As mentioned in my previous article, my '
2009 SuperCoach team' finished 188th overall, which I was very pleased with. I could not believe in my wildest dreams that I would ever crack the top 1,000, let alone the top 200. When you enter a competition with 400,000 entries, statistically you have a 1 in 400,000 chance of winning. Therefore, a top 1,000 ranking was and is, in my opinion, a very good result.
With a solid ranking behind me, I approached SuperCoach 2010 with a lot of confidence and decided to try something different. As far as I was aware, my proposed strategy had never been tried before. I decide to have an 8 rookie midifeld in my starting line up, not 7 rookies and 1 premium, not 6 rookies and 2 premiums, but 8 rookies and no premiums in the midfield. That meant that the usual SuperCoach elites of Ablett, Swan, Pendlebury, Judd and Dal Santo were not in my initial team.
My initial SuperCoach team in 2010 was:
I have colour coded the above table to differentiate between the premiums and non-premiums. The general idea was to stack my midfield with rookies as I believed they were the best crop of the rookies in 2010 and that in theory, they had a better chance of scoring higher than other rookies. Naturally, I was hoping to catch a fallen premium at some stage. With my strategy there was a high risk that the premium midfields that I had to forgo would punish me and score more than their theoretical replacement, ie back or forward premiums, but I believed it was worth the risk.
In relation to rookies, I don’t normally select high draft, ie high priced rookies as the extra money paid for these rookies could be used elsewhere and it’s harder to generate money from a higher starting price. However, you will note that I picked Martin and Trengove who were the higher priced rookies. The reason was that due to my high risk strategy of an 8 rookie midfield, I needed to pay a small surcharge for some insurance in the form of Martin and Trengove to alleviate some of the risk.
Rule 4: Don’t select high draft/priced rookies, unless there is a good reason
Rule 5: Pay extra for insurance (eg. Trengove/Martin) to reduce risk (eg. 8 rookie midfield)
Unfortunately, I don’t have a week to week summary of 2010, but I know I was ranked 1,144 after round 6 and finished with an overall rank of 724. However, I vaguely recall that I was in striking distance and was in the top 2,000 all year. I won’t go into detail, but deep inside I know that my SuperCoach team in 2010 was better than my SuperCoach team in 2011, when I won the whole thing. The reason was that the SuperCoach Gods were looking after my SuperCoach team in 2011, but gave me the cold shoulder in 2010.
However, I think one of the most underrated thing about my all 8 rookie midfield in SuperCoach 2010 was my confidence to do it!!
Don’t forget being part of a number of AFL chat forums, I normally discuss the basic framework of a SuperCoach team with a number of people. Many people will have a similar skeleton team, for example only, Goddard, Deledio, Swan, Pendles, Cox and Franklin as a starting point and then deviate or individualise their team from there. Here, I had the confidence to ‘challenge the standard framework’, the confidence to be ‘different’ and more importantly the confidence to ‘break the rules’.
In my next few articles, you will understand why my SuperCoach team in 2010 played a major part in my SuperCoach win in 2011.
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This article has been migrated from
SuperCoach Scores Blog to
SuperCoach Scores Forum.
