A Tale of Woe (Well hopefully not!)

I guess a congratulations on the new job are in order! Your style of writing is brilliant, looking forward to reading more!

Congratulations on the appointment at Chelmsford. A great club to get your career going with, as they have the funds to certainly push for promotion from the Conference South - and they've been very close a number of times in recent years. Best of luck!

You ran Palace very close in that friendly, positive signs for the coming season! Shame about Whelpdale, he really is a fantastic player

Comment Responses:
@mgriffin2012 Thank you! My writing style is something that is hopefully going to continue to improve throughout the story, so thank you for your kind words; it is nice to know someone is reading!

@ScottT I am obviously a little further ahead in the save = i.e. just seen the odds for promotion etc, we are most certainly up there, however it is also quite clumped near the top!

@Justice Certainly positive signs! Whelpdale will certainly be a miss! I think it is going to be difficult to find a player as good without being able to search for attributes or by looking online! I guess that makes it more realistic though, ultimately so not too bad of a thing.

Just as a side note, I have also changed the way I screenshot as I was disappointed by how small the images were, even after being clicked on. Let me know if this works any better for you.

Continuing the Re-build

I pressed on with my pre-season games whilst continuing to keep offering trial positions out to players. Given that I was offering trials to players who are currently unemployed, I am surprised how many were turning my offer down – at this point I am not willing to take too many risks on players as it could leave me in a dangerous situation. I will not keep listing all of the players whom I offer trials to, however I will allow you to see all my finalised transfers.

Dorchester town, a team we should fairly easily beat, managed to hold us to a 1-1 draw before we were beaten 4-1 by Norwich (Championship) on the flip side, we were able to come out victorious against Fulham Under 23s – beating them 2-0.
I have made no secret of the fact that I am Birmingham City fan and so, it is probably obvious that I would choose to set up a friendly with my beloved Blues – I kind of wish I hadn’t! Given Birmingham missed out on promotion last year following defeat in the play-offs, I was fully expecting a tough game…I did not, however, expect to draw 3-3!!



My aim of earning money in the early friendlies, and building morale in the squad in the latter friendlies really worked. Sadly, given the high turnover of players (trialists) I didn’t necessarily get the best understanding of my team in this time.



I have also found it especially difficult to find loan players who are willing to join us, who are also better, or at least equal to, the players already in the club.

As you can see from above, my pre-season has now come to an end. The board have given me my objectives for the year ahead and this formed a big part of my interview so I believe I may be judged quite harshly with respect to these aims; thankfully they are actually pretty reasonable objectives.



The next post will briefly outline my transfers thus far (totally forgot no normal transfer window!) and how my team is looking.

My Team:

Players have come and gone from my team over the last few weeks more times than a fat kind visits the buffet table! I have not gone into detail with the players due to the sheer number of them; I have a full page of transfers!



I am especially liking the look of Terrance Saydee, a Reading reject who is just 18 years old and James Comley a player who is already experienced at this level of football.





I am under no illusion that games are going to be tough at this level of football, and that players are not going to be quite as capable as players from bigger clubs.

With this in mind, I have decided to keep a fairly basic set of tactics (442 (cautious route one), 4312 (positive route one) and 4411 (balanced counter attack)) This should help to prevent players from making too many mistakes and leaving us open. I am sure that these are going to need tweaking as we go along though!
As it stands, I believe my best 16 are as follows:





Having looked at my opening few fixtures Welling and Hemel Hempstead could be tough games having finished 3rd and 7th in the league last season! Based on last season’s table, I will need approximately 58 points to finish mid table and 65 points to be within the play-offs!

Fingers crossed!

Keeping it simple is definitely the route to go down at this level, I believe. Fingers crossed going into the season.

Have a feeling you're going to upset the apple cart a bit this season!

Comment Replies

Well, it is funny you should say that @Mgriffin2012...

An Ok Start I suppose...

So, I have played all of my matches in August and I guess they have gone ok..



The only downside to this is that Concord have nabbed Jai Reason from me - Didn't see anyone in their team to nab as revenge

I am struggling to keep my players fit at the moment, their home lives must be crazy busy as 2 games and they are almost crawling around the pitch!

It also appears that I am a bit of a millitant manager - having requested that my players go in hard on a few tackles we got fined £500 as 6 players were cautioned - oops!

Oh...and of course....

Great start to the season. Very surprised to see Jai Reason to drop down to Concord's standards, no disrespect to them, but I'd expect he'd have preferred a move to Chelmsford but obviously not.

At least you're the one laughing, currently.

Great start to the campaign just need to maintain the high levels now

Comments

@ScottT For the time being – here’s to hoping that the whole season goes well!

@mGriffin2012 Really hoping I can keep the levels up, I expect it to be difficult but I think consistency is key!

Moving onto September!

After such a strong opening month I figured it was time to begin improving myself so that I could lead in the best way possible. After having a long and heated meeting with the board, trying to justify the expense of the course, the board finally agreed to allow me to begin studying.



Unfortunately, much like the news today, my emails also contained news of Brexit.



It will be interesting to see how this plays out! I will look forward to Brexit developments, but hope it doesn’t screw over the English teams too much!
Another month of fixtures down and I am still yet to lose a competitive game; though I haven’t quite managed to maintain my 100% win record – DAMN!

Still a fantastic again nevertheless, hopefully it can continue over the course of the season. Form as strong as this will have the title wrapped up, for sure.

Sensational month of results! The team looks set to challenge for honours this season

Absolutely! I have spent a couple of hours this weekend trying to plough through a couple of months - get to the end of 2018 - will try to do a proper update soon!

A very good month and a great record in being unbeaten so far this season!