FM14 - Harrogate Town - English Hero achievement

Harrogate Town – from the Skrill North to the Premier League

Part One – Getting started

I decided to start a series of posts charting my attempt to go from the Skrill North to the Premier League in the hope people might find it helpful/informative/funny (depending on how it turns out). I'm using FM14 with the 14.3.1 patch.

First a bit of background about me. I've been playing FM for years now going back to a copy of Championship Manager 02/03 for the Xbox which I picked up for £5 from a market stall. I've already got the Scottish hero achievement with Stirling Albion (FM14) and I aborted a first attempt at the English Hero achievement with Boston after getting back to back promotions but then getting stuck in League 2. I have done this achievement in previous FM games too so I’ve got a bit of background knowledge to rely upon.

So I set up the game database with a few top leagues and all the playable leagues in England and Scotland with a large database. It was the same for my last game and I thought why bother changing it? My manager has only Sunday League experience and I decided to just pick a club rather than start unemployed.

Harrogate

Harrogate Town are the closest team in that league to where I live so I had to go with them! The press predict them to finish 3rd but the squad is in a bit of a mess. My best player Michael Woods is out of contract and while I have a few decent centre backs and central midfielders I don’t have any good strikers, full backs, a goalkeeper or a left winger. The squad is full of dead wood and my budget is of course pretty tight.

My first move was to appoint Gavin Tait as a scout and sack the old guy (whose name I have forgotten but his stats were rubbish). I resisted the temptation to change more of the backroom staff because it’s relatively expensive and offers little gain. They are all only contracted until the end of the season also.

Between Tait and myself we found a few new players and I managed to offload a few old ones but not as many as I would have liked! Annoyingly scouting is restricted to England which hardly makes sense as Harrogate is closer to Edinburgh than it is to London and I know you can get some great free transfers from north of the border.
It is worth noting that my final season ticket sales were a massive 20! Wow. 266 turned up for my first home game but to be fair that was a Tuesday evening. I’m averaging 300 per home game on a Saturday. It will be interesting to see how these figures change over the next few seasons.

Transfers
After asking for a Parent Club I ended up going with Bristol City but none of their players worth taking were willing to come on loan! So I’ll have to resign myself to using the free transfer market only to get the players I need.


I was able to plug a lot of gaps in the squad but not all. There is no real depth in the squad and a few injuries to key players would be a disaster. I’ll come back to how these players have performed so far but first let’s talk tactics.

Tactics


Purely because I can’t afford a good left winger but I do have a good DM I’ve gone for a 4-1-2-1-2 formation that is generally quite attack minded. As a backup I’ve gone for a 4-5-1 with the wingers playing high up and this can easily change to a 4-4-2 if needed.

I’m handling match training myself but my assistant is doing individual and general sessions.

Results

Pre-season went well and the early results have been encouraging on the whole but with the odd wobble. I still hope to bring a RB in but that will depend on losing another two players as I’m currently £184p/w over the wage budget.

Suhaj and Macken have a good strike partnership and have been scoring goals. Suhaj has 5 goals and 1 assist from 8 games while Macken has 5 goals and 3 assists after 8 games. Woods flashes between hot and cold but does have 5 assists and 1 goal from 10 games. The rest of the team have been inconsistent at best. Misiewicz has been decent in goal while the defence is shaky and the midfield is very average, not really contributing much to the cause. Panther has been fairly ordinary so far but it is early days. Heath has only played 3 games and isn’t match fit yet so I’ll give him a while to bed in before judging him. Luckily I’ve had no major injury problems, just the odd knock putting a player out for a week but nothing disastrous.

At the end of my first two months in charge I’m quite happy with how things are going but we do need to find another gear to challenge for the league title as we’re winning too many games by only one goal.

Part Two – Struggling for consistency

October and November have been tricky months for the Town with results being so inconsistent. One game we’ll dominate and the next we’ll be hopeless. The results speak for themselves really:

In the league we’ve been lucky in that the teams around us have also been dropping points but we seriously need to find some consistency. Getting knocked out of the FA Cup by my own feeder team was unbelievably embarrassing. We have had some excellent wins as well but we have got to win more! There are a few reasons for this inconsistency that I’ll have to address.

