NMA Blog Cup 2022 - We Have A Winner!

We may be in World Cup mode now, with the shutdown of the Premier League underway, but Round 16 of EPL brought us the small matter of the 2022 NMA Blog Cup final!

Over six hard-fought previous rounds we whittled the original 219 teams down to just 20. Some big names fell by the wayside along the way, but many of the names on NMA-11’s leaderboard made it all the way to the showdown. With all those heavy-hitters still in play, it was going to take a special performance to win.

Since we knew the confirmed Manchester City vs Brentford lineups before the Fantrax deadline, piling into City assets would surely be the route to victory, right? Umm...not so much, it turns out.

Here are the results in full:

So, congratulations to Sir Boy United FC, the NMA Blog Cup 2022 winner, who claimed victory with a very impressive 145 points!

Commiserations to the rest, and especially to second-placed Team msneezie31, who fell short by an agonizing 1.5 points.

What was the secret to success? Well, for once this year, it wasn’t any of Haaland, Salah or Cancelo. Together these guys managed only 15.5 points between them, and they were the lowest scoring players in the winner’s team. All of Sir Boy’s other players scored at least 9.5 points, including two of the top-five scoring players of the week in Danny Ward and Darwin Nunez (29.5 and 26.5 respectively). So it was a really good all-round team for Sir Boy United FC.

The second-placed team had the identical forward line of Haaland, Salah and Nunez, plus KDB, Trippier (does anyone NOT have Trippier?) and Laporte. But it was the other five players who made the difference, with the inspired pick of Tavernier picking up a huge 26.5 points. Ederson disappointed in goal, picking up only 5.5 points after the shock City defeat. Brentford’s late goal made all the difference here - without it, we’d have been looking at a different winner.

Completing the podium is THKSFIGHT, whose 129.5 points came mostly from eight solid players all in double figures including Nunez’s 26.5. Again it was the goalkeeper that came up short, with Lloris only managing 2.5 points.

There were four previously-eliminated teams in the league that scored more than the winner, so if only they hadn’t fallen in an earlier round any of them might have been the champion. Three of the blog staff members made it to the final, and I’m pleased to say that my own team The Motley Crewe came out on top in this little three-way battle, ahead of Team stallexpress and blog editor Jeff’s Alehouse WAGs, although none of us will have been very pleased with our performance in the final. Stall will find some consolation in the fact that he still retains the league’s number one spot. What a season he’s having!

I’ve been keeping a tally of cup performances (each team’s finishing position for each round), and the team that is clearly the most consistent is ching, with finishing positions of 29, 14, 7, 13, 6, 15 and 12 for a total of 96. They’ll just be disappointed that their performance dropped off at the crucial time. The Motley Crewe came second with a total of 114 and DISCO ARGYLE third with 120.

Fantrax is now on pause for the World Cup, but the Premier League resumes on Boxing Day. Once we return, you’ll want to get your league position as high as possible by GW-20 (14th January), because that is when the qualifying positions for the NMA-11 Cup are determined. The NMA-11 Cup is our blog tournament for the second half of the season; see here for all the details.

Were you one of the Cup finalists, or even the winner? We’d love to hear from you. Were you well placed this week but eliminated in a previous round? Ken, we’re looking at you for one - you’d have been half a point off winning! Please let us know in the comments.

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