‘I watched fella scoff 80 rooster nuggets on the pub – then he stood up and acquired a pint’

The first leaves were starting to fall as we arrived at The Peckham Pelican.

We were heading out for a bite to eat in Camberwell, down the road from the pub in Southeast London. But one of our party, Ferdy Turral, 27, from Elephant and Castle in the capital, turned up with an unusual mission, one that would ensure he didn’t touch a bite of the mangal.

Ferdy had just completed the first month of this season’s Fantasy Premier League, and things had not gone well.

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He was part of a group of lads who take the imaginary points-scoring system very seriously. A small circle of enthusiasts hellbent on making it to the end of the year with all of their players still trying to win, or at least not lose. They were desperate to overcome the classic loss of interest that typically hits in the run-up to Christmas, and in order to do that they instigated a system of edible punishments for each month’s loser.

For the first month of the competition, the losers had to make up for their errors by eating a chicken nugget for each point in their deficit to the leader.

Ferdy, for his faults, had lost the first month by 80 points.

“In order to keep people playing Fantasy Football for the long haul you need to inflict a series of punishments and [use] the threat of punishments each month to keep everyone playing out of sheer fear,” a member of the group told me.

“It’s exactly the same as going to sign up for the gym at the start of January, they’re really motivated for a couple of weeks, it’s all going really well, they’re feeling really motivated, excited to be there. And then bam, they fall off the wagon. They have a bad week and they stop going completely.

We sat under twinkling lights in the beer garden of the Pelican, the peace shattered as Ferdy slammed down four sharing boxes of McDonald’s chicken nuggets.

Each was loaded with 869 calories, meaning that the four boxes promised Turral 3,476 in total.

He sweated and toiled as he scoffed, box by box, the boiling hot nuggets burning his mouth as he went. The table sat in silence, mouth agape grease building around his mouth as he moved from box to box.

Talk was limited, with occasional updates on how he was feeling, references to his aching stomach or the growing burns on the roof of his mouth.

The silence was broken as spectators grew in confidence, soon people were cheering for the blond man on his fourth share box.

Just 35 minutes after the first bite, as the last one was put away to scenes of wild revelry, he stood up, arms triumphantly apart.

Then he walked inside and ordered a pint at the bar. You’d be hard-pressed to find someone at the Pelican that night not secretly impressed by the fowl scenes that had taken place.

“The pint was probably a mistake,” he later admitted, when he failed to order any food at the mangal. Still though, it had been his night, he had nothing left to prove.

You can read Ferdy’s take on events, and hear about the bizarre Fantasy League group in more detail exclusively on the Daily Star Online this weekend.

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