The whole fantasy football thing has been around for an age now. You know - you have a budget and pick your team a la Alex Ferguson and watch as your team steams to the top of the league. We denizens of the GAA world have been really been deprived of this virtual fun for a number of reasons. Firstly the championship follows a rather convoluted structure so it is difficult to shoehorn into a fanstasy football format. Secondly the GAA is amateur so it is impossible to put a price on any given hurler or footballer. (That last point was a joke).
Thankfully that situation has changed with the arrival of FaceTheBall.com which is an pretty decent attempt to provide online GAA supporters with a way to demonstrate the vast knowledge of the games. Instead of picking teams, you simply try to predict the result (and margin) for each weekend’s matches. There are separate leagues for the National Football and Hurling leagues (and the Six Nations in which we gloriously triumphed).
I’ve been diligently following the NHL and entering my predictions every week. And, with 2 rounds of the league left and the final, I’m sitting in 56th position out of approximately 300 (my user name is statto). I’m 89 points behind the leader (right now, barrynolan on 813 points) so I’m unlikely to win unless I freakishly predict every remaining result. My predictions for last week were:
My FaceTheBall.com predictions
You get 20 points for picking the correct result (40 points if you predict a draw) and then 10 points if you get the margin of victory correct. You get 9 points if you predict the margin of victory within 1 point and 8 points if you get it within 2 points and so on.
I did reasonably ok this week. I thought home advantage might swing victories for Waterford and Westmeath (doh!) and got the margins of the Clare v Kilkenny and Antrim v Kerry matches badly wrong.
The good news is that FaceTheBall.com will also be running similar predictions leagues for the championship. And we all know that’s when the real hurling starts.