‘THE Kenna should be won and lost over a pub table groaning with empty pint glasses and dog-eared player lists’ were the words of the chairman this week in deciding London’s leading pub-based fantasy football league’s latest debacle.
The arguments over remaining budgets will no doubt rumble on, but effectively the outcome has answered the question over which managers should be favoured by the league: those who attend the pre-season auction over those who don’t.
The two camps had credible arguments. Those who turned up to the auction used their £100m budget in the time-honoured Kenna tradition, by attempting to buy eleven players through the fog of alcohol and the 50p game. They either make an outlay for the big names or take the shrewder approach of picking up less fashionble footballers and leaving themselves a sizable war chest for the first transfer window.
Those who did not attend were offered the chance to have players picked at random from the most well-thought-of dregs by the charts and graphs department’s new spreadsheet tool. At the minimum cost of £0.5m a player, the non-attendees would be left with unprecedented resources at the window, ultimately giving them first dibbs on such available talent as Angel Di Maria and Leonardo Ulloa.
The attendees said this was unfair. Why should someone who didn’t go through the emotional mangle of six hours in the upstairs room of a pub on a scorching August afternoon have a budget to eclipse the rest of the league?
The ire of those attendees had last week threatened to overturn the legitimate power of Kenna HQ. The Young Boys of Vauxhall manager led a vociferous faction that caused one league member to lock himself in his South London flat, declare martial law and claim his side would be placed top of the table until new leadership was installed at Kenna HQ. The Still Don’t Know Yet manager’s curtains are still reported to be twitching wildly. His neighbour’s cat, Mr Tibbs, is still missing.
The chairman ultimately came down on the side of those loudest voices, but the murmur of dissent from managers who did not attend the auction could still be heard.
They claimed that having been awarded a team automatically from the dregs of the players after the auction meant they needed the tremendous remaining budget to edge their way up the table. All three auction no shows – the managers of FC Testiculadew, Hoxton Pirates and Just Put Carles – are in the bottom five.
The chairman decided to award those three managers the average remaining budget of all the others – £17m. They now have the eighth highest spending power going into the transfer window. It is not enough, they say. Will the straitened managers come to the pub in three weeks’ time? Could the window turn ugly if they do? Only time will tell.
Of course, the Young Boys manager – with his paltry £4m fund and serious questions being asked of his decision to part with £20m for a misfiring Bojan Krkic – will claim ‘The No Show Three’ have been given too much. His case will be dismissed by the majority who see through his sedition as political ambitions in the Kenna boardroom.
For now the chairman appears to have regained control of the league and many see his solution as a common sense approach, but how quickly this snafu escalated will cause some concern in the corridors of Kenna HQ.
Kenna table (*awarded average remaining of managers who attended the auction)
Weekly scores
| Manager | Points | Goals | ||
| 1 | Piedmonte | Phil | 32 | 1 |
| 2 | Still Don’t Know Yet | Pete | 30 | 3 |
| 3 | Cowley Casuals | Stu | 29 | 1 |
| 4 | St Reatham FC | Mike | 26 | 2 |
| 5 | Young Boys | Denney | 26 | 0 |
| 6 | Headless Chickens | John N | 24 | 0 |
| 7 | Hoxton Pirates | Abdi | 23 | 1 |
| 8 | Bala Rinas | Lewis | 23 | 0 |
| 9 | Hairy Fadjeetas | Aiden | 22 | 1 |
| 10 | KS West Green | Stix | 22 | 1 |
| 11 | Lokomotiv Leeds | Ben S | 22 | 0 |
| 12 | Just Put Carles | Carles | 20 | 1 |
| 13 | Team Panda Rules OK | George | 19 | 0 |
| 14 | Walthamstow Reds | Dudley | 18 | 1 |
| 15 | Sporting Lesbian | Ben M | 18 | 1 |
| 16 | Dynamo Charlton | Alex | 18 | 0 |
| 17 | Judean People’s Front | Sholto | 16 | 1 |
| 18 | FC Tescticuladew | James N | 15 | 0 |
| 19 | Pikey Scum | Jack | 13 | 1 |
| 20 | Fat Ladies | Ted | 8 | 0 |
| Points | Player | |||
| Player of the week | 12 | Dzeko, E – MCY – STR | ||
| Club | Still Don’t Know Yet |
