January Monthly Round-up

The opening month of the new decade was one which did not disappoint – in fact it didn’t fail to amaze to be more precise! January can seem like a long month but in TUG it simply flew by and there were goals galore week in, week out. We had a whopping 140 ‘green’ scores and 80 different players celebrating at Club 100 – with plenty of you dining there twice and a few select players even more! This was a prolific month for many of you, so much so that the record average points per week (56) was smashed to pieces in gameweek 26; reaching an average score of 77 is no easy feat, but to prove this was no fluke the following week the average was once again in the 70s! Another record broken that week was the Highest Weekly Score; Lee Thacker’s 156, which has stood since gameweek 2, was finally toppled by Zak Mitchell’s phenomenal 163 in gameweek 27! Well played Zak.

Things are tight at the top of the table, but we have a new Global League leader. Congratulations to Dale Bayford on powering through to first position. His score of 1954 is narrowly ahead of Heather Roome’s 1930 in second place. Following the two front-runners we have six players on a score over 1800, so expect some more reshuffling when we return at the end of February. Quite amazingly, 8 players reeled in over 500 points this month, with Karl Norman leading the way by bagging a sensational 568. Wow!

Now there are many ways of going about your weekly team selections, but one team is undisputedly the most picked……it’s Manchester City (of course!) With 501 total picks last month, the Citizens were selected the most by far. It’s easy to understand why, they’re the first team in Europe to reach 100 goals (in all competitions), so why wouldn’t you back them?! To emphasize their superiority in terms of picks, the second most popular team was Celtic with 200 – a staggering 301 fewer than the current Premier League Champions. So it’s pretty obvious who will be the most selected team in nearly all of the multiplier positions; Man City occupy every spot except x5, where Cove Rangers proudly sit, having been picked 129 times on that multiplier last month.

We had very few minus scores last month with just 62 across the five gameweeks in January, in fact two separate weeks had less than 10 minus scores recorded, which is most unusual!

Now that January is over, the focus starts to shift  towards the business end of the season, which we can guarantee will throw up some interesting and surprising results as the pressure mounts. Good luck to you all!

– Samuel Wilkinson