Breaking new grounds
This time I thought I'd try to keep you up to speed. After being fierd from RCK I decided not to go for any second division-sides (with the Championship being the exception to confirm the rule). Not so long after the departure from Holland a long awaited offer dropped into the mailbox... one from South Africa! The big clubs have strong finances, much due to the great arenas left behind from the WC, but the lack of interest from foreign players to go there still makes it a challange to creat a winning side.
The team who came with the offer was Maritzburg United. They were an anticipated midtable-team (7/16), surprisingly they weren't far behind that prediction (12th) when I was appointed. Maby it's an omen of what to expect from the chairman... well, I'm not one to back away from high pressure situations!
Arriving late December I had a chanse to use the good finances to find myself som gems during the January-transferwindow, however I decided to only get players for the positions I really needed to cover (for exampel I only had one LB with a starrating above one gold star).
This is what my squad looks like a couple of months into the job:
I've decided to adopt a attackingfootball making our games pure shootouts were the form of both teams strikers more often than not becomes the deciding factor. It may sound crazy and desperate, but we usually don't allow more than 1 ccc for the opposition and creat at least 3 ourselves, so I think it's an interesting experiment to carry on with. Thus far it's not been great reslut-wise as I have a 5-4-2 record thus far (W-L-D), but as I said I think I may be on to something here.
Looking towards the end of the season my focus will be at developing the tactic as well as working on a transferplan for this summer are quite a few changes will have to be made for us to be a contender next year.
Until then, merry christmas and for the love of god comment and read!
