The more things change . . .

Personally, I've just wrapped up one of the best and almost certainly most important years of my life, having got married, travelled to four continents, finally got a new job and bought a house. For this blog though, the results have been less promising. I considered charting the quality of content here with my life developments or perhaps dousing the fire of my own work but given that I'm still travelling I'll stick to simple words for now.

Long story short, I've had priorities which have trumped this blog which meant that (a) the weekly content has suffered (and stopped at the end of the last season) and (b) I totally ignored this year's pre season activities. My policy has always been to only post things which are worth reading so I didn't ever want to mail anything in with out of date data or banal narratives. I wasn't sure I could make a quality preseason guide so I didn't and I wasn't sure if I'd even be back for this year. Now it's started though, I got that familiar buzz on opening weekend - even if my team was assembled the night before - and so I've come to the conclusion I'm not yet ready to walk away.

There will be a couple of changes though. First, I'm hoping to move to a more 'graphic' based site which I'll hopefully host on a new site that allows for a bit more flexibility. Second, I won't aim to put out weekly lineup lessons or 'fanning the flames' pieces which take up masses of time and in all honestly become repetitive for you to read and me to write (no, you shouldn't buy the 19 year old right back who played once but scored with his only shot of his life). I will however continue to post written pieces where a particular player needs attention or where a new concept/trend arises.

There are a lot of good sites around which cover player fitness, team news and what I'll call 'standard' reporting and while I've never tried to offer great depth in those areas, I'm abandoning that area entirely now. I know less about the weekly ups and downs of football than most of you probably do as I'm simply not plugged into it 24/7 thanks to living in Canada. I no longer default to Sky Sports News as my background noise and I don't discuss Rooney's hamstring in the elevator at work anymore. The problem with this approach is that when data tables show Stevan Jovetic as the best forecasted player for a given week despite knowing that there's a 99% chance he won't play, many people get confused/annoyed and complain. You can't please everyone though and there likely won't be comments on the new site anyway (I'm always on Twitter though for any fairer comments or queries).

So the plan for the next couple of weeks is to get the new graphics completed and launch the new site. That should nicely coincide with the time when we have some somewhat useful data (~GW5). In the mean time, I'll start getting back into the swing of things by highlighting some promising new players and offering caution to those whose early success looks unsustainable (basically a prolonged fanning the flames piece).

I've just realised that given my absence there could be no one reading this but if you are, thanks for sticking with me and I hope and I can reward that loyalty with a couple of useful tips in the coming season.