The Guardian newspaper launched their own version of Fantasy Footaball this year. and it's f*u*k*i*n amazing!

After having played the Fantasy.PremierLeague.com (FLP) offering for a few years and deciding to hang up ma boots after winning the league last season I decided to give the Guardian version a go.

My thoughts so far are that it's far more mature and realistic than the FPL version which had quite a few flaws.

Those of you familiar with the whole FIFA vs ISS mash-up will probably agree that FPL is the FIFA of the fantasy football world whilst the Guardian version is more like ISS.

Anyway, lets talk tactics... the Guardian version uses comprehensive stats provided by OPTA for each player. So, for instance, if you have a defender whos team conceded three goals but the defender put in a brilliant performance by making a heap of superb challenges whilst his donkey team mates were scoring own goals (I'm thinking Carvalho and Terry here) you can still make quite a few points, unlike the FPL version where if a defenders team concedes a goal it's nil-points. Here's a breakdown of how points are scored in the Guardian version:



Those of you who looked at how the points are scored will have noticed that for every "Tackle won", "Clearance" and "Interception" made the player scores one point. So if you have a decent defender playing in a poor team, chances are that he's going to score a bucket load of points each match!

We're now about six weeks into the Premier league season, so lets see who the top scorers are so far!




Notice how there aren't any strikers or goalkeepers in the list. They're all defenders (DEF) with a couple of defensive midfielders (DMF) and a couple of midfielders (MID).

This suggests that the more defenders you have in your team the more likely you are to pick up the points.

Just for the hell of it, here's my team.



Until next time....