The day I stopped trusting people

Hi there,

Rory Fitzpatrick (Dublin, Ireland) here with another blog post.

I have been doing some self-analysis recently and felt it was worth sharing. Perhaps for therapeutic purposes.

If there is one thing I've realised about myself recently, it's that my level of trust for others is rapidly declining with each year that passes. I barely believe anything that somebody tells me unless I can verify it for myself. I also tend to be very skeptical of people's motives.

I went for a walk along the coast road over the last weekend and I thought about a lot of things. Not specifically about my skepticism, but many things. During this walk, a random thought popped into my head and it was so clear to me that it was the first real incident in my memory that impacted my trust of others.

The incident itself was related to a 'Fantasy Football Management' game that used to be very popular on football forums years and years ago. It was really primitive compared to what there is now, but it was great craic. I was a member of one called 'TFF' (The Fantasy Football) which was run by a guy (BillyBlue), his Dad (bluebrummie) and a friend (can't remember, but not important).

To understand the finer details of the story, I'll need to give some information on how exactly the game worked. It wasn't based on any real-life football results like common fantasy football systems. Each person managed a team and that team had a squad of players. Each player was assigned 4 statistics:

Goalkeeper Ability

Defender Ability

Midfielder Ability

Forward Ability

So, as an example, I had Sebastian Deisler in my team (Middlesborough) and his stats were pretty good. Like this:

Sebastian Deisler 1 , 5, 15, 12

The game was actually pretty easy to understand/win if you knew how it worked. Not many did. The tactics engine took into account the second highest statistic as well as the highest. So a forward who had 14 Attack and 14 Midfield was actually better than a forward who had 19 Attack and 1 Midfield.

But anyway, why is this important?

As mentioned, I was managing Boro. I had a defender, Ugo Ehiogu, whose stats were something like this:

1, 10, 10, 2

While his midfield score was high, the defender score was actually too low for him to be great. I had slightly better players already. So he was resigned to my bench and never really got used.

BillyBlue had put up an announcement on transfer deadline day that said any players who had a secondary ability stat higher than 10 would receive an automatic bump of +10 to their primary stat after deadline day. This would mean that Ehiogu would be:

1, 20, 10, 2

This made him by far the best defender in the entire game. I was obviously very fortunate to profit from such a scheme from BillyBlue. The problem? I didn't actually see the announcement.

So I am sitting at my computer chatting with my friends about the transfer window on MSN at around 11:30pm. Deadline was 12. Suddenly BillyBlue messaged me out of the blue and he was "slurring" his words *a lot*. An absurd amount in hindsight.

He was proposing a swap of my lowly defender, Ehiogu, with one of his better ones. He explained it away as him being drunk, "LOL" and various other incoherent reasons. I was delighted and accepted the offer and started to plan my new defence based around this mid-level guy that I had just received (from the best team in the game managed by BillyBlue).

The next day comes along and I realise that Ehiogu has gone straight into BillyBlue's team. And what's this? His stats are now very different to what I remember. I read the announcement about the ability changes and realised that I had been.. I don't want to say tricked. I was the one who didn't read it. But I felt violated and it bothered me for some time. I hated seeing Ehiogu, a guy I had riding the bench all season, was now enjoying being the main man for the best team in the league. I didn't deserve him, but the circumstances surrounding the move left a very bad taste in my mouth.

I also have some very serious complaints about another sleazy move that BillyBlue pulled to help out his Dad's team, but that's for another day.

So BillyBlue, if you're out there.. Fuck you. You have completely destroyed my trust in other people.