1. The leaky defence
Most of the goals my team are conceding are because one player will miss an interception and the rest will basically just sit back and watch the opposition striker drift into the box. A few goals have been scrambled efforts which my gran could score. The defenders are hopeless. Joe Heath is taking most of the flak from the press but in truth they are all to blame.

2. Refereeing decisions
I don’t want to sound like a real football manager here in complaining about referees but in two of the games we lost it was because big decisions went against us. One penalty that was never a penalty and one onside goal being ruled out cost us those games.

3. No goals
First up Jon Macken was out for 6 weeks with an injury and that has had a big impact because I don’t have a similar replacement for him. I do have a boy called Worsfold who has done ok but he isn’t as dangerous as Macken. Pavol Suhaj had a 3 game dry spell that didn’t help but still his record is good with 10 goals and 3 assists in 15 games. Michael Woods creates lots of chances and has 6 assists but only one goal in 16 games (I play him behind the strikers so I’m not expecting loads of goals but only 1?).

I’m not going to panic at this stage. We are only a few points behind the league leaders after all. But still I’ve made a few tweaks to the team in an effort to find some consistency.

Transfers

In the last post I mentioned that I was struggling to offload players. Well at the end of October I got offers for 3 boys and was able to get shot of them. They left for nothing but I’m not bothered about that as I just wanted to free up some wages to bring new players in. I signed Josh Law who is now my first choice right back and Sanchez Payne who gives me some much needed cover in midfield. I would still want some decent wingers but it looks unlikely I’ll be able to afford them this season.

Tactics
I made two minor changes to my tactical instructions, telling the player to play at a ‘higher tempo’ and I unchecked the ‘play narrower’ box. Most of my goals are coming from through balls but that just isn’t working on some defences so if I can go for some slightly more risky plays, running at defenders and taking more shots from the edge of the area then hopefully we’ll get more goals.

I talk to the plays fairly often, praising good displays and criticising the bad ones. This is not having a massive impact just yet but I think the longer I manage this group of players the more impact my talks might have.

Player form
While form has been inconsistent some of my players have been performing well while others have been consistently poor. Nobody has been awful but there are a few guys averaging 6.3-6.5 per game which is not good enough if you want to win a league title!

Pavol Suhaj, Michal Woods, Ashley Worsfold, Adam Bolder and Manny Panther have all been pretty good. Joe Heath, Matt Heath, Anton Brown, Leigh Franks and Michal Misiewicz have been generally poor. If anybody is looking into these players for their own teams I’ll do a proper breakdown of form at the end of the season but so far there is plenty of room for improvement for some of these boys!

Part Three – A tweak and a chase

What happens when your team consistently underperforms, ships goals and repeatedly fluffs their lines in front of goal? You can shake everything up, keep faith and hope things improve, or just do a little tweaking. I went for the latter.

December was an up and down month and at one point I fell to 10 points with a game in hand behind the league leaders. Not good. I had half resigned myself to settling for a play-off spot which I wasn’t keen on because it’s too much of a lottery. But a few tactical tweaks later things are looking much better.

As you can see the tactical tweaks have done the job. January was very good, February we were dominating games but the finishing wasn’t great. Still, a win is a win and 9 wins in 11 games is a good record for anybody. I’m now top of the league and hopefully we’ll hold it together for the rest of the season.

Tactics
I’ll break the tactical changes down as there are three main things I’ve changed:

1. Changed the team instructions.
I’ve gone from a controlling mentality to an attacking one. I’m now pushing higher up the pitch and playing at a higher tempo. I’ve asked the team to stop looking for overlaps and to stop playing narrowly. The problem that kept cropping up was that my strikers were struggling to find a way behind an organised defence. There was also too much of a gap between my lines and we were giving the ball away too cheaply. It looks so far like we’ve solved some of those problems.


2. Complete wing backs
My full backs are good playing in the limited full back role but going forward are not great so I played them in the roles they are best at. The problem was nobody was running wide and no crosses were going in. Changing their roles to complete wing backs has definitely had an impact on the attacking side of things but crucially we don’t seem to be any worse off defensively.

