Well, that didn’t
take long.

Gameweek hero

Ciara Sullivan

There is really no argument here.

Ciara’s 81 points were the best score in Puppet Masters, enough for a Gameweek rank of 83,969, and put her straight to the top of the league. She was also the biggest overperformer versus the pre-season rankings, jumping the full 19 places from predicted 20th to actual 1st.

And it wasn’t simply a lucky collection of template players.

The captaincy call was excellent. While most of the league clustered around Haaland and Bruno Fernandes, Ciara captained Saka for 18 points. Saka was owned by only two managers in Puppet Masters, making the decision even more valuable.

The Bench Boost also delivered. Szoboszlai returned 8, Vuskovic 6 and unique pick Egan another 8 among the additional players contributing to the 81-point total.

For someone ranked 20th before a ball was kicked, it is a reasonably aggressive opening rebuttal.

There are still 37 Gameweeks available for the prediction to recover its dignity.

Captaincy corner

João Pedro wins it

Gameweek 1 captaincy was heavily concentrated.

Eight of 20 managers captained Haaland, while another six went with Bruno Fernandes. That meant 70% of the league put the armband on one of two players who returned just 4 captain points each.

Martin Moran decided not to participate in that arrangement.

He captained João Pedro instead and collected 22 points, the highest captain return in the league.

That was a major reason Martin finished third with 66 points despite being predicted only 14th before the season.

Ciara’s Saka captaincy produced 18, making the two managers who largely ignored the popular captaincy choices two of the top three scorers.

At the other end, Sean Moss went properly differential with Thiago.

Thiago scored zero.

Sean had João Pedro — scorer of 11 — sitting there as vice-captain.

Sometimes bravery and recklessness are separated by a very thin line. In FPL, it is often exactly 22 points wide.

Bench of shame

Paul Wynne

Paul Wynne scored a perfectly respectable 58 points and sits joint seventh.

Unfortunately, his bench scored 24. The highest unused total in the entire league.

The painful part is how good some of the decisions actually were.

Paul was the only manager in the league to own Hinshelwood, who scored a superb 16 points. He started him.

Excellent.

He was also the only manager to own M. Sangaré, who scored 14.

He benched him.

So Paul successfully identified two of the best differentials in the entire league, collected 30 points between them…and arranged matters so that almost half of those points did not count.

That is genuinely impressive squad construction combined with considerably less impressive furniture placement.

Differential department

Rewards at the edges

Gameweek 1 rewarded anyone willing to move slightly away from the obvious picks.

Paul Wynne’s Hinshelwood was the standout: 16 points at 5% Puppet Masters ownership.

M. Sangaré returned 14 for Paul as another unique selection, although naturally those points remained safely protected on the bench.

Paul O’Connor found Stach for 13, also as the only owner.

Aoife O’Sullivan got 11 from Dewsbury-Hall, another 5%-owned pick, while Ronan Fitzpatrick’s unique Ben White selection delivered 11.

There were successful lower-owned defensive picks too: Guéhi returned 10 for Declan Moss and Martin Moran, while Saka’s 9 points rewarded Ciara and Sean.

This is probably the most interesting early squad-building lesson from GW1. The highly-owned core did not completely fail — João Pedro was excellent — but much of the separation came from the edges of the squad rather than the obvious names.

Prediction watch

Immediate difficulties

Nobody should change a season prediction after one Gameweek.

We will therefore merely observe several completely meaningless facts.

Meanwhile Ronan Fitzpatrick, predicted 2nd, starts in 13th, while Wayne Moss has gone from a predicted 6th to 18th — currently the biggest negative gap between prediction and actual position at 12 places.

The reassuring news for the pre-season preview is that Daniel Cullen was tipped to win the league and is already second with 74 points.

So one prediction is behaving itself.

Daniel’s Bench Boost helped considerably, but 74 with only four captain points is still a strong opening week. He sits just seven behind Ciara and has started exactly where a title favourite should.

Elsewhere, Ronan’s 51 is hardly a disaster — only 2.2 below the league average — so 13th looks considerably worse than the actual performance.

Wayne’s 39 is more concerning. Fourteen points below the league average, with Haaland returning only four as captain, left very little elsewhere to compensate.

And then there is Greg.

The other end

An extremely collaborative failure

Greg South finished Gameweek 1 with 15 points.

The league average was 53.2.

No manager really came close to him at the bottom; the next lowest score was Garry Everard’s 32.

Greg's starting XI managed no individual return of eight points or more, Haaland contributed only four as captain, and Matty Cash even chipped in with -1.

It was an extremely collaborative failure.

The good news is that one bad Gameweek in August means very little.

The slightly less good news is that when you score 15, you need people to remind you of that quite regularly before it stops being funny.