Good News!
This is great news, and has me even more excited about the coming campaign, so I thought now was as good as time as any to suggest once again that you join our Facebook Group if you haven't already...I will be announcing the details of the first few Blog Leagues to our existing Facebook members slightly before providing the details on the blog, so if you're a Facebook user it would be a good idea to join up! Its also handy as it allows me to send out message to all member about any planned cup competitions I may choose to run, and you'll be notified via your news feed when I publish a new post.
My hope is to get to 1000 members this year - lets see if we can!
Cheers,
AM
73 comments:
Good news, indeed!
However, I have an innate revulsion towards Facebook and will not sign up to it under any circumstances. I'm sure I'm not alone in this.
I've found that by using Google Reader I can get updates from your blog within seconds of them being posted. Maybe you could do your announcements in both Facebook and on the Blog so that everyone has a chance to sign up?
Of course mate, the Facebook request was directed at people who already use the site, I wouldn't want to force anyone to use some they hate!
The blog league announcement will be put on both Facebook and this site...I'm planning on running more leagues this year so hopefully most readers will get the chance to be in one of them. The only problem is the maximum leagues per Yahoo ID is 5, so I'll need to create an additional one for additional leagues.
Saw the news as well, glad to hear it.
I'm more concerned though that the French game is not open yet, with games starting the first weekend in August. Although I recall it being open a little late last year too. I'm in the minority on this site, but I enjoy playing the "foreign" leagues just as much, if not more, than the EPL game.
good news, can't wait to start playing! :)
i'm on the same boat with djpigg, i'll follow blog and hopefully i can join as well to compete with other followers.
BRING IT ON !
Hans_India
mark i like all three leagues equally well. the french one will be harder this time, because there weren't as many foreign signings, but the italian one might pick up the slack.
Hear hear!
I have been signing up to other fantasy games to take the edge off my fever, but none have done the job yet. The sooner it's back, the better.
hey guys, not to doubt Jeremy, and other pundits. but its
Thursday 7:00 PM in the UK I think, July 22, and its not up. I am still very nervous. Its got to be up tomorrow, Friday before the weekend.
Already pondering the line up. Right now, the biggest question is how much Gareth Bale is going to cost.
Arrrrgh. The drama is killing me.
Hi Chris - Jeremy & Neal have contacts within Yahoo from their time writing the official blog, I know they were going to ask the question earlier this week & I believe they've now had confirmation that the game will go ahead this season.
Keep the faith :)
@greginho:
I recall you saying that in one of the other recent posts. Good to hear. I've thought about starting a blog dedicated to those games for a while now, but I think due to some work commitments coming up, I won't be able to pull it off. But if I had help...haha...
I usually play in S11 leagues for those games, highly competitive. We run Cups for them as well. The number 1 guy in the world played in the Serie A league last year. I still would like to have a league up here for those games, just for the hell of it.
I like playing the foreign leagues, just usually do poor as it is much harder to get news on injuries, in-form pick-ups, bargains etc. :/. The french game was pretty fun (helped I had Nene)
AM - your concern should be that the same people as before "manage" the fantasy league. If they were half as dedicated as you or any of the regulars here, YFF would be loads better. Alas, get ready for another season of "Update the points pleeez" and "when is Yahoo going to add the new player who already scored two goals?"
i had nene at 13+, koscielny at 3.13, ciani at 1.00, niang for 15+, and pjanic for 8.88. these players gave me a lot of points, but i got screwed on double weeks. i would load up on players, and apparently the french teams change the whole team for each game, so i was getting a lot of 1 gamers.
@greginho:
I had picked up Nene too, fairly early if I recall, just not sure what I had him at. I was glad I did though! I had some other moves pay off, although I never really seemed to move much in the standings. Looking for better results this year though. I think I had a sub-par first and/or second weeks compared to others and that pretty much killed my season, could not make it up, no matter how good I did.
Thats a GREAT NEWS AM . a big relief
I Hope i can achieve a top 10 Finnish like i did last year :)
see you soon guys
Great News!!! Don't shy from having more than one account! I will have at least four teams this year!
PHEWWWWWW!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
@ DJPigg
How do you do that Google Reader thing for the updates?
Thanx for the info
Bring it on YFF !
Pauly
(no fan of Facebook either!)
Admeral , really ;) I will have 2 acount this year , it's fun .. And give you better chances if you had bad start .... Not shy at all 3 teams in top 50 (hahaha)
Good news about the league.
I look forward to finishing higher than 8,000th this season.
Thanks
LC
What are the chances the game will be up and running before the weekend do you think?
Thanks
LC
I consider anyone having more than one team A CHEAT!!!
I'm not a fan of having more than one team - I think it negates some of the risk that makes fantasy football so enjoyable as you can cover more options, so it's not something I would personally do. However, people who choose to do this are certainly not cheats, they just have a different approach!
