Here to resurrect my blog with the start of the football season this weekend as I like to share my musings on the football. I've joined the office tipping comp again for this year and I hoped to do better than last year which was the 1st year in which I won no prizes at all!!! Up until last year I had always won at least a prize!! I hope the good fortunes returns.....
It is always difficult to tip the 1st round matches. You can't necessarily rely on the previous year's form. Gone are the days when a single team dominates the comp for several years on end. At best a team would be successful for only a couple of years before falling to the middle of the pack or even lower!! So it is rather pointless going by last year's form. And you also don't go by the pre-season form cos that is when coaches experiments with team line-ups, strategies, etc, and also the scoring system is different with extra points given for goals from more than 50m. So it is mostly luck and guess work. Me and "luck" seems to be mutually exclusive. I only have some measure of success when I apply scientific methods, analysing team forms, newspaper articles, etc. I have next to no success when I rely only or mostly on "luck". I have never been lucky in life, I guess it is my destiny to be always on the short end of the straw when it comes to luck.
Last night was Adelaide/Essendon and it looked like history was about to repeat itself. I went with peer pressure and picked Adelaide. BAD MISTAKE!!! Not only it had given me a bad start to the tipping, but this is the match where you nominate the winning margin and it gets added to the "points variance". The points variance becomes important when you have the same number of tipping points as someone else and the prize monies are being decided - the one with the least variance receives the prize money. And since the variance is cumulative from week to week, if you started with a large variance, it remains large and is therefore very difficult to win prizes if you are level with one or more other competitors!! The variance for the week is the absolute difference between the winning margin and your nominated margin when your team wins, but it is the ADDITION of the winning margin AND your nominated margin when your team loses!!! Adelaide lost so just as was the case last year I am in the unhappy situation of already holding a large points variance which will make it near impossible for me to win prizes unless I get ahead on the tipping points!!
So since Friday night I was really depressed thinking that I would have another bad start to the tipping. The next match was the Weagles/Freo match - WestcoastEAGLES hence WEAGLES. That was billed as a close match, and last year when it came to close matches i would very nearly always lose out. Indeed when the margin is less than a goal it is the team I did NOT pick that would win!!! So I was not holding out much hope for this match. I had picked Freo. And for the 1st half it seemed a destiny that my bad luck would continue. Most happily however Freo fought back in the 3rd term, they gotten ahead, and pretty well held the lead through the 4th term. So I am slightly happier now..... my tipping result so far is a more respectable 1-1.
Now I have to wait until next weekend for the last 7 matches of the round to pan out..... I'd be happy with another 3 to 4 wins which would make it roughly 50% and so I still stand a chance of winning a prize as team forms after the 1st round becomes more obvious. I'd be even happier if one of those 3 to 4 wins included my beloved Magpies as I did go with sentiments and picked them!! After round 1 however sentiments will play a lesser role.... remains to be seen how my Magpies would do this year!!!
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