You will have seen on the schedule screenshot in the last post that we won in the Tester Challenge Cup Semi-Final 6-2 against Fairwarp II, which in itself was a great results and a great game. But it also put us into the Final, which was an even better spectacle if a bit tense to watch… Continue reading Pub Team to Manager’s Dream Part 10 – What About The Cup?
We are now through the back end of the first season and you’ve already seen that we’re already guaranteed promotion to the Mid Sussex Football League Division 9. But did we win the league… Continue reading Pub Team to Manager’s Dream Part 9 – Slightly Ambitious Attempt to Build Suspense
At this point we are still a few games away from the end of the season, but there is some pretty big news, even though as the title says, it’s a bit of a giveaway and takes the suspense out of the end of the season.
But it’s not exactly a bad thing that we’ve ended up running away with the league so far and I’m sure there will be plenty of tense endings to the seasons as we potentially move up to more and more challenging leagues.
Hopefully this encourages you to join me next time for the run in to the end of the season and crunch time as we come towards the final stages of the Tester Challenge Cup.
A very short post just because I think this is worth showing to demonstrate just how brilliant this guy has played for us this season…
14 goals in 12 games with an average rating of 7.82, certainly can’t complain about that. Not worrying at all about him being stolen off his amateur contract by a bigger club now…
This is just a quick post based around the ‘Team Report’ page which I’m using as a brief mid-season review of the effectiveness of the tactics, which players are having the most impact and what are our weaknesses etc… Continue reading Pub Team to Manager’s Dream Part 6 – A Little Mid-season Assessment
Yes it was indeed only a matter of time before the amateur contracts began to cause their trouble. So far we have avoided the vultures of bigger teams quite well and we’ve only had one player approached by another team. It was actually Louis Ezewele, one of our young centre backs with good potential and by some miracle he chose to stay.
But now…
If you remember, Jim was actually our scout who wasn’t really a scout, so we were already in a fairly desperate situation with staff. But now as he was offered his preferred role at a much bigger club, Carlton who are in the Ev0-Stick First Division South, he has jumped ship and rather left us in the lurch a bit.
Luckily our squad seems to be performing well enough in this division and new players won’t be desperately needed for us to succeed this season. But I do like to always be looking out for good additions to the squad as one of the advantages of amateur contracts is that new additions don’t cost you any wages.
So the search for a new scout begins and let’s hope this isn’t the beginning of the bigger clubs ravaging my team…
After a rather uninformative and not particularly useful preseason, we reached the beginning of the league and not long after that, the first round of the cup which is called the Tester Challenge Cup.
At this point, we are at roughly the half way point of the season. There are only 16 leagues games per season as there’s only 9 teams in each league in these divisions.
So there’s a list of all the results up to this point and now I’ll go into more detail about some of the best matches and then end on a few general notes about the team’s performance over this period. Continue reading Pub Team to Manager’s Dream Part 4 – Competitive Matches
Last time, I showed you the players chosen to kick this club off and now we’re going to see how I’ve arranged them and what I’m telling them to do (formation and tactics).
So I ask, what’s wrong with the good old 4-4-2? Personally I think nothing. Generally I think its a great formation, especially if you have the right players with the right strengths.
And in the lower leagues, and they don’t get lower than this one, it just keeps things relatively simple and doesn’t risk weaknesses and failings due to players not having great positioning or not being able to perform more complicated roles. It is also a balanced formation and as we are not yet sure how we measure up compared to the teams in our league and our players have never played together before so they have no cohesion or understanding as yet, things are complicated enough already.
Also, I had a rough idea of how I wanted to play (for the first few seasons anyway) and so the players that I signed were selected to play in this formation.
So the style revolves around direct football aimed to try to get the job done in matches and not risk stagnating and getting stuck in any of the lower leagues because of cautious football. But in order to keep things slightly sophisticated, the directness is mainly focused around a crossing game. So the instructions are… Continue reading Pub Team to Manager’s Dream Part 3 – Tactics and Pre-season
FM Real Virtuality - Football Manager Touchline Tales, Tips & Tactics 