As always I will only be doing 1 team this season, but obviously I'll need to create a 2nd team with my 2nd ID to run the extra blog leagues.
I was thinking...rather than just leave that team blank and score 0 every week, maybe we could all make use of the "empty" team by picking 11 players via discussion in the forum on a Friday night/Saturday morning? No barndoor work obviously, so all players would be full price, but it could be an interesting experiment to see what we come up with as a group?
@AM:
You could make your second team a "best" team of the picks from discussion/votes here on the blog and see how that team fares over the course of the season. S11 does something similar each week. Something a long those lines, basically like you were saying.
Still waiting on Yahoo for the game, then again I have been waiting on yahoo for the game for the last 10 years, doesn't surprise me they haven't put it up yet, we waited until beginning of August one year!
I usually play two teams, the second team is made up of players from the team i support, in my and my sons case it happens to be Spurs (coys) !. it makes for a bit of fun rivalry,picking starting lineup and later on in season being able to afford players coming back after injury etc, I remember last season having to use a couple of Spurs fillers who weren't going to play, until Mr G bale came on the scene and freed up some cash!, It was not as close as you would think i ended up about 60 points in front of my Son.
We were thinking of doing the same this season in our private league of about 10 players with all putting a supported team in for a quarterly cash prize or whatever. wont be too easy for Man U fans or certainly his year, Man Cty....can you play 1-8-1 formation ? !!
Just had a thought................
How about an A M Blog supporters league ?
shouldn't take toooooo much of your time to organize A M !!.
Or rather an A M Blog supported teams league ?
I couldnt wait any longer and I have already begun analyzing the fixtures for the opening weekend in my blog! AM will you be gambling at all this year on your YFF private leagues?
Thats a nice idea about the blog team AM, it would make an interesting experiment.
Also it would be fun to see how a team that pays full price every week does.
Is it possible to have some kind of poll feature on the blog to make it easier to gather the votes? Otherwise it'll be alot of work trawling through comments and in the chat room.
Changing the subject slightly... I will just be having one team this year aswell. I briefly used a second team in the middle of last season to test stuff out on, but i think i prefer the excitement of making decisions on just the one team.
There's something about having a 2nd, 3rd, 4th... team to fall back on that seems quite boring. You can cover all bases every week, so you're practically guaranteed a good week every week. Bad weeks are half the fun.
@ AM, Kavedas, Mike B...
I'll still have a #1 A team that I will focus on the most and it will be the same team the whole season...I just want to have somewhere else to test all my hunches on so quickly picking teams every week without worrying too much about the results is the purpose of having any extra teams, just for fun really. Unless one of those teams were in a cup tournament then I wouldn't really spend much time on them.
Admiral! Long time no speak.
Thats precisely why i used a 2nd team for a couple of months last season. The downside is that you often end up not putting your hunches in your proper team, only for them to perform.
Quite frustrating if i remember rightly!
Mike! still in Mexico?
I get so many hunches I think I can use the more logical ones and go out on a long limb with the less obvious ones
Yes still here untill next year, i am however now enjoying an internet connection for the first time since April, just in a nick of time!
You'll have to let us know how your hunches turn out.
One i'll be trying as soon as i think he'll start is Pablo Barrera of the Hammers. He looked good in his sub appearances in the World Cup. i hope he gets a decent chance of starting.
great news.. i can't wait..
only gonna have one account on yff this year.. but will be playing few other fantasy game on other sites.. mainly for the prizes.. :p.. anyone can recommend me a good ff to join?..
Maxer
AM ; it's a good idea to have a blog team based on discussion on the blog , but why make it a full price team ! It's really hard to make a good team at full prices week by week, so I suggest you keep some players if you bought them cheap and let the discution about who to to drop ..
@ Maxer,
What are some good sites that offer great prizes?
Fill us in...
Drogba doubt for opener...more money for everyones budget! :p
As pertains to the discussion of whether one can field a competitive "full-price" team, one of the striking things (for me, anyway) about the top teams overall last year was how often they were willing to ditch highly-discounted players in favor of full-price players with better match-ups. I think too often we hold on to, say, a discounted Graham Alexander or Shay Given when his match-up is sub-optimal (or when we know he won't play a certain week) so that we can preserve the discount. Top managers don't do that and, more often than not, they seem to correctly make the educated guess about which players will shine in that given week.
In retrospect, there were only a handful of players who were really worth keeping NO MATTER WHAT last season...Bale, Drogba, Verms (although less so in the second half of the season) immediately come to mind.
i really wish that every article about football would include the ages of players mentioned, especially transfer ones. it is a pain in the butt to. constantly have to look around.
i had originally pegged van persie and cesc, if cesc was coming back, but i just read an article that says that cesc and van persie are exhausted, wenger went on to say that nasri and walcott's world cup snubs are having a positive influence, they are both committed to proving there worth.
i made go with them, instead and pick up other higher end players.
