Failure in fantasy land

September has not been a very productive month: not for this blog, not for my beloved West Ham and certainly not for my fantasy football team.

It’s the latter that’s causing me most concern at the moment. Despite spending much of a very quiet summer’s day at work poring over statistics in order to choose my squad, I find myself struggling in the bottom three of our 18 team-strong office mini-league; just above somebody’s 10-year old son and a colleague who is still struggling to understand the concept of football, let alone fantasy football.

As a real Premier League manager might say; it’s been a difficult start, but there’s a long way to go and I know there’s real quality in the squad. Unfortunately, most of that quality is now resting on the treatment table, with Bobby Zamora, Michael Dawson and Antonio Valencia all now out of action for Anton’s Wonky Lip FC until the new year at least.

But whilst my squad has certainly had its share of injury troubles, a summer transfer policy based on avoiding the purchase of brilliant, but highly annoying players, hardly helped either. The likes of John Terry, Frank Lampard and Jermain Defoe were completely off limits as a result of this policy. My gamble of selecting players who I thought would be surprise packages rather than opting for the more obvious targets like Gerrard, Drogba and Rooney, has also unsurprisingly backfired.

And so I find myself languishing in the lower reaches of the mini-league, and the butt of the office jokes. This must be how Graham Taylor felt when the nation’s press was busy comparing him to garden vegetables as England’s World Cup qualifying campaign fell apart. I feel your pain Graham.

I do of course have a “wildcard” to play - which under the terms of the fantasy football league we play in, allows me to swap the whole squad whilst retaining my so far measly points total. I’m uneasy about doing this though. First of all, it would be an admission of failure; a sure fire way of highlighting to the whole office that despite the football fanatic persona, I actually know nothing about the game at all. But secondly, and probably more importantly, it’s just not what happens in the real world: it feels like cheating to me.

Now the irony of worrying about the level of realism in a game with the word “fantasy” in the title is not lost on me, but somewhere in the depths of my strange little mind, is a view that people who are good at fantasy football are probably good enough managers to cut it in the dugout of at least a fairly awful League Two team.

As a teenager, I was beginning to build a healthy reputation as something of a bright star in the fantasy football world. Regularly winning my Mum’s company’s mini-league, I had naively thought it only a matter of time before a desperate club from the lower end of the Football League came calling and took a chance on me.

My record on the PC game Championship Manager spoke for itself too: a Champions League final appearance with unfashionable Coventry, a meteoric rise through the Scottish leagues with Montrose and a thoroughly enjoyable five year spell in the sun with Valencia were the highlights of my considerable CV. I was dedicated too - playing for so long that my eyes were almost bleeding, and even taking the lead of the late Brian Clough and taking my teams out to huge games whilst still under the influence (although I don’t remember Old Big ‘Ead playing any games at 3 am after a trip to a suburban nightclub - I raised the bar with that one).

But the call from League Two, or any other league for that matter, never came. And whilst my obsession with Championship Manager is now thankfully under control, I am still hopelessly devoted to fantasy football - even though my star has been on the wane for a number of years now. Deep down, I know I’ve lost it though. The old me wouldn’t have picked a squad without any Chelsea players in it. The old me wouldn’t have gambled on the untried Javier Hernandez at a costly £7.4m. And the old me certainly wouldn’t have bought Ryan Taylor - a reserve for relegation favourites Newcastle United.

So with the season just six games old, it’s with a heavy heart that I am going to have to resort to using the wild card. I just hope League Two chairmen don’t notice, and still remember that glorious night at Highfield Road when a Tommy Svindal-Larsson inspired Coventry made it to their first ever Champions League final….