Rollercoaster Saturday

What a mental day of ups and downs!

If you've been hiding under a rock, here was my team: 

De Gea, Brown, Wheater, Vermaelen, Eagles, Sessegnon, Silva, Lampard, Gervinho, Adebayor, Aguero

So what went wrong? Well - lets start with the fact that I spent 20.48 on Frank Lampard, only for him to start on the bench for a quite useless 0.5 points. I'm convinced he would've got me a big total had he played, so I'd say the feeling when I saw the Chelsea team sheet is about as low as I've felt this season; I really thought I had great team but when 20% of your budget goes on a zero if massively affects everything you'd planned for, and it hurt like f... well, let's just say it hurt.

Next up, David Wheater sent off within 20 minutes for Bolton, which also affected my Chris Eagles pick. To be fair, Eagles' 6 points was was far from a disaster, but -5 for Wheater when I spent almost 7 of him was. Ouch again. However, it gets worse.

Stephane Sessegnon returned just 1.5 points; and the real killer was my Saturday morning team had Younes Kaboul and Kieran "playing behind the striker" Richardson instead of Wheater and Sess. I talked myself out of my original selection less than 2 hours before the deadline to a detrimental swing of roughly 20 points. Ouch AGAIN.

I did have a major bright spot scattered amongst the mess, and that was Emmanuel Adebayor, who helped my beloved Spurs to a superb 3-1 win at West Brom, to move us within 2 points of Manchester United (who drew with Newcastle) with a game in hand. Ade missed a penalty but converted the rebound, set up Jermain Defoe's winner and then scored an injury time bonus for a massive 40 point haul which involved a simply ridiculous NINE shots on target. This obviously lifted my spirits as real life outweighs fantasy anyway, but let's renew the pain shall we?

OK - Gervinho was benched in favour of the awful Andrei Arshavin, and I must admit I was re-demoralised by this point. It could've got worse as I didn't have Robin van Persie - but oh wait, forget about that - how about Thomas Vermaelen scores an own goal? Oh he did, did he? Cheers. Thank God he then scored the equaliser for a remarkable recovery score of 16 points, but then RvP rocked up with 17 without doing anything, so it didn't really help that much. At least Arsenal could only draw, which was another positive that helped numb the disappointments elsewhere.

So despite a really crazy (and often devastating) day, I somehow stayed more-or-less where I was at the start, dropping just 100 places to 2200th. I've ended up on 80 points with David Silva and Sergio Aguero to go tomorrow, which isn't great, but it really could've been far far worse given the amount of stuff that went wrong. It was also a great day to be a Spurs fan - I'm seeing our best run of form since I was aware of football as a 3 year old, and that makes me feel very proud. I wish my fantasy team was having the same success, but all football fans know what's more important. It would be nice to have both, but I'm not that greedy :)

I'll leave it there other than to say I'm really looking forward to Liverpool v Manchester City tomorrow (and Swansea v Villa actually). I hope you've had a good week so far; despite everything I've whinged about above, I honestly feel football is the only sport that can give you these highs and lows in such a small space of time and on such a regular basis ... the lows feel absolutely awful but it makes those highs all the more important. I wouldn't change it.

Let me know how you did, and as ever, thanks for reading.

Cheers, Nik