I hear that YFF should start up on Monday! (just saw it on J&N's facebook). Great news =D
I am not in the slightest bit excited about any of the other games i've registered for.
I like the idea of a discussion based team, but I don't think we should have a full priced team every week. In my opinion it is better to keep those players on a discount if we think they will do well again. With that said, our objective should still be to maximize points on a weekly basis, rather than thinking long term. If we think the player will be an excellent pick two weeks in a row, then we should keep him at that price. If he is likely to miss a game, or has bad fixtures, we should sell him. This seems to be the strategy of the top players in the game, so I suggest we should adopt that strategy and see how it goes. Of course, every player that we buy will be full price because we won't barndoor, but because many of us are experts (relatively speaking) on the game, we should be able to create a team that does very well.
@greginho - how would cesc be exhausted? he played like 20 minutes in the world cup..
@bean - just because you don't get much playing time doesn't mean you won't be exhausted. cesc had to go through another 6 weeks extra of training. and since he was injured before the wc, i think he could just some extra rest.
bean players don't get tired from the matches they play, it's the training that does them in. Training is always and I stress that, harder than the games. Do you think if you run 90 minutes with some breaks in between as hard as you can you'll be more tired than running as hard as you can for 2-3 hours with breaks? Not to mention training is more than once a week. For any gamblers out there, there's some great specials on skybet right now for the PL opening weekend so go check em out if your feeling lucky.
if that was the case, most players in the leagues wouldn't play in the weekend matches because they'd be too tired from training all week? or if you train on a world cup squad, you're too tired to play in the matches because of training?
i'm not saying that training is a walk in the park by any means, but there's a big difference between 'only training' and 'training + playing full 90 min world cup matches. so yes, someone like fabregas who trained on a world cup squad and only played here and there as a substitute is more likely to be fatiqued after the world cup vs. someone who didn't participate. but at the same time, with their training they are staying fit as opposed to sitting around their mansion playing fifa (or going to exotic places for vacation or whatever the case may be)
either way, i'm most likely staying away from Fab anyway since this whole transfer saga could be quite a distraction and for sure staying away from RVP since he is probably exhausted and so fragile anyway.
i've been tinkering around with official fantasy premier league to hold me over til YFF puts it shit together. I usually play in that along with Yahoo..
Cheers
Oh no good point bean, Im staying as far away from him as possible. I was just saying he could easily be tired and need a rest after a straight 11 months basically. Cheers :)
thank god!!!
All I have to say is Wenger, get a deal for Akinfeev done.
http://www.skysports.com/story/0,19528,12876_6278623,00.html
@mehico - is he good? don't know him very well
@Bean: I agree. I usually do with you ;D
PS: Bale has been impressive in preseason, ready to dish out the +18.mil for him when YFF starts up IF hes still a defender?
Man United 1 - Kansas City 2 (and only 10 men), Gibson, Scholes, Giggs, Rafeal, Evans, Berba playing, I'd say thats a shock defeat, atleast 6 first teamers in the side
:D
PS: 70mil for Torres to Citeh? If he doesn't want to be with us anymore cash in NOW! Biggest thing we have to see is his injury record, we cannont afford another injured season with him. 70mil ONLY if Hodgson can spend it to help strengthen the squad.
akinfeev was one of the best goalies for their club team for the last two years. rarely a gaffe, strong on crosses, deadly shotstopper, bosses his defense commandingly and his delivery is above average. his only weakness is deciding whether to come out and get to balls, that are behind the defense. cska moscow is the best defensive team, in an offensive league the last two years.
i will say, that he is near flawless from his club team, but i have seen two mistakes internationally. i like akinfeev the best, with neuer my second choice. the reason why i like akinfeev above lloris, is his command of the defense. how many arsenal goalies don't communicate, is frustrating.
just realized I need to think of a team name for this year :/
@AdmiraLord Nelson.. check this site out.. http://www.richdavies.com/fantasy-football.htm
it has a summary of good ff with prizes to join.. :)
Maxer
@Doctor Teeth
I agree with you Doc I asked the question many times last season is it better to hold on to valuable players for much of the season or try and go for match ups each week. I noticed also that the top performers in this competition wil regularly drop their valuable player in favour of who will perform. hard to get right as it is! I held on to Bale drogs and Verm (most of season) but Teves and Rooney etc I think I clinged on to too much.. Hope for better luck this year and am goin to try the match up tactic!
Bale will be an expensive midfielder I reckon..
Any ideas on any inexpesive newcomers who will shine throughout anyone?
