IN SEVEN YEARS, my late father will have been gone for as long as I knew him: 35 years.

But, 28 years into his ongoing death, I sometimes see him, now, as powerfully as I did, then.

We didn’t see eye-to-eye on a lot while he lived. His politics were sometimes embarrassingly conservative – I’m particularly glad we never had occasion to discuss US Senator Joe McCarthy – but I learned intellectual pragmatism directly from him.

A FANTASY FOOTBALL NIGHTMARE — But You Never Wake Up

An advice column for the bottom seven million Fantasy Premier League managers

For the last four years, BC FC, my Fantasy Premier League team, has followed the same strategy every season: in game-week one, establish yourself firmly in the cellar position in every league and mini-league and maintain that slot resolutely until GW38.

The other managers in my family & friends and neighbourhood mini-leagues have appreciated BC FC the way this year’s Premiership teams are valuing Sheffield United: as long as I was in the competition — no, as long as I was around — they didn’t ever have to worry about coming last.

A FANTASY FOOTBALL NIGHTMARE — But You Never Wake Up

An advice column for the bottom seven million Fantasy Premier League managers

My Fantasy Premier League team, BC FC, which I expected to crash and burn last game-week actually soared and lit up, like American democracy. Instead of slipping from the number three spot in our family & friends mini-league, BC FC climbed to the top; it’s hard not to think that BC FC didn’t come out of its own mini-insurrection a lot better than the USA.

My players ended the double game-week with 120 points, 75 below the highest global score of 195, but almost 50 points higher than the global average of 74. It was BC FC’s highest score of the season and only the second time it got into three figures since GW4’s 115. And, as pleasing as it is unusual, I left only four points on my four-member bench.

Men go crazy in congregations but they only get better one by one – Sting, from the song All This Time

WATCHING THE inauguration of the 46th American president on Wednesday, even Donald Trump must have said, if only to himself, “Whew! Thank God Joe Biden won the election, yes!”

How lovely Wednesday was, apart from on Fox News (which I think of as, “Firetruck Facts News”) and rightwing radio and propaganda sites, where the hate is still being vigorously fanned. Even before the old Fat Nixon rolled out of Washington with his Addams Political Family, the air seemed clearer; you could almost not remember that, just two weeks before, Trump’s Red Hats, like Hitler’s Brown Shirts, had broken out a day of American Kristallnacht.

But you can’t ever forget that.

A FANTASY FOOTBALL NIGHTMARE — But You Never Wake Up

An advice column for the bottom seven million Fantasy Premier League managers

16 January 2021 — Double or Quits

Even for a man like me, who values irony the way a sadist cherishes the whip on his back (it’s what I live for) the irony would have been too great to have headlined game-week 18’s Fantasy Nightmare, “Blank Game Week Too Literally Named” — and then to have drawn a total blank! My Fantasy Premier League team, BC FC, managed 32 points (16 of them from my captain, Harry Kane) and held on to its number three spot in our ten-club family & friends mini league.

Only a couple of teams did better and both used their free hit chips.

So, for the moment, I’m feeling like a proper pound shop Pep Guardiola; or perhaps Sam Allardyce.