Pub Team to Manager’s Dream Part 26 – Season 3 Cups

It’ll be no surprise when I remind you that the board had set us the objective to win all three cups (as well as the league) this season… again.

So after comfortably achieving our aims in the league again this season and achieving promotion by winning the league, did we continue ticking the boxes for the cup competitions…

Again this early on in the series and this low down the leagues, I’ve discovered that trying to build up suspense and play a guessing game with the cup results tends not to be worth it, and in a way I hope it stays that way for some time as it would mean that we’re succeeding without major trouble in the cups. And that’s never a bad thing in terms of prize money and media coverage (sadly not TV rights yet and probably not for a very long time) to improve the club’s reputation.

As you can see this years cup finals were a noticeable improvement on last years cup finals, with the only exception of the Malins Challenge Cup final against Crawley Panthers. We were away from home for this match so how much impact this had is hard to say but we had plenty of rest after the excellent performance against AFC Bolnore in the Parsons Challenge Cup so there aren’t really many other excuses. Unless of course my tactics weren’t suitable for that particular match, although we have played them in the league over one of the past few seasons and haven’t had any real issues.

In two of the three cup finals we were dangerous in attack and that was reflected by the impressive looking scorelines. And although we did concede in both those matches, I think that if you don’t concede in a cup final then either the opposition were lacking passion or you set up a too cautious boring tactic for a cup final.

So once again, after a successful season with almost all our players performing well throughout, the big question over the off season will be whether we can hold onto the current set of players or if it will be an enforced complete rebuild again. And once again, time will tell so I hope you join me again for updates on that…