Life After FPL (The Fantasy of a Normal Life)

Trembling fingers can’t find the right buttons to hit, sweaty palms force you to hold on to your phone a bit tighter and every ping raises your hopes, only to let you down, once again.But enough about your love life, let’s move on to stuff that matters and is a little/way more tangible.

Fantasy Football, is the real deal. For the uninitiated, Fantasy Football is the alter ego of real world football, like the Barclays English Premier League, but with higher degrees of suffering, and on the internet, which automatically validates its existence. To be fair, Fantasy Football lets you choose your nightmares for the week, but it does make you watch Stoke City parallel park their team bus in slow motion, You also end up craving for a wildcard like you would for a green light at Juhu circle (I wanted to say like how you would crave for your next hit but then it’ll be about drugs and drugs are bad, except when it’s Breaking Bad, but this isn’t, so no.)

As an individual, I love to be part of fantasies, but those usually include a PS3 and/or food. I am, of course, a man of the world, but I will not state the obvious boyish fantasies (like ‘Top 25 Thierry Henry goals in super slow-mo, includes Keown head-banging Nistelrooy’s mom’ or ‘Naughty Arsenal – 49 positions to not be in’). Now with the air cleared and the elephant in the room addressed (not your mom, silly), let’s pardon that necessary digression.

Fantasy Football lets you choose your pick of footballers from clubs across a league, to play in a virtual team of sorts, which you manage, to earn points from real life events. For instance, a goal scored by a player you picked, earns you points and a tear of happiness. That, multiplied by a million permutations and combinations gives you a general idea of what is also employed as a slow poison in many African countries which I don’t want to name as they don’t know they exist, yet. So the basic idea here is to accurately predict what will happen in that particular round of games (called a Game Week, GW, fun time) and strategize over the 38 rounds of football (a regular season, time it takes to correctly learn how to load a gun) to slowly lose all friends and shut out any friends categorized on FB as acquaintances because who-do-you-think-you-are-to-’bro’-me.

I was a Fantasy Football virgin (haha, you said virgin) until earlier this year, as I discount the teams I had made in the past and quickly forgotten, because, life. This year was different. This year, my non-imaginary friends decided that the teams we made deserved to be in a mini-league of their own, and that league deserved a group on whatsapp, just like the group which includes all the elderly people of my khandaan who want to send me and my cousins a picture which basically says ‘good morning embossed in Idlis’ at 5 am. I have never replied on the said khandaan group, even when they introduced me (as my father’s son, nothing less), because no. But I have chatted quite frequently on the football group, where we discuss who picks whom and differentials and goals and assists and Bigg Boss and Biryani from Arsalan and AAP and Star Sports (in Hindi, you know who you are).

The chewing of the fat leaves you wanting for more, and you keep going back to make changes to your notional team which gives you notional points which gives you notional bragging rights which gives you a notional upper-hand on your now notional friends. Your favorite team is also condemned to the back-burner as you cheer individuals from across the board, even Spurs at times.

Fantasy Football isn’t all bad though. You watch every match as if you were paid to do so, which is good if you ask any football fan (don’t ask their girlfriend though) ((Not a sexist statement, change it to girlfriend/boyfriend, I don’t really care you know)).

You scout the unpronounceable to nonchalantly name him your pick-of-the-week and later drop him for Silva because Citeh-home-pe-baap-hai-yaar. You find differentials because most of you have the same ‘Suarez as captain’ routine and it just doesn’t cut it 18 weeks in, where you can’t keep earning the same points as the next guy, if you want to really rise to greatness that is. And GLORY CALLS FOR SACRIFICE of your work because does your client really need that presentation EOD? Do that later no, simple.

This is when it starts to kill you. From putting up alerts on every damn match to staring at the FPL site at work; this fantasy suddenly turns out to be the worst thing that happened to you since that nicotine gum you picked up because you quit smoking, only to realize you only quit buying, not bumming. (Did you notice? I used a semi-colon)

The moment the points start meaning something to you, is when you should let go. It is time to shut that tab when you can’t appreciate an underdog see off a league leader because the obvious clean sheet didn’t find its way home. The ‘Fan’ in Fantasy dies a painful death when it becomes a game of numbers as opposed to being a game of beauty. The adrenaline of predicting a score-line accurately obviously has a high, and you suddenly know a lot about a lot of them. You appreciate tactics, but you hate the change made at 60 minutes.

Just like any other addiction, the first step to sobriety is to accept that there’s a problem. And the easiest/quickest way to get there is introspection. So to conclude, all we need to do is ask ourselves, if we had to actually choose between Fantasy Football and friends, family and real world stuff, would you really take the minus 4?