Euro 2012 Fantasy Player Pool - Day 1 Roundup

Day 1 of the Player Pool was a real eye opener for me and I'm sure for a lot of you.  Not only did I realize just how badly my pre-tourney reads on the Russians and Czechs were (thankfully I was far from alone there), but I also came face to face with the fact that I hate the scoring system for this pool!




Whether you were one of the many with Cech or the few with Wojech, the theme of the day was lame performances from Keepers that were expected to be scoring stalwarts. But the shitty showings by each also revealed the first thing I think is wrong with our scoring: how can the Headgear watch four fly by but suffer nowhere near as badly as SZCZ, guilty of one little moment of madness?  I guess it makes a strong statement that seeing red is unforgivable at tournament level, but still.

Don't tell me this man didn't outplay his counterparts!

I also realize now that we probably needed to do more to diversify how field players could score points, get some Tackles, Fouls Drawn, and Shots on Goal categories going. The trio of Russian defenders who all turned out 2.5s despite having very different experiences on the pitch over the 90 minutes speaks to that need.


But all that is just windspitting, after the fact rubbish, probably born at least a little from the fact that I now find myself sitting in 28th of 29 places (Somehow Kyle Scott managed to get BOTH of the day's red cards on his scoresheet). Obviously we're not going to be changing any of the scoring now that things have begun. There's always next year.



Anyway, in other news, Andrei Arshavin is a sandbaggin' son of a bitch!! This guy spent the past 18 months or so acting like a panda bear at the zoo (a short, tiny, less multi-colored panda bear, to be sure), then comes out for his country and starts playing like his hair on fire is again.  I think if he keeps this up he's really gotta start drawing the interest of the big Premier League Clubs, right?

Of course for pool purposes, it's better to receive than to give.  Arshavin may have been the diminuitive catalyst, but your boy Dzagoev reaped a few more rewards from Russia's rampant run. He really made all those sites that tabbed him as a pre-tourney breakout candidate look good.  


Apparently a few of y'all read those sites, too!  I'm pretty surprised to see just as many people in the pool with Dzagoev as there are with Arshavin.  Overall there's a wide array of Russians active in our pool, especially compared to the Czechs and Croats, and the award for Ripoff of the Day goes to Michael Laign, who saw Alexander Kerzhakov's powerful header denied by Post only to watch Dzagoev slam home the rebound. I guess the real shock is that NO ONE in the entire pool took Post!  Come on y'all, that guy never loses.


In the early match, I felt like a genius for 45 minutes with Szczesny in goal, then watched over the next half hour as he lost his clean sheet, lost his confidence, and lost his freaking mind on that challenge.  If you're the Polish coach do you even put SZCZ back in for Game 3, or stick with Tyton?  Tough call I think, especially if Tyton handles Russia better than Cech did. There are a lot of us in the Arsenal fan camp who like to try and convince ourselves Szczesny is world class, but the truth is the guy always makes me nervous (even though this was pretty sweet!)


Lewandowski did his best Dzagoev impression, in advance, by living up to his own pre-tournament hype, and Andrew Laign gets props for having both of the day's most notable goal-scorers on his team.  Mike Slipsky and John McCann grabbed some solid, fairly exclusive points from Shirokov, and Nathan Lebowitz hated himself for picking Pavlyuchenko, for about 81 minutes. If you're one of the three people who sat through disappointing DNPs from Akinfeev and Sifakis, just take heart that at least they both outscored Szczesny.


So, some people are looking really strong, others may already be losing heart.  But this is just one day, people.  Anything that's been done can be undone, it's a marathon not a sprint, blah blah blah.  Today we welcome the Group B teams, full of fantasy superstars, and the first appearance of Captains in our game so the leaderboard is going to go through some major upheaval, for certain.  I'll try to get the scoring done asap, but I am working tonight and won't be at a computer between the end of the games and the start of my shift, so be patient.


Game On!