need to be pretty into football to get anywhere with it, although I think the people near the top tend to be slightly more obsessed with the planning/strategizing that only comes from being a nerd.

Cool.

Where were you before your wildcard week? Where would you have finished if you didn't make the Coutinho switch?

Jon O'Neill wrote:Cool.

Where were you before your wildcard week? Where would you have finished if you didn't make the Coutinho switch?

I was 189th, and had pretty much flatlined at that rank for the preceding 5 weeks. Looks like not making the Coutinho switch would have seen me finish in 82nd (although that's a bit dodgy, as I presumably would have made some other move if I hadn't gone for Coutinho).

Jennifer Steadman wrote:Because he didn't enter the C4C league(s). Fortunately.

Hollow victory.

Well done to Jen, Michael and Ed!

Interesting that I finished third in the overall league yet was something like 11th in the Head to Head league, guess this was because my teams' scoring was wildly inconsistent with massive scores one week and awful scores the next.

I think my best achievement was staying interested for virtually the full season. I usually lose interest after a few weeks.

Amazing. One of my true heroes.

I know a bit silly, but what would you say the ratio of how much football/heart and stats/head went into your work? 90% mathematical approach or something?

Was saving your wildcard until the end of the season (where multiple rearranged fixtures is probably fairly common) something you had planned all along that you do every year?

Also link please to team page. Got a few people at work talking about you now. Though will look myself too.

Finally, how much was your team worth in the end?

My approach was probably almost entirely stats/maths. You can get some sense for players to keep an eye on from watching teams live, but as I don't have Sky I mainly just caught up with things on Match of the Day which doesn't tell you much about how individual players are doing. Moreover, almost everything is hiding in player stats if you know where/how to look. For example, if you watched Everton near the start of the season you'd notice how much Baines and Pienaar were linking up and dictating the play from the left, but this sort of information would also tend to show up in stats/average position maps.

Other than that, the only 'football reasons' that would factor into my strategy would be obvious things like whether the teams have something to play for, whether important players will be rested because of other matches (Chelsea and Man City were particularly bad for this around their cup runs), and whether important players were out for injuries/suspensions (there was a huge increase in the points from Sturridge/Coutinho once Suarez got suspended and stopped gobbling up all the goals, for instance).

Saving the wildcard was deliberate. A lot of people play them early because they're impatient and/or want to catch price rises early on (the latter of these could well be a valid strategy, but I'm not convinced), but as a rule you should only play it if your team is utterly screwed. I got relatively lucky as my team never got enough injuries/suspensions to force me to play it, and I kept on top of all fixture changes which pointed towards a big gameweek at the end of the season. I don't do this every year, though: last year I played it in about gameweek 32, just because my team was beginning to really struggle and there wasn't the same prospect of mega gameweeks.

My final team value was £106.8m, having peaked at £108.8m in gameweek 28.

If you added up all the fantasy points scored by the players in each real-life team, would the table look similar to the real-life league table?

Top question. They used to do tables of this on the site but I can't find them. Might run the numbers later. It should correlate pretty well with goals scored and clean sheets, but we'll see.

Michael Wallace wrote:Top question. They used to do tables of this on the site but I can't find them. Might run the numbers later. It should correlate pretty well with goals scored and clean sheets, but we'll see.

Yayyy!

I did it:



Interesting.

Also did fantasy ranking by player position:



Don't really know what this is telling us except that Aston Villa got saved by Benteke which is pretty obvious.

Oh you fucker, I literally just did it myself. Although I get some slightly different numbers (the most alarming being that I have QPR with 1256 points, which looks correct when I do a manual check using this page).

Agree for the most part with the others, including Chelsea top. Although I wonder how much of that is because Ba joined halfway through the season, so with my method Chelsea get all the points (115 or so) that he scored for Newcastle. Can't see a trivial way to fix that and I cba to do it manually for everyone who changed team.

I just used this:

http://fantasy.premierleague.com/player-list

I didn't check anything.

Oh, I see what's happened. That's a list of 'current' players, so people who've left the EPL aren't on it. The highest scoring omission is Ryan Nelsen of QPR, while the most famous is probably Balotelli of City.

Edit: So here's my version, which includes players who left the league, but doesn't take into account players switching clubs.



Since I've gone this far I may as well try and deal with the various players who switched clubs manually. I don't think there can be that many who'll make a difference, but with Ba's Newcastle points counting for Chelsea it's possible they wouldn't be top.

I love you two.

