NMA-11 Cup: Round 1 Results and Round 2 Draw

GW-24 saw the first round of the Fantrax NMA-11 Cup take place. This featured 80 Fantrax teams — those ‘non-league’ teams who’d battled through the qualifying round plus the ‘League 1’ and ‘League 2’ teams, all rankings based on teams’ qualifying positions in GW-20 in the Fantrax NMA-11 league.

In real life, we saw some unexpected results, especially on Saturday. Man City drew at Nottingham Forest thanks to a late equalizer; tail-spinning Chelsea lost at home to bottom team Southampton; second-bottom Bournemouth won at Wolves; Fulham upset Brighton away from home; and Brentford just salvaged only a draw at home to Crystal Palace.

Liverpool also won fairly comfortably at Newcastle — not an upset in previous years, but certainly against the form of both teams this season. Add in a gritty home win and clean sheet for Everton against Leeds, and it was clear that a lot of points were going to unexpected places. Arsenal did win, although the Gunners needed two late goals to get past Aston Villa. On Sunday, results reverted more to form, with Man United and Tottenham both having fairly comfortable home wins with clean sheets.

Having a cup week where there are a lot of real-life upsets can lead to fantasy upsets too. Four teams in the league posted scores over 130 points, their current league positions being: 10, 91, 321 and 311! Two of these teams had only nine players who actually played, and only one of them fielded a full compliment of 11!

Here are the results in full:

Highest scorers here, and second-placed for the entire week was Christian Soldiers with 137.5 points. This was achieved despite including Akanji and Porro who didn’t play and with Haaland’s -4 points. But they included Bruno Fernandes, Rashford, Alisson, Zinchenko, Saka, De Bruyne and Salah who all scored well. So they ran out comfortable winners over Team wengc1980 who scored a not-terrible 98, but fell short by 39.5 points.

The biggest winning margin of the round was 72.5 points, with Omonoia FC overcoming Nic 123 : 50.5. Fernandes, Rashford and Saka formed the nucleus of this winning team — as they did for many high-performing teams this week. The losers not only failed to include any of these, but also had Haaland and Ederson for a combined -4.5 plus four other players who scored zero (two of whom did play). Negative points from six of your players combined never bodes well!

There were several very close matches, with five ties being decided by fewer than five points. The closest featured Team tampatonz squeezing past 1Arsenal by 75.5 : 75. One extra foul would have made all the difference here!

The most unfortunate team of the round award, given to the highest points scored by a losing team, goes to two teams this week, with both Team Baziu and [TyF] Nunezbian losing despite scoring 122, which put them in the top twenty scores for the week overall. They came up against Pigs F.C and HardasChuck respectively who posted scores of 124.5 and 128.5.

The converse award, that of most fortunate team, who progressed with the lowest winning score, goes to Team c444si who scored a mere 52 points — 70 points fewer than the unfortunate teams — but were fortunate to come up against PAOK who posted a feeble 36.5.

40 teams therefore advance to Round 2. Here is the draw:

Round 2 will take place in GW-26, which at the time of writing is a single game week for all teams including Liverpool v Man United and Man City v Newcastle, so the cup avoids the likely carnage of GW-25 with its blanks for some and doubles for others.

The winning 20 teams from Round-2 will join the ‘big’ teams in Round-3, so there’s plenty to play for!

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Did your squad participate in Round 1, and if so how did it fare? There must have been plenty of hard-luck stories - do you have one? Let’s hear from you about your chances this year. Please let us know in the comments.

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