28 Apr 2014

Gameweek 36 - Close Quarters

With just three gameweeks left before the season draws to a close, I find myself contemplating yet another successful gameweek laden with green arrows.

It’s particularly pleasing that this arrives on the back of an uncharacteristically tough week - having had to contend with the twin vagaries of injuries to key players and pressure from those behind me in the mini-league. The latter especially was the more daunting proposition. For large swathes of the campaign, the onus to set the pace lay largely with the opposition. I simply had to match or better their efforts - a task I’ve gone about with atypically Teutonic efficiency in recent weeks, as my ascension through the ranks can attest. This gameweek however I found myself in an unfamiliar position – perched atop the driving seat, expected to set the pace. It’s a novel exigency that necessitates a bit of getting used to.

It’s hugely pleasing then that I’ve managed to come out the other side victorious and with a bit of wiggle room to boot. There is something inexorably satisfying about sustained success - something unanswerably primal that speaks beyond the prosaism of mannered orthodoxies. The immediate result of which is the spawning of a quiet confidence - a heightened, near-hubristic cocksureness in one’s actions and abilities. It is this burgeoning aplomb that chiefly informs my decisions going into this most crucial period. It’s funny that what seemed for all intents and purposes like a gung-ho, high-risk, attacking gambit - drafting in messrs Mata, Yaya and Rooney for an 8 point hit with barely 10 minutes to go - can, with the benefit of hindsight, be looked at now like a managerial masterstroke.

It is this newfangled brazen confidence that threatens to lead me to a most unlikely fantasy eminence.

For Igor Rytchko,

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- denniskig at 02:20