For those who didn't read this on Guardian Football, check this out.. (sounds familiar?)
When your Saturday evening includes wondering if Leighton Baines created any goals earlier in the day, then you know you're in trouble, writes Benjie Goodhart There is a reason most men don't like being asked the question "what are you thinking about?" It is because the answer is almost never the right one. Instead of "how much I love watching Dirty Dancing with you, my angel" or "when we could next go shoe shopping" it tends to be more "what your sister would look like in a bikini" or "who would win a fight between Mr T and Arnold Schwarzenegger". The problem is, we're quite sad creatures. At least, I am.
One day a couple of weeks back, the missus asked what I was thinking. Twice. This wasn't a wistful, romantic, dreamy, "let me see the inner-you" question (thank God) but rather more one based on the fact that I'd frozen, a forkful of pizza inches from my mouth, and started to stare into the middle distance, perhaps drooling absentmindedly. The problem was, I had to admit I was wondering if Leighton Baines had been named man of the match on Saturday. She was deeply impressed.
Hours later, on a train, she asked why I'd been staring at the luggage rack for several minutes. It's quite interesting to discover just how irritated a woman can become by the seemingly innocuous phrase "I was just thinking about whether Gareth Barry will create any goals this afternoon, or whether he'll be exhausted after his England games."
So here we go. In an effort to ensure that my unborn child does not grow up fatherless, I need to tackle my demons: my name is Benjie Goodhart, and I'm addicted to fantasy football.
I first discovered fantasy football when I was 22, young, naïve and foolish. I'm not proud of what it made me do: I ended up buying a newspaper whose political stance made Enoch Powell look like Clare Short, just so I could play its shiny new football game. Indeed, I actually appeared to be quite good at it. In my second year, I finished the season 81st. OK, that hardly makes me Carl Lewis, but I was happy.
For a while. To paraphrase Winston Churchill, fantasy football has taken more out of me than I have out of it. The games changed, were refined, improved. They became cheaper and easier to play, more involving, more exciting and more time-consuming. The Premier League brought out its own, official, free online version. You no longer had two transfers a season, but one or two every week. And before I knew it, I was hooked, drowning in a flood of transfers amid an ocean of statistics.
It has changed me, changed the way I watch my beloved football. I no longer live for the moments when athleticism and genius combine in a moment of sublime aesthetics: the 30-yard strike, the balletic, weaving dribble. Of far more importance is whether the ball hit the arse of one of my attackers on its way into the net. If someone were to pick up the ball in their own area, beat 11 players and slot it home for the greatest goal ever, my only concern would be that it was one of my defenders who had initially passed them the ball.
And when you get involved in a mini-league - that's where things really start to get out of hand. Winning is everything: fantasy football is more important than life and death. And it doesn't matter what principles are sacrificed along the way.
At the start of every season, I pick a team devoid of Chelsea players: as a QPR fan, it is a matter of principle. Except that, sooner or later, you notice that Frank Lampard is scoring regularly, or Shaun Wright-Phillips looks a bit tasty. And suddenly they're in, because beating your friends, grinding them into the dust, means more to you than any tribal loyalty. To my shame, I have cheered Chelsea goals. If not wanting them to win, necessarily, I have wanted them to lose 7-6, with a Lampard double hat-trick.
And I'm not even the worst offender. I spoke to a friend recently who said he'd had a bad weekend, football-wise. He's a Gooner, and they'd just beaten Spurs 3-1 away, yet he was traumatised by his fantasy team's poor performance. This is the same man who has been known, towards the end of the season, to sit at home with the team line-ups of his rivals and a pen and paper, listening to the radio and keeping a running tally of scores.
Most tragically of all, this is the man who spent a large chunk of New Year's Eve in an internet cafe in King's Cross, planning his transfers. Why? Because he and I had a £10 bet riding on that season. At the end of the season, he won. He won £10. His total internet cafe expenditure was £30 for the season. And the saddest thing of all? He considered it money well spent. Then again, I'm hardly in a position to pass judgement. If it had cost me three times that to beat him, I'd have jumped at the chance.
Benjie Goodhart is a journalist and fantasy football expert. He is currently rock bottom of the GU Sport Pick the Score league.
