Euro 2012 Fantasy Player Pool - Day 5 Roundup

If you were wondering why we have decimal points in our scoring categories, this is why. Just five days into the player pool madness, and only six tenths of a point separate first from fourth.  That means a couple of saves mean the difference between pole-position for a big fat payday at the end of the month and the first-place loser. 

Incroyable!!  The final margin may not end up quite so razor-thin, but you see that this thing is likely to stay very close down the stretch.

At this point there are two classes of Owner in this fantasy pool: those who have Alan Dzagoev, and those who don't.  After his brace in game one I touched on the fact that he'd been identified by a plethora of websites as a potential breakout star of the tournament, and now that he's emerged as a Golden Boot favorite, the people who stumbled across that nugget in their last minute research are getting handsomely rewarded.  Yes, I'm lookin' at you, Dan P.

Let's hope they think to invite DZA next time

Everyone in the Top 5 of our leaderboard has Dizza (he's earned a diminutive nickname at this point).  The rich look to get even richer if he can score again against the literally poor Greeks.  If you're up near the top and you don't have the Diz, you probably have the dude who's suddenly gone from looking like a lazy zoo animal to playing like a hungry predator.  

Jared D. gave Arshavin the armband, and it's paying off bigtime, his 15 points doubled to 30 are the highest individual score so far, though of course Group A has had the extra game on most of the field.  Still, anticipate both Alan and Andrei to remain among the elite fantasy scorers even after the rest of the tournament finishes Matchday 2.

While Dzagoev continued his sleeperstar ways, the similarly tipped Lewandowski couldn't follow suit with a second strong performance. Instead he let his fairly large group of owners down, with a booking that dropped his Matchday 2 point total below those of the guys on the Polish backline.  Meanwhile, Kuba's equaliser to give the hosts hope of advancing was the type of goal you wish could get a few bonus fantasy points...great move up the right, awesome cut inside to burn Zhirkov, and a super finish.

Having Arshavin as captain isn't the only way Jared D. picked up points on the field today, as his roster is also the only one to feature CZE/GRE Man of the Match Theodor Gebre Selassie. In fact if Jared didn't have four guys on his roster yet to record a point, he'd probably be a serious threat to win this thing!

Petr Cech owners had to be glad to see him back in fantasy form, while it almost hasn't even mattered which player you picked from Greece (unless you picked Papastathopoulos, that is). 

Oh, so we're not kicking faces anymore?

Two owners had particularly rough ones today - Austin S. and James W. each took a DNP, gave up a few goals, got two yellows, and saw Rosicky subbed off at half, all adding up to a 3.5 total on the day (Lowest anyone has scored in any day of the competition so far without a red card involved).  Watch out guys, you definitely don't want the shame of falling behind me on the leaderboard, even if it's just by a couple of decimal points.