FM Scout FC: The Ultimate Challenge
Practice..
I arrived 5 minutes early, to see that the squad were arriving at the same time-frame. I called them out to start stretching, as a good portion of the team had already arrived. As the stretching finished, the indomitable Jesus Wagner arrived, 10 minutes.. late. He quickly approached me and said in his thick Brazilian accent,"Sorry Boss, my breakfast took longer than I imagined, and the traffic was tense." I looked at the young attacking midfielder, knowing that he could be key, in both a positive and negative way. I whisper,"Give me 10 laps around the pitch in less than 12 minutes. If this ever happens again, I'll add another lap and take off a minute, capiche?" The youngster nodded and started running.
After Jesus Wagner ran his 10 laps, I set up the team to play a 5 v 5 on small goals. 2 defenders and 3 midfielders, to handle ball control in small areas. The three goalkeepers would train with the strikers, and alternate every shot, whether it went in or was a miss. As I supervised the training, I thought to myself,"Not a shabby start."
We had three goalkeepers, and all of them looked pretty similar. All of them in good shape, incredible reflexes and were safe in set-pieces. However, the full-back position, was another story. We had four right-backs and two left-backs, which meant that many players were not going to play any matches, yet alone make the substitutes bench. As for the centre-back position we only had 4, but, with my enhanced management skills, some right-backs could be shifted to cover for some of the centre-backs.
Out of nowhere, I hear a scream, but a girly scream. I run through the pitch to see one of the right-backs, Josh Slater, grabbing his foot tightly, looking in pain. After some questions, I had learned that the young English right-back had broken his toe-nail. I shrugged it off, and told him to go speak to the physio for treatment. This Josh Slater acted like Louis Tomlinson when he had his debut for Doncaster..
In the midfield department, we were practically covered. There's the talented Peruvian Alfredo Martinez, the hard-tackling Dutch sensation Frans Trijbels and the sneaky Welsh Danny Cutie. If you didn't think we were covered, Justin Casanova, Tata Youre, Kyle Erdos and Randy would all have to fight for their spot, along with the ones listed above. These type of trainings would be essential for every player in the squad, to show who would start in the pre-season friendlies, which were yet to be scheduled. On the wings, we had options, and it would prove to be a good head-ache to think about. Abhinav Srivastava, Garrincha Jr, Pierre Espimas, Odd Sindre Tonning and Rafael Der Silva were all talented, and I had to think about who would play. In the middle, it wasn't too much too think of, Jesus Wagner and Louis Basham would have to fight for a place in the line-up but it was healthy competition.
Finally, we had 4 strikers, in which 2 were Brazilians, [Aaron Hardy and Naveed Tahir) and the other had European descent [Eoin O Raghailligh and Terry Henry]. If we fielded two strikers up top at any time, I'd be pretty sure that I'd put Europeans with Europeans and Brazilians with Brazilians. Ahead of our first friendly, I had no idea how we would line-up, but I was starting to get a closer look at who was technically better in the squad..
