It would be untrue to say that I no longer love the game, perhaps I am disillusioned, for the term fantasy football is somewhat misleading. It's as if I have awoken from a dream and am groggy, reluctant to accept that the dissipating fragments of unconscious rememberings are just that; a dream. Maybe at the beginning (when we were winning) there was something illusory and fantastical, in whose impetus, I was swept along, making me think maybe this is one of those times when the nice guy won't finish last.
Alas, as the crowd gathers in the town square and the masked executioner sharpens his blade, the baying throngs, armed with lettuces and tomatoes, await my arrival. (Why is it the hordes always throw salad?). For it is surely only a matter of time before the axe falls and my dismembered head is left to rot, impaled; a monument to failure.
I have done all I can to focus my attentions elsewhere, engrossing myself in charitable works, such as donating some of my precious hair to the Bald Foundation and I have weaseled out of my weekly sticks and stones exchange with the national media. I have ignored the provocative and salacious headlines the tabloid editors bait their hooks with and have tried to reassess my priorities, to re-engage with the training ground, to communicate, not with defensive derision, but to speak the ethereal universal language of football. But these distractions are fleeting, and invariably I find myself alone in my office, slouching into depression, gorging half a dozen Tea Time Express cakes, washed down with a bottle of single malt.
Oh the life of a top-flight fantasy football manager is anything but wondrous! The lads sense my weakness. To them, I reek of vulnerability and it will take more than Jo Malone Pomegranate Noir Bath Oil to reaffirm my status.
When I was a boy in secondary school, my physics teacher told me that I was too honest for my own good. It is only now I am grasping the tenet of his message. For I am not the only manager whose results are poor, whose team is grossly under performing. But for all my skills as a manager, the one I do not possess, is the one for which I have the greatest need; that of the illusionist. No rabbits from hats, no mirrors, smoke, no distraction.
For example, take Hodgson at Liverpool, he had several of his players shave their heads, and instead of focusing on their results and performances, people spend their time wondering if this is the baldest team in Premier League history. Wenger at Arsenal will complain about the hue of a particularly bright traffic light on the way to the ground in the wake of a defeat and no one talks about his flawed transfer policy and team selection. Everton have 18 points from seventeen matches but all David Moyes has to do is say: "Look I'm ginger" and the press feel so sorry for him, they talk about the wonderful job he's doing under such difficult circumstances. Mark Hughes' Fulham team have won a paltry two games all season, but all he has to say to ease the media scrutiny is, "at least I'm not Spanish or Italian."
Perhaps this sounds like sour grapes. Or apples, maybe. The truth is I am envious of those with the ability to deal with the intrusion and the maliciousness and hit it for six. The best I can hope for at the moment is a risky single and hope I don't get run out.
You see, the media are like a dog who bounds down the street after a ball you only pretended to throw. By the time they realise, you've long gone. In this game, you either lie or you hide.
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