September Monthly Round-up

As the second month of the season draws to a close (yes it really has been two months already!), it’s that time again where we reflect on the main talking points and boy did we see a whirlwind of drama whipped up! September started with our first ‘international week’ and it certainly threw a spanner in the works for many of you, but since then there’s been plenty of opportunity to claw back those lost points.

We’ll start by looking to the top of the Global League where things are really hotting up. Forget the Premier League title race; we’ve got our own battle for top spot going on right here in TUG! Firstly a massive congratulations to Oliver Norman, our league leader at the end of September on a phenomenal 762 points! Hot on Oliver’s heels is Ally Jessop, just a single point behind the pace-setter, then comes Lee Thacker, leading the chasing pack a further 22 points behind Ally on 739. Very impressive stuff all round considering we are only nine gameweeks in!

Speaking of impressive, the award for highest individual score in a single week this month goes to Julie Keller and George Murphy, each bagging a mammoth 137 in the explosion of goals that erupted in gameweek 8 – excellent work! This month we had a healthy 69 three figure scores, with 55 of you sitting pretty in Club 100 and 14 of you actually ‘in the green’ twice! Getting there once is hard enough so a big well done if you’re one of the 14! As for our highest average gameweek this month, we couldn’t quite beat August’s best of 56 set in week 3, with a high of 51 in GW 9 just falling short of the season’s best thus far. Interestingly though, the previous two scores in September (gameweeks 7 and 8) were both 50. These consistently good totals meant that our average points score across September was a very respectable 44. This would of course have been higher if it wasn’t for the international week’s (GW6) average of 23 letting the side down, not to mention the inevitable minus scores that the game always throws up!

There’ll be no prizes for guessing who swamped the matrix for total picks this month…..Manchester City! The Citizens took up the x2, x4, x7 and x8 multiplier positions, being picked a total of 98 times on x8 alone in September – proof that many of you are happy to gamble on bringing City’s points into play by placing them there. This was a shift from August’s most selected side, Celtic, but the Scottish champions and rivals Rangers averaged the most picks on x5 and x6 respectively.

We can’t let the review pass by without touching on the slightly uglier side of TUG, those dreaded minus scores! September brought 79 reversals, down from 93 the previous month. 59 of that 79 were minus 20s, 17 minus 40s and 2 minus 60s, but it was Pat O’Connor’s gut-wrenching -140 (the lowest possible score in the game) that took the eye as he propped up the table in gameweek 8, with the sort of score that can surely only be attributed to the full use of the ‘Random’ button and it subsequently backfiring in spectacular fashion!! Either that or an incredible amount of bad luck anyway!

Gameweek 10 is fast approaching, good luck for that and indeed for the whole of October.

– Samuel Wilkinson