MW - one more (for now). Did you enjoy this season about the same as previous seasons, a little more, or loads more. i.e. how much does the actual result of how well you do make a difference. And if it makes a huge difference, are you tempted to retire on 55th and not stick in the effort again next season? You're incredible.

I think I enjoyed it a little more, but not loads. Obviously when things are going well you get annoyed a bit less, but at the same time it's pretty stressful when you find yourself with the opportunity to obtain such a high ranking. Fortunately(?) I was never in contention for the top spots so didn't have that to worry about: the guy who came second lost on final day bonus points, and had Lukaku (who scored a hat trick!) on his bench, which must really hurt. I also finished the league on my highest rank all season, so I didn't have any disappointment of "oh man, I was top 50 once" or anything (I only hit the top 100 with one week to go).

I'm seriously considering retiring after this season. Partly because I can never expect to do this well again, but also because we're moving to Canada and so that's going to screw stuff up in all sorts of ways. It's a pretty weird decision to be taking so seriously, but as you can probably tell it can become quite a big part of your life!

Also, here's a more accurate Fantasy Premier League table, having taken into account what I believe to be all the players who switched between clubs during the season. The main changes are down to Demba Ba (who scored 115 points for Newcastle before moving to Chelsea) and Danny Graham (who scored 58 points for Swansea before moving to Sunderland). The top is now very close, although Chelsea still edge it, which on face value is pretty weird. United scored 11 more goals and only kept 1 fewer clean sheet. I assume it's mainly down to midfielders/defenders scoring vs. strikers: Chelsea's top three scorers were midfielders, whereas United's were two strikers and a defender. Every goal from the midfield is worth one more point than one from a striker.

The main other feature is West Brom dropping 4 places. It's not immediately obvious why, although they kept relatively few clean sheets, and the table is generally quite tight down there.

Just wonderful.

I've just gone on the Fantasy Premier League site and it's up and running ready for next season. Has someone set up a c4c league again this year?

Adam Gillard wrote:I've just gone on the Fantasy Premier League site and it's up and running ready for next season. Has someone set up a c4c league again this year?

Nope, I'll do it now!

Is there an entry code for this?

Martin Bishop wrote:Is there an entry code for this?

Classic league: 267575-77081
Head-to-Head league: 267575-77102

Be careful if copying and pasting that there aren't any extra spaces at the end of the code, as that has caught some people out when trying to join the leagues.

Cheers

MIDFIELD: Hazard [15], Mirallas [10], Ramsey [9], Ozil [12]
STRIKERS: Sturridge [5], Lukaku [2], Giroud [8]

WHO DID I FUCKING CAPTAIN? LUKAKU, OBVIOUSLY

I was grumpy about dropping Van Persie, but then replacing him with Giroud wasn't so bad. And Ozil captain

Jennifer Steadman wrote:MIDFIELD: Hazard [15], Mirallas [10], Ramsey [9], Ozil [12]
STRIKERS: Sturridge [5], Lukaku [2], Giroud [8]

WHO DID I FUCKING CAPTAIN? LUKAKU, OBVIOUSLY

I don't know if I have pointed this out to you but you'd probably be top of the league by now if you'd picked Hazard

Edward McCullagh wrote:

Jennifer Steadman wrote:MIDFIELD: Hazard [15], Mirallas [10], Ramsey [9], Ozil [12]
STRIKERS: Sturridge [5], Lukaku [2], Giroud [8]

WHO DID I FUCKING CAPTAIN? LUKAKU, OBVIOUSLY

I don't know if I have pointed this out to you but you'd probably be top of the league by now if you'd picked Hazard

YES, YOU HAVE ALREADY POINTED THIS OUT TO ME GO AWAY SMUGFACE

Anyone fancy doing a World Cup fantasy football league? I was looking around and found a few places doing one so I didn't know which one people would be keen on. The McDonalds one seems to be the official FIFA one. Any suggestions on which one to go for?

Mark James wrote:Anyone fancy doing a World Cup fantasy football league? I was looking around and found a few places doing one so I didn't know which one people would be keen on. The McDonalds one seems to be the official FIFA one. Any suggestions on which one to go for?

I'm planning to use the McDonalds one. We used it for the Euro 2012 fantasy football league - it was pretty good (apart from the eventual Apto league winner ) so yeah, let's stick with that one unless anyone has any objections.

On the McDonalds' site it says, thanks for registering, come back on June 8th to start selecting your team. It is June 8th and I can't select a team. Anyone know what's going on?