📊 Fantasy cricket leagues taking over office group chats completely this season

Our entire office group chat has genuinely turned into a nonstop stream of fantasy cricket league updates over the past few weeks, people sharing their specific team selections, celebrating a particularly good round, and occasionally genuinely mourning a completely disastrous week where their carefully chosen team performed considerably worse than absolutely anyone actually expected going into it. Joined myself mostly out of simple curiosity rather than any genuine deep cricket knowledge, and found myself genuinely more invested in actual matches now than I honestly expected to be beforehand, suddenly caring intensely about a specific player's individual performance purely because they happen to be sitting on my own particular fantasy team roster that specific week. What genuinely surprised me most is how this has actually changed how people around the office actually watch and discuss matches generally now, conversations have shifted noticeably from broad team based support toward considerably more granular discussion about individual player statistics and performance across the board. A colleague who has genuinely played fantasy leagues for years now explained that the specific appeal lies partly in following players you might not otherwise have any real, genuine reason to actually pay close attention to, suddenly having a genuinely direct personal stake in how a specific player from a team you would not normally support closely actually performs that particular week. The competitive banter in our specific group chat has genuinely gotten fairly intense too, a running leaderboard gets updated after every single round, and there is honestly real, if fairly lighthearted, pride involved in actually beating colleagues who take their own specific team selections considerably more seriously than I personally originally expected anyone in our particular office to actually take it. Has fantasy cricket genuinely taken over your own office or friend group this season too, and has it actually changed how you personally watch and follow matches now compared to before you actually started properly playing it yourself?

My office group chat has become entirely unusable once match season starts each year, easily forty messages an hour about captaincy choices and points totals that have nothing whatsoever to do with the actual work we are all supposedly meant to be getting done during those exact same office hours every single day this whole long season without fail at all.