Of course, hindsight is 20/20 and the likelihood that this team could’ve been predicted from the start was slim to none. However, the idea that you could make a team and make no changes and it still win was a tantalising prospect to get behind. Add into this the fact that, after your initial investment of time at the outset, you would have nothing else to do, meant that I found this challenge irresistible. 

My Zombies didn’t do badly at all. My final rank was in the top 1.8m players, which obviously isn’t great but for a long time, it was in the top million. It only fell away towards the end due to the accumulation of injuries and January signings edging some of my team out of rotation. My team was beating many in my main mini-league for most of the season, a fact I liked to remind those below it frequently. 

So, what did I learn from this experiment?

It all boils down, very simply, to one key lesson learned: Patience. Without the ability to chop and change and second-guess myself, anyone in my team who went through bad patches inevitably came through the other side and continued to provide.

How many times last season did you lose patience with a player, take them out, and then they come back into form? The trick to winning FPL is finding the purple patches of players and dumping them when their form drops. That’s easier said than done though. I think the most common term in the #fplcommunity last season was ‘troll’. Hazard, Wilson amongst others, were frequently in and out of managers’ teams, only to make us pay for our impatience.

When it comes to our live teams, we can’t just sit on our fingers and ignore poor form, conversely. I would love to travel back in time and transfer Alonso out as soon as he started hitting the post instead of the back of the net, but I can’t. Even if I could, perhaps had I kept him all season, I would have been better off. He was the 6th best defender last season, only just behind Luis and Laporte (though quite far off the top Liverpool trio). Did I really improve upon his points with his replacements? Probably not. 

When it comes to goalkeepers too, I had gone with Pickford in both my live and my zombie team. After a poor start, I dropped Pickford for my live team but when I went back and calculated how many points my gk got for me, my decisions all season netted me fewer points than had I stuck with Pickford. Additionally, how many times did you rotate keepers and find that your bench keeper with the tough fixture got more points? 

This season, I am going to try to have more patience with my premiums, one set-and-forget keeper, only transferring out after long injuries or transfers. Of course, if I get bored, this will all go out the window…

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