1.5 - Fantasy Football (Patreon)

5.

My mum sent me a link. That in itself was odd; it hadn't happened for 2 years. Most of the time she couldn't remember her passwords.

The link was to a Facebook quiz. Absolute trash, designed to harvest your data, not something I'd normally even click on. But for once I started going through it, and to my surprise, it was quite interesting. It was a series of choices - painting A and painting B side by side, and you had to guess which was made by a human and which was by an AI. I sort of expected there would be a catch, and the AI would have created all of them. But I never got to the end.

It was question 4 that got me. Image A was a red train, on a track in the countryside. But it was just the engine, with no carriages behind. There was something about the image that unnerved me. I closed the tab within microseconds of seeing it, but the memory of it haunted me for days.

***

I spent Saturday nursing a hangover and Sunday was ruined when Man United lost, meekly, at home against Brighton. I took Monday evening off to binge watch sitcoms, and carried that over into Tuesday. I think the curse didn't like that I wasn't obsessing over football non-stop because the monthly special deal appeared on Wednesday morning.

UNIQUE SPECIAL OFFER!

New perk available until the end of August: Fantasy Football.

Cost: 2,000 XP (MEGA VALUE)

Effects: The Fantasy Football perk gives three new abilities:

1) Bench Boost. Your substitutes will play better in one game of your choice per season.

2) Triple Captain. Your captain's influence attribute will be tripled for one game of your choice per season.

3) Free Hit. Increase the chance of a penalty, free kick, or corner resulting in a goal by 10%. One use per game.

This was weird for many, many reasons, but let's focus on two. First, the new abilities were named after 'jokers' you could play in the Premier League's official Fantasy Football game. The effects were different - the curse had simply taken the names and tweaked them.

Second, it struck me that the curse was treating me like I was in charge of a football team. Who else could pick a team's captain or choose the substitutes?

And that assumption was ludicrous. I was as close to managing a team as I was to landing a date with Margot Robbie. I literally knew no-one in the football industry. Even the idea of going to a Sunday League team and offering to manage them was insane. People have been put in asylums for less.

One interesting factoid was the revelation that one of the attributes I couldn't see was 'influence'. I spent a few minutes wondering what the effect of that would be. Inspirational players like Roy Keane and Patrick Viera would have high influence, right? Did it lift the other players? Did influence only matter if that player was selected as captain? Or would Keane still propel his team forward if he was in the team but not the captain?

Anyway, all these questions were irrelevant. I'd struggled to get 1,000 XP in July, and more than a week into August I only had 165. If I spent every waking moment driving around Manchester looking for games to watch, sure, I could get to 2,000. But nah.

That said, I was interested in going to see a professional match, just to nail down what CA and PA meant. So I spent Wednesday evening on my laptop looking for a game in the Greater Manchester area, as soon as poss. My preference was, naturally, United. First because that's my team, second because I know their players so well, and third because seeing those players in person would give me some very definite results about the whole attributes thing. For example, Ronaldo might be the best header of a ball in the history of the game. If his heading was rated at 20, that would give me a definitive boundary. If it was rated at, I don't know, 44, then maybe scores were out of 50. Similarly, Rashford had to be close to the max in acceleration and pace. Eriksen would be near the top in passing. And so on.

But their next home games were against Liverpool and Arsenal - good luck finding a ticket for those - followed by Leeds, Newcastle, and Tottenham. All big games! Maybe there would be a chance to get a ticket to the Leeds game, but even if that was possible, it would be 6 weeks away. Annoying. I posted on a forum that I'd love a ticket to the Liverpool game. I doubted anything would come of it.

I skipped City - I didn't intend to give them any of my cash, ever - and went down the leagues. In a way there was too much choice. Wigan vs Bristol City in the Championship? How about Bolton vs Salford City in the EFL Cup? I was strangely drawn to Preston vs Watford. Watford had recently been in the Premier League so I assumed they still had some decent players. But they also had a guy called Rey Manaj, who they had bought from - get this - Barcelona. Surely he'd be interesting? The only question was whether I could wait that long - the match was a couple of weeks away.

***

I picked up some XP on Thursday night, and talked to Emre about British footballers who ended up in Turkey. He had amazing stories about Graeme Souness's time as manager of Galatasaray.

But the main focus of the week was Friday night and my second time coaching Beth's team. We filled in the paperwork correctly, I gave the players instructions, and they carried them out. There was nothing much to do - no star players to defend against, no particular weakness to exploit. (The other team were awful at everything, equally.)

After 5 minutes I checked and lo and behold, I'd earned 10 XP. So I was getting 2 XP per minute for coaching compared to just 1 for watching. And the quality of the opposition didn't matter, because this rabble were miles behind the girls from City. And clearly the intensity of my coaching didn't matter, either, because after setting them up, I was extremely passive.

With all the players in the right positions and with a simple gameplan, we crushed them. The final score was 8-0. I was 100 XP richer, but I just felt... dissatisfied. There was no challenge to it. Beth and the girls were very happy, though, and dragged me to the pub again. This time, I didn't go home with Beth. I didn't see the point in coaching them again. I told her, in front of the rest of the team, that in the morning I had to go and see my sick mum in the hospice, and there was no way Beth could fight back without seeming like a selfish B.

***

XP balance: 365

***

I did go and see mum, but not in the morning. That's when the care home smells the worst. After lunch is good because the mood is high and everyone's sleepy. And if the sun's out you can have a nice cup of tea in the grounds, which are not Versailles but still nicer than the dark, damp, narrow streets and alleys of Moss Side.

We ended up playing cards. The four of us: me, mum, Anna, and Solly. The dog didn't get dealt a hand; he just lay on mum's feet. Sometimes he'd get up, turn around, and resettle.

It was all very chill and felt like something we'd been doing our whole lives. But we hadn't. Mum was... frankly she was being cured by Anna. That was the only way to think about it. Instead of slipping further into her disease every time I saw her, she was moving away from it. Normally you'd use words like 'struggle' or 'fight' but it wasn't like that. She was just getting better. Even her dexterity was better - she could deal the cards, albeit slowly.

We were playing with matchsticks as our stake, and I was losing, bad. Once I was down to my last five matches, I gave Anna a sly look. She was cheating! She saw me looking and shook her head left and right about half an inch. Then she did an almost invisible nod towards mum, and I was supposed to understand something from that.

As revenge, I turned the discussion to Love Island. Anna glared at me. Even Solly lifted his head and gave me a disdainful look. I leaned back and stuck a matchstick in my lips. Winner.

"How are United doing?" mum said.

"Not great," I said. "Lost the first match of the season. They looked good in pre-season, though. I think the new coach will do well."

"That's good," said mum. "I'm sure they'll win the next one."

Which just proved that if Anna was right and mum had some psychic abilities, it did NOT extend to predicting sports results. Because United were about to get absolutely annihilated. And that would be my ticket - literally - to everything that would follow.

***

Ted is at the wheel
Tell me: how good does it feel?
We've got stats and our boxes are blue,
That's why we follow, rate, and review.
Ooh, ooh, uh, ooh.