Part 4: Chapter the Fourth: Slouching towards Bethlehem to be born.

Chapter the Fourth: Slouching towards Bethlehem to be born.
July 26, 2013-August 15, 2013

It's two days from our first friendly, and we've actