On a dark and stormy Tuesday evening (well, late afternoon), Boris and his motley crew of Team Managers met up at the ‘Watts App Arms’ in a tiny wee village called Th’interweb, to fight it out for the MVP players. There were many ideas put forward for player selection methods, including arm wrestling, mud fighting and even cock dressage to name a few. In the end though the wise choice of a snake draft was settled upon, and so the battles commenced.
Yes indeed, the MVP Draft was successfully completed on Tuesday evening, and if you missed last night’s online discussion between Mark and Az about it, you can catch it online here.
For those too eager to know the results, however, please read on!
The Draft – The Top 10 Picks
The full draft details are available via this, and here are some of the highlights:
The order of picks was a competition itself with all the managers vying for who would get the first draft choice. The rules were simple – the manager with the highest cumulative FPL score by GW4 would go first and so on, excluding any Bench Boost/Triple Captain augmentation of course.
With an incredible score of 346 and an OR of 3148, Suvansh the mystery man with no FPL history got the well-deserved premier choix, selecting Az. We are still not sure who was most pleased with the result: Az or Suvansh!
Second, was community tournament legend Speedy, with a very nice 328 and a sub 50k OR. Speedy’s choice was Lateriser12, which no doubt will give him bragging rights over his FPL Wire comrades, Zophar and BigMan Bakar.
Third place went to Tets McGee, team manager of the runners up in our last tourney, the Pundits Playoff. Tets boasts a score of 335, and an OR of 15,167, and made an astute signing in the form of Ragabolly.
KIRAFPL’s score of 323 leaving him just outside of a 50k OR, earned a fourth-place draft choice, and he opted for Tom Stephenson, the current leader of The Great and The Good, to join his team.
In fifth position we found FPLHints, a well-established pillar of the FPL Community but making his debut as a Community Tournament manager. His 321 points not only gets him off to a cracking start, but also a nice pick in the form of LTFPL Andy.
FPL Richie got the sixth pick and went for the FPL legend Mark Sutherns, disbelief on both sides that the founding father of Scout was not higher up this pick order.
Darth_Krid, a veteran of the community tournaments who picked up the management mantle this season, plumped for Bigmanbakar and he will be hoping his statistical insight and possibly his dancing skills help him to victory.
Danelius with 337 points and a cracking 11,960 OR, was the victim of the cruel BB Chip points bludgeoning stick and had 24 points docked leaving him in eighth picking position. A true pro, he took the news on the chin and selected Magnus Carlsen to join his team. Will this be checkmate for the opposing teams?
FPL_Mihir grabbed the 9th place position and opted for the expert skills of Zophar to enhance his team’s credentials, rounding up the top ten GauravGharge greedily grabbed his grade A selection of FPL Salah.
The Best of the Rest
Moving outside the top 10, this is where it became tense amongst the managers, with some fantastic managers still available. Lagdon82 prayers were answered as he came in eleventh to take his chance and select a true pro-player in Holly Shand. He also managed to secure one of the more prominent members of the Community, FPL General.
Now starting to feel like Tony Blackburn…in at 12 is Sam FPLFamily, signing for none other than TedTalksFPL, whose squad has a sniff of being the official Scout Mods and Cons team with Editor Neale Rigg also joining him.
The manager of the Champions last time round, Pirlo’s Pen, signed Top Gun Luke Williams with his choice, FPL Panda took his turn at 14th and chose to enlist career Hall of Fame no.1 Fábio Borges to his crew.
The next manager to make a pick was Auto select, and he opted for Sean Tobin before Gianni Buttice became the 16th MVP to be drafted, joining richardsp93’s team.
Toblerone52 had the fortune of signing one of the best MVPs on the list, Zan Keroski. Welcome to the winning team Zan! Full disclaimer I should mention the author of this article is also on that team so there may be some degree of bias.
With only six more places left of the first rung of the draft, Linnbee signed the vastly experienced FPL Editor who is on his 12th FPL campaign this season and has a very strong track record.
Sreethe, whose team dominated the league stages in the Pundits Playoff in the last Tournament, made a cracking signing in Tom Freeman and the next pick was made by team manager The Fantastic Mr Fox as he chose the £100m valued Johnny HOW SON?.
Geoff Dance was signed by Narcos as we near the end of the first rung and he was joined by Joe Lepper in the next round of picks to give him a formidable double up for the competition.
The infamous Greyhead made his first pick of the evening and he must have weaved some magic as he has secured the services of one of the best managers around in FPL Matthew and also Darren Wiles, who has graced the higher reaches of the Hall of Fame.
And although he had the last pick, in his first campaign as team manager Chandler Bing couldn’t be any happier with the signature of former FPL Winner Simon March and the newest member of the Scoutcast FPL Mode, Andy North.
You can see the full details of all the signings on the Player List and emails are busy being sent out to connect them with their new managers/team and do whatever team bonding they deem appropriate.
What happens next?
The action doesn’t stop though as we will have one final draft to fully flesh out the teams, and that takes place this Sunday at 8pm.
If you have yet to be selected by a team then this will be your final chance to get drafted into one of the squads, so feel free to use the comments section to make any final heartfelt appeals to those managers still looking to finalise their squads.
After that, it’s just a case of teams coming up with team names, so start thinking up those puns, along with optional team avatars and getting the tournament under way! Stay tuned!