The defining moment in my FPL season.

In this emotionally charged blog post, I will be sharing a story with you, a story that haunts me and my Fantasy Premier League (FPL) dreams to this day - a story that is painfully non-fictional. I hope to achieve some sort of catharsis by delving back into the recent past as such, but most importantly, I hope that, by sharing where it all went wrong for me, you, the reader, will be able to learn from my mistakes, and make sensible transfers from this point onwards.

The incident in question occurred on Thursday 28th November, in the period before Gameweek 14 - on this day, I made a pivotal transfer, one that would plague me for the following week, and one that would set a tone of disappointment and failure that persists to this very day. ‘What was this terrible transfer?’ I hear you cry: quite simply, I axed Newcastle’s Jetro Willems, to bring in Gary Cahill from Crystal Palace; oh, how I regret doing so. My policy on Fantasy Premier League (FPL), is to wait until the end of the week before I make any transfers, so as to account for any injuries that may occur mid-week; biding my time as such allows me to keep my team injury-free to the best of my ability - or so I thought. On that fateful Thursday, I brought Cahill into my team on the understanding that he was match fit - and he was match fit for two days, until 3pm on Saturday 30th November, when Palace played Burnley at Turf Moor. Here then, you can see where my problems begin. Cahill was left out of Palace’s matchday squad altogether, with a knee injury. My policy of caution had failed me: Cahill bagged me no points, before being auto-subbed to the bench for Bournemouth’s Diego Rico, who also managed a whopping zero points away at Tottenham. 

This was not the most painful thing about this episode though - no, the keenest pain I felt arrived with the news that Crystal Palace had actually managed to keep a clean sheet. I was vindicated, as such, in bringing Cahill into my team, but a cruel turn of fate deprived me of the clean sheet points my football nous had earned. What’s more, the man I turned in for Cahill, Jetro Willems, inexplicably concocted a goal-scoring performance against Manchester City (yes, Manchester City!), in one of the finest examples of salt rubbed into wounds you ever will see.

As you can tell, Cahill-gate dealt me a heavy emotional blow, numbing me to all else that went wrong (and right) in Gameweek 14. Not that anything else of note happened in this gameweek, apart from my usual points punishment for not having Abraham or Vardy in my ranks. It would be misleading for me to insinuate, though, that Cahill-gate and the misery it caused was limited to Gameweek 14. No, the fact that Crystal Palace’s defensive solidity continued with two more clean-sheets in the following gameweeks ensured that this free transfer was a particularly costly one.

I hope you can now see, then, how transferring Gary Cahill into my team on Thursday 28th November was a defining moment in my fantasy premier league season. In one fell swoop, I was deprived of Jetro Willems’ goal-scoring points, at the cost of bringing in the wrong man from the right team. Cahill’s injury shut me out from three clean sheets’ worth of points. I think that there is a lesson to be learned somewhere in all of this - I trust that you can find out what it is.

Thanks for reading, I hope you enjoyed!

Feel free to comment your thoughts on my FPL woes, and please share your own tales of FPL misery as well!

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