Following David Brian's excellent article on the FPL cup, where we're cheering for last blog man standing 1998jjb, it reminded me of the old Yahoo blog cup which used to be run by the great Nik (or is that Nik the Great?). I've volunteered to run a small-scale Fantrax-11 version of that - well it is obviously smaller because there aren't as many of us - over the last few weeks of the season. It will take the top 128 teams in the F11 league and pit them head to head over seven rounds, with the final taking place on the last week of the season. Hopefully it will give some teams that are now out of the running for league honours a new lease of life and generate some extra interest.

The schedule will be as follows:

Week 25: final qualifying week. At the end of this, the top 128 teams in the league will go forward to the cup. I'll post the draw once we get there (i.e. after week 25 is over), but it will be 1st v 128th, 2nd v 127th and so on, so there will be a degree of seeding based on league position.

Round 1: week 26: 128 qualifying teams - results posted after the week is over
Round 2: week 28: 64 teams
Round 3: week 30: 32 teams
Round 4: week 32: 16 teams
Quarter finals: week 34: 8 teams
Semi-finals: week 36: 4 teams
Final: 2 teams

The rules will be simple, in that the team with the higher score wins. In the case of a tie, these tiebreakers will apply, starting with the first until there is a resolution:

1) Team with more goals scored (by players in the team)
2) Team who conceded fewest goals – this is more tricky to determine since there’s no Fantrax stat for it, so I will total the number of goals conceded by the team of each player. This will apply whether the goals were scored when that player was on the pitch or not (including whether they even played at all).
3) Fewest number of yellow/red cards (each yellow card counts 1, each red card counts 3).
4) Most corners forced plus accurate crosses.
5) Coin toss – you’ll have to believe me if it comes to this!

There's the chance of late updates to scores. I will try to accommodate these if they come in fairly quickly, but if they happen late, it may be too bad (and certainly once we're into the next round that's too late). No doubt I'll make an error at some point, but if you point any errors out I'll correct them as far as possible.

I think I've thought of everything, but if not I'll be making it up as we go along - I'll make sure I post anything that changes or adds to this. I hope you'll support the cup and may the best (well perhaps the luckiest) team win!