3. Opposition instruction
Traditionally I’ve mostly left opposition instructions to one of my coaches but since none of my coaches now really know how to deal with opposition players I’m now doing it myself. Quite simply I’m closing down, tight marking and showing most of the opposition onto their weaker feet. I don’t bother giving any instructions for the opposing centre halves.

Players

On the whole player performances have much improved, particularly the full backs. Manny Panther has been solid in midfield, Michael Woods has been excellent and considering he has been out of contract for the whole season and refuses to discuss a new one I’m getting a great player for free! In 32 games he’s now got 12 assists and 6 goals, much of which have come in recent games so he’s certainly coming along now. In central defence Shane Killock has been superb and although I’m still conceding too many he has been a rock.

I have jettisoned some more players now and brought in Ronan Murray who I planned on using as a winger. He was really more of a signing for next season but another club made him an offer and I didn’t want to let him escape.

So the title chase is well on now! I’m starting to put together a list of transfer targets for next season now and my next post will be at the end of the season.

I love this sort of story and I will be following!

Thanks, glad you like it! I do love seeing little clubs grow.

Part Four – Champions

Stage one is complete and I’ve won the Skrill North! From next season it is the Conference Premier for us and (as far as I know) the highest level of league football that Harrogate have ever competed in. In my mind they’re already casting a bronze sculpture of me to sit outside of the stadium.

The second half of the season saw us go from 10 points behind league leaders Colwyn Bay to winning the league by 9 points with highlights including beating Colwyn home and away, 7-0 and 5-1 respectively. Some of our play was amazing, we scored a few passing goals that Barcelona would be proud of.

I’ve begun to organise my team for next year and I’ll report back when I’m up and running but first it’s worth doing a season review.

Players

Some of the players have been excellent in the second half of the season but here are some stats for my best line-up plus subs:
GK – Michal Misiewicz – 42 games, conceded 35 and 16 clean sheets, average rating 6.87
RB – Josh Law – 25 games, 3 goals and 6 assists, average rating 7.10
CB – Matt Heath – 37 games, 2 goals and 0 assists, average rating 6.84
CB – Shane Killock – 40 games, 4 goals and 1 assist, average rating 6.94
LB – Joe Heath – 35 games, 1 goal and 2 assists, average rating 6.83
DM – Adam Bolder – 39 games, 0 goals and 3 assists, average rating 6.89
CM – Anton Brown – 40 games, 0 goals and 3 assists, average rating 6.78
CM – Manny Panther – 42 games, 4 goals and 5 assists, average rating 7.01
AM (Trequarista) – Michael Woods – 42 games, 11 goals and 24 assists, average rating 7.26
CF – Pavol Suhaj – 40 games, 20 goals and 14 assists, average rating 7.25
CF – Jon Macken – 38 games, 24 goals and 7 assists, average rating 7.20

Subs:
GK – Craig MacGillivray – didn’t play at all, sorry Craig
CB/RB – Leigh Franks – 36 games, 3 goals and 0 assists, average rating 6.86
CM – Sanchez Payne – 24 games, 0 goals and 3 assists, average rating 6.66
CF – Ashley Worsfold – 25 games, 4 goals and 3 assists, average rating 6.74
CF – Ronan Murray – 10 games, 4 goals, 0 assists, average rating 7.09

Woods has been excellent and I want to keep him but he is asking for more money than my board are willing to pay. He’s been out of contract all season so if I don’t release him he might stick around a bit longer and sign a contract. I’ve offered new contracts to Macken, Panther, Killock and Murray so far. I might offer another couple yet. The players are all good enough for the next league but since I want to win the league I’ll need a team capable to really challenging the top teams.

On the staff front I plan on bringing a whole new backroom team in. I’ll keep hold of the scout Gavin Tait as at this level I doubt I’ll be able to get a better scout.

Upwards and onwards! Stage one is finished and I’m now four promotions away from the Premier League. Easy…

A good detailed start but some imagery might add a little something to your posts Just a suggestion.

Thanks Jamesg237, I will bear that in mind