FPL Cup Night Stalker, Round One Preview

Greetings all,

It’s the most wonderful time of them all, if you’re into chasing down into the rabbit holes of the intertubes. It’s FPL Cup time, and I know most “serious” FPL players probably regard this as a trivial little side game, but I think it’s just a weekly delivery of a whole new box of puzzles. Each week we get just a name and a team page. Who is this dude? Is it a dude? Is it a famous dude? Is it a grumpy middle school history teacher from Newcastle? Is it the future Australian Men’s National Team Coach? Is it a stripper/model/waitress/actress from South Africa? Is it a high school cricket player from somewhere in Ireland? The internet is a wonderful thing and with a few clicks here and a few clicks there, voila!, your opponent is no longer a random name but is a flesh and blood, real life person with whom you are locked in mortal combat.

I’ve been doing this thing for a few years for my minileague and wanted to share the fun. I think I probably find about 2/3 of the opponents with pretty high degree of certainty. And when I can’t find them, I sure don’t let the truth get in the way of a good story. Here’s what I dug up this week on the Cup opponents for the FMLFPL crew. Team pages are linked.

This is Sayantan’s sixth year playing FPL, vs. Walsh’s fifth, but the Indian gent has yet to crack the top 150K. He played a Free Hit Chip back in GW12, but it really doesn’t look like he made very much of it as he only changed about five players. Weird. His is a much more common name than you might initially think (unless you’re Indian and it probably seems like Sean Thompson, or something like that), and the search took a while. He’s in a bunch of leagues, but when I looked at the smallest of them, I found a bunch of guys who all had this guy as one of their friends, and I think this must be his page, pretending he’s a Gooner and shit because Gooner Fans are generally kind of insane. But really? Thomas Vermaelen? And then I saw the URL to the page and it has his actual name. Yup, that’s him. So what does he do? Not really sure. The other guys in his smallest league all seem to be engineer types at various places about India, but there doesn’t look like a common thread to their training. So I think they basically sit around the Indian version of GoonerSlack and just talk shit on Spurs all day long. Sound about right?

This one seems like it ought to be a walkover with Walsh’s Sterling, Silva, Salah differentials and with the Chelsea defense. Kun and Lukaku are Sayantan’s only hope. Smash him Walsh!

This is the second season for Su, who flies the Myanmar flag, and who claims a Chelsea allegiance. Su finished 1.1 million last year and is doing better this year. Now first off, if you do a FB search for Su Myat, about the first three pages of links that come up, or maybe even more, all look like they work at one of those strip mall foot massage places with the sliding windows and shady price menus and the exiting clients who are scanning the parking lot furtively to make sure nobody recognizes them. And none of the people in these links happen to be wearing Chelsea kit in their pictures. And some aren’t wearing very much, period. In fact like the whole list consists of people like that who really don’t look like they would even know what FPL was. This was the only guy I saw while scrolling. And he doesn’t look particularly interested in FPL either. Ultimately I had to give up looking for this one for fear that the kids would walk through and see some dubious images while I was hunting for this needle in a haystack. No happy ending here.

The injuries could hit Alon on this one with Morata out, but if Kane Kanes like Kane can Kane, then it’s not going to be much fun time for Su. I think Alon should see this one through.

This is the second FPL season for Khuzaimi while it is Nate’s sixth. Nate topped out at 24K two years ago, while his Malaysian opponent finished 694K in his debut season. Malaysian opponents are sooo hard to track down in general, but this is the guy here. Three of the guys common to one of his minileagues are all FB friends and are flying this same banner in their pictures, whatever it is. It says he is from London but currently lives in Shah Alam, Malaysia. He used to work at Euphoria, which says it is some kind of Marketing and Social Media Agency, but looks maybe kinda like a nightclub place also. Maybe Nate could get a gig there for the band? Road trip to Malaysia! Who’s in?!?!?

Khuzaimi has Aguero teed up and ready to tit against Swansea, and KDB could add to the damage, but I think those could be countered by Kane and Silva if they get their large units swinging in the box as well. Nate probably has an edge on the defender front, especially if Jones makes it back into the lineup. Show this lad how the entertainment business is properly run, Nate!

Who does this? This is a first year account for Lochie and there hasn’t been a single roster move all season. No lineup change. No transfers. And yeah, I know that some people make teams to enter into some kind of set it/forget it contest where you have one lineup that stays set for the whole season. But this is not the kind of lineup you would come up with if you were doing that. Sam McQueen, Rob Holding, and Emre Can are in the starting lineup, along with Rajiv van La Parra. Jack Butland is the vice captain pressed into action whenever autoCap Kun sits out or fractures his torso. Allegedly. This team isn’t in any minileagues and that’s not even really a name, I don’t think, so I doubt we’ll get a peek at the psycho who came up with this thing, but like a science experiment gone bad, it seems to have been properly abandoned. But wait… I never totally quit, and it turns out that Lochie Rumble is actually a Twitter account with two followers, but who has liked 3,660 things. I hope they don’t actually like their team. And he’s also some kind of gamer, I guess. I’m going to suggest that he stick to things other than FPL.

Aguero, KDB and Mane for Lochie, but the rest of the team is shite and Jason should move on to the next round.

It’s Milen’s first FPL season and it might be his last, by the looks of it. It’s Derek’s second year after finishing 47K in his 2016/17 debut. Milen did nothing in the first few weeks, but then in GW5 made three transfers, and that has been it. And that week, he decided to triple captain Morata at home against Arsenal. Obviously a Chelsea fan with his team name and that move. He got a 1x3=3 point haul after Morata played 88 minutes and only produced a yellow card as a return. Whoops. Milen isn’t in any minileagues so doesn’t have any cross linking that way. I have no way of knowing which of the multiple Milen Dilovs is actually “running” this team, but I’m gonna go with this guy, because the pictures on his page are pretty awesome and he works at Monster Energy.

Derek should win this one pretty easily. The midfield matchup is really one-sided. And Kane. And etc. Go do it Derek!

And finally my team! This is another first year FPL player who has gone Ghost. He made his single roster transaction in GW5. The lineup has stayed the same since, and he only made it into the Cup because his armband is on Kane. Kane produced 24 of Toby’s 44 points last week. Really not fair that he gets in, and so many active players don’t. Booooo Toby! Anyway, here is Toby on Facebook. His picture from back in 2013 is rather embarrassing, and in 2012 he is partying in a room with some Justin Bieber posters on the wall. At least one of the others in his one minileague lives in Newcastle and two of them seem to have been in college together at Leeds Beckett University. Can’t seem to lock down on where Toby lives now, or maybe he’s just on the road following the Beebz. Anyway, he sure isn’t tending to his team, so hopefully I can just put him out of his misery, but you never know what happens in H2H.

Toby will get eleven out on the pitch, but just barely and I think I have the edge in midfield differentials and should hopefully manage cleans from three, if not four of my defenders.

Crazy, yeah, but only marginally more crazy than the existence of this game at all, when you think about it…



Good luck everybody! Go smash those random opponents! They deserve it.

- Scott AKA @tempebug on twitter