Like Taking Candy

The disbursement of the FTL (sponsored by The Football Analyst) prize fund is under way. Graeme could hardly wait to handover the bounty and Fedslam has been paid. I'm still awaiting confirmation of Skeeve's PayPal address (he is dealing with a bereavement at the moment), but Fedslam and Webbo are probably in Bali spending their winnings.

As is Graeme's wont, he went into great detail about his season and noted that the 'official' prices on his FTL entry were in profit by 3.4 points, i.e. 14.12 points lower than the recorded prices from Pinnacle Sports. It's no picnic, and an issue that affects everyone to some extent, possibly Graeme more than others, but as I mentioned yesterday, actual results will usually be better than those in the table. If you want to read Graeme's full reply, it is in the comments. I would have included it in this post, but Blogger were looking to charge me extra for disk space.

The one event that has made this League all worth while though is that Graeme and Neil are now friends! Neil commented first saying:

Again big thanks to Cassini for running this, it has been a hoot.

Fair Play to Graeme in coughing up his hard earned, we don't exactly see eye to eye but he has sort of grown on me as the season has progressed :-)

The Barcelona of the competition turned out to be more of a Barnsley but hey as I finished bottom I am in no position to throw any stones :-)

I am looking forward to next season already.

Graeme's reply almost brought tears to the eyes:

I do think we just started off on the wrong foot in the SBC forum tbh mate. I maybe shouldn’t have been so strong in my initial postings on your footie thread but I think you actually had a lot of good ideas generally. As I’ve said before, I don’t hold any grudges at this game and life’s too short for that sort of thing anyway!

Enjoy your summer mate and battle can commence next season again.

So everyone knows, I’ll probably enter Atletico Madrid next year instead of Barcelona tbh, I clearly missed the fact Barcelona have gone off the boil a bit and they aren’t as good as they once were. I would name all my systems as footie teams but given the number of systems, I'd have to use Sunday League team names at some point! :)

I'm not sure Atletico is the team to be next season though. It was good to see them break the Real Madrid / Barcelona grip on La Liga, but I fear it's all downhill from here. Still, better than Barnsley I agree.

Looking ahead to next season then, and Graeme has very generously offered another bounty:

Happy to contribute something towards a prize pool again for next season. Don’t fancy getting into a bidding war but something like this season would be OK for me I think. £25 for everyone who beats me up to a max of £500. 

Could be a nice payday for some of us although the first prize isn't likely to reach a hundred grand...

While a good start is always good, it's important to remember that it's a marathon, not a sprint.

 Finally, if Hejik wins, it will be a:

This post has gone down the toilet in a hurry.