Kendo
@Kendo - not sure how the prices will end up, but i've got a bunch of newcomers on the radar:
Chamakh, Jovanovic, Zigic, Boselli, Chicharito, Taylor-Fletcher, Adam, Dorrans, YayaToure, Hitzlsperger, DavidSilva,Koscielny,Alcaraz,Boateng.
I was hoping Yahoo would be up and running by now.. I've been tinkering with my official FPL Team and it's very different because you only get 1 transfer a week, so you really have to plan your team!
The cheap newcomers in that game are: Adam, Dorrans, Hitzlsperger,TaylorFletcher and Boselli and Zigic are a little more $
I think Adam and Dorrans are the one to watch since I think they're on set pieces and should be dirt cheap. I wonder how much Tuncay will be?
Still no FF!!!
Rumours in my household suggest the delay is due to Yahoo negotiating with AM to take over from the Fantasist.
This would also explain why Nic has been quiet of late.
i tried to get on this site earlier but it informed me i had to be invited and could not access ?? - i love this site my e mail addy is cribmad@hotmail.com - please invite me - thanks
if AM becomes the "Fantasist" (i hate that name) I hope hordes of users will not spam "where's my points?" on this blog here.
that being said, I hope Nic does get that job--it could propel him to greater things in the world of football, no?
-JJOKBOB
AT this rate, my guess is Yahoo will have the Fantasy Football up by mid November :D
mid-november? that be quick for them :P
maybe we should just volunteer to do it for them?
@Kellz - masch out, but Torres now saying he'll stay. Also saw rumors of Liverpool looking to sign Salcido for the LB spot, which I quite like. Pretty good news all around for 'Pool?
I am righteously angry. Anyone here no how to do email bombs so we can wake Yahoo up.
On another note soccernet has an article saying that ManU is looking at Mesut Ozil who can be had for as little as 10 million pounds. WTF is Manu you waiting for. Ozil is exactly what ManU's aging and toothless midfield needs. Besides Ozil would be a fantasy bonanza. Ozil was perhaps the 3rd best player in the WC behind Forlan and Muller. At 10 mil he is a steal, he's like a younger Messi. There should be a bloody bidding war going on for him.
@chrism - i was very surprised at Ozil being valued at 10 million. I thought for sure the WC hype would have jacked that price much higher. I thought a few weeks ago, Werder Bremen said he was not for sale and he said he wanted to stay. I guess what people say has less and less meaning these days (as well as contracts)
I'm starting to think of switching over to Starting11. I tried it a bit last season, it works well, just not as much as a community with leagues and such. Just seemed like it was more of just a message board with a fantasy game. But the game itself seemed great, same complexity of Yahoo, quicker updates, etc..
I wonder if the quality of the Yahoo! game would be improved from a service standpoint if Yahoo! charged a nominal fee for participation....$5 or so.
Ozil would fit perfectly into the Utd Team. He would replace Scholes. His value is only 10mil though because his contract is up next summer so they just wanna cash in.
I think its more of a decent holding midfielder we need though. Someone better than Carrick and Fletcher.
Hargreaves will be like a new signing for us if he ever gets fit!
LC
@Bean: Well possibly (likely) losing Masch is tough on me, BUT I figure we can move Gerrard back further to partner Lucas in a staggered central role allowing Joe Cole to play in the slot behind Torres which I think will be his best position anyway. Or leave Gerrard in the slot, have Joe Cole play slightly ahead of Lucas. Either way I want Cole in the middle.
We still need another striker, but yes I am actually happy right now, we need to rebuild, maybe some Masch money would help.
I think they would be better off using the MaschCash for a strong defensive middie to partner or replace Lucas. While I think Cole's best spot is "in the hole" I also think that's Gerrard's most effective spot, so would rather see him there. I'm curious to see if Hodgson sticks to his 4-4-2 4-4-1-1 preference or switches it up... I actually kind of like Cole/Gerrard in the middle of a 4-4-2 with Lucas coming in when Joe Cole is inevitably injured. Play Kuyt as a forward where he belongs and that gives you another striker.
Anyway, saw that Liverpool agree on a fee for Luke Young. Kind of a strange signing, but not bad. Should be an interesting few weeks of transfers...
4-4-2 with 2 AMs and attacking FBs? Though guess for that they'd need some strong Defensive middles :/ (and probably wouldn't work to begin with :P)
well I think it would be a whole lot better than playing Gerrard as a defensive midfielder. at this point Liverpool need to change it up, maybe going to a more conventional formation will be what they need to gel.. and Glen Johnson needs to learn how to defend, instead of basically playing as a midfielder. who's the other attacking FB?
missed the early bird as Ive only signed up again today surely yahoo will reset the players values to give - values for teams and everyone will have to adjust accordingly, it can't be that difficult to sort out the muck up
Kendo
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