The unsung hero

When he realized that he wasn’t getting any cap for Germany, he switched to Poland, letting me get rid of him, i.e. improving my score.

But it wasn’t enough for him.

Today his team (Hoffenheim) was playing Bayern, i.e. the team of his ex-Andrea-V.-1st-cycle-mate Douglas Costa. 73 minutes in, the result being 1-1, Boateng’s hand ball means Bayern has a penalty against and will play the last minutes with just ten men. Hoffenheim is very close to a big win, but he knows that this would mean people criticizing Bayern and the end of the lauds for Costa. He wants to help his ex-mate, so he takes the ball and… misses the penalty.

But it in’t enough for him.

In the last minute of the game, Douglas Costa starts his umpteenth run. He is there, and he lets his friend go. Costa crosses, Goetze does an intentional dummy, Lewandowski scores, everyone praises Costa again.

Eugen Polanski: my hero.

(about my players being mates, also see Goetze and ter Stegen)

Douglas Costa

Yesterday, while ter Stegen got humiliated by Mikel San Jose, the world marvelled at Douglas Costa‘s flair. Sometimes the best things and the worst things come together.

I marvelled at Douglas Costa, too. For years I’ve thought that when I picked him (beginning of 2009) he was already 24 or so, so I wrote him off as a bad pick several years ago. You know, I was almost stunned that he got a couples of picks last year.

This is not the One and Only Way of Fantasy Scout, but having a player blossom six years after you picked him is quite telling of one of the sides of the game.

Pessimistic and optimistic player predictions, part one

Believe it or not, there is more about the statistical predictions Daniele made at the beginning of the year!

Daniele sent me not just the mean prediction for each player, but also the median one and the ones that aren’t exceeded respectively 10% and 90% of the times (let’s call them reasonably pessimistic and reasonably optimistic ).

Let’s start with the top 10s:

Player	Mean prediction	Rank	—	Median prediction	Rank	—	Pessimistic prediction	Rank	—	Optimistic prediction	Rank	—	Current score	Rank
Neymar	159.558197	1	—	156	1	—	118	1	—	206.5	1	—	98	1
Muller	135.2445984	2	—	134	2	—	106	2	—	166	2	—	88	2
Kroos	115.7565994	3	—	115	3	—	87	3	—	147	4	—	66	9
Gotze	111.4077988	4	—	109	4	—	77	7	—	148	3	—	54	12
Ozil	108.2768021	5	—	106	5	—	86	4	—	134	6	—	80	3
Schurrle	107.2277985	6	—	105	6	—	73	10	—	145	5	—	59	11
Busquets	104.8018036	7	—	103	7	—	82	5	—	130	8	—	75	5
Di Maria	99.76139832	8	—	98	8	—	77	7	—	125	10	—	67	8
Higuain	98.96299744	9	—	97	9	—	77	7	—	125	10	—	69	6
Welbeck	91.3483963	10	—	88	11	—	58	13	—	129	9	—	43	13
Cazorla	91.06159973	11	—	89	10	—	80	6	—	104	12	—	80	3
Pogba	89.65720367	12	—	87	12	—	51	14	—	132	7	—	27	14
Pique	84.61419678	13	—	82	13	—	69	11	—	104	12	—	69	6
Lloris	83.47679901	14	—	82	13	—	69	11	—	100	14	—	65	10

The median top 10 (here and everywhere, I mean “the top 10 based on the median prediction”) is almost the same as the mean one: the only difference is that Cazorla (11th in the mean ranking) and Welbeck (10th) switch places.

The pessimistic top 10 is more interesting, even if the top three remains the same: e.g. Goetze drops from 4th (mean) to 7th (pessimistic), Schuerrle from 6th to 10th, and Welbeck from 10th to 20th. The player replacing the latter in the top 10 is Cazorla, again; this time he’s 6th, since at the end of 2014 he had already scored a lot of points, so even if he lost his place in the national team forever, he would still have those points. Indeed the pessimistic ranking should be close to the current ranking, since the pessimistic prediction is more often than not that a player won’t get capped anymore. So we can compare the current (again: at the end of 2014…) ranking and the pessimistic one. Indeed they are close, but not too much. E.g. Pique goes down from 6th (current) to 11th (pessimistic), while several German player go up: Kroos from 9th to 3rd, Goetze from 19th to 7th, Schuerrle from 13th to 10th.

Finally, let’s compare the optimistic top 10 to the mean one. They are quite close, with the main difference being Pogba: 12th in the mean ranking, 7th in the optimistic one.

[To be continued in a later post…]