Fantasy League Report - 27/09/2023

Roberto Di Statteo
Sep 27, 2023
4 min read

Cup Fever!

GW6 was cup week (Round 2) and there's been some tasty fixtures... here are the pertinent sections of the tree...

Notable Results

(from top left to bottom right, column by column)

The very first game on the docket turned into a massive upset (or at least would, if league assignments at the beginning of the season weren't arbitrary 😂) with NL4's Matthew Pike scraping past 5th-placed Premier League opposition Lee Petty, 80-76. He'll meet second-bottom L2 player Jack Robson in Round 3, the latter having also beaten a player exactly one division above him, in Jonny Hedley.

Yin Mo is the second-top scorer for the entire gameweek, and Stuart Latimer should feel hard done by with a perfectly respectable 83 points this week paling in comparison to Yin's 110. Yin meets Premier League opponent David Osguthorpe in the next round.

Toontalk admin Tony Slater beat Archie Walker by 12 points, despite being 4 places behind him in the league, then there's potentially another upset on the cards as bottom of NL3 Les Anderson managed to hold 7th-placed Premier League player Paul Riley to a 79-all draw; that game will be replayed this weekend, the winner facing the Championship's Robert Hutchinson, who hasn't won a league game since GW1.

There must have been something Kay Waters did after GW4 (I wonder if anyone helped her), as she's won her first game in the league in GW5, and has now beaten League 2's Roy Parkinson to set herself up with a Round 3 fixture against NL2's Sam Benton, who beat L1 leader Yiu Keung Tsang by the narrowest of margins, 72-71.

League 2's Peter Thompson is through and will play League 1's second-placed player Simon Morton, after a fantastic win against 3rd-placed Premier League opponent Kim Fong. Another giant killing followed, with NL3's 3rd-placed player Ryan Jensen upsetting Championship leader Ian Thirkeld; Ryan will play Premier League struggler Graham Hall in the next round.

In the right-hand side of the tree, Toontalk admin Ross Macdonald made short work of NL2's Raju Daju, to set himself up against same-division Dean Hadfield... I wonder if their board-game competitiveness will come out as they go head-to-head! This fixture in the Round of 32 is actually the only fixture to feature 2 teams from the same division, so it should be a good one!

NL3's Lee Girdlestone upset Premier League opposition in Daniel Bishop, and he'll meet ME in the next round, as I triumphed over NL4's Simon Baxter. The only game that featured two players who've been undefeated in the league thus far was Toontalk head honcho, PL's John Waters, against NL1 leader Greg Surtees. The game finished 78-58 in John's favour and he meets Enda McGuane, who is bottom of the Championship without a win, in the next round. Enda only just scraped past NL3's Callum Henderson 80-77. The winner of John vs Enda will play the winner of Me vs Lee, meaning it could be the first admin vs admin clash (not to mention father v son) in the last 16 if we both win in Round 3.

Another upset saw NL2 leader Ben Harper absolutely demolish Premier League's 2nd-placed player, Stephen Towers, 80-49. The biggest score of GW6 went to L1's 4th-placed player Graham Clark, whose astounding 113 points could've been 127 if he'd played 4-5-1, with Leno and Pau replacing Flekken and Archer. Here's his top-scoring team:

"Toonali" - Graham Clark

NL3's Colin Wesbroom was the unfortunate on the receiving end, losing 113-72. Graham will play NL2's Ali Roberts, who scraped past Championship opposition in James Sheppard, 71-66.

Meanwhile, two more giant-killings mean that NL1's 2nd-placed Ross Percy (who beat Fantasy League admin Michael Hannard 71-65) and NL3 leader Joshua Lian (who absolutely demolished PL's Sue Kinghorn 91-47) will play each other in Round 3. In one of the most surprising results, NL2's Alex Banks also smashed a PL player, none other than PL leader Chris Parvin, who's won PL Manager of the Week four times on the bounce! That result has certainly turned some heads in imaginary Fantasy Football punditry land. Alex will play former Toontalk Fantasy League admin Bob Douglass in Round 3, after Bob's "My Schärona" beat NL2's "Toon Barmy", managed by David Bell, 85-70.

So, they're all the fixtures that were most interesting... sorry if I've not included your game in the report but there are loooooads of games at this stage and I can't possibly say something interesting about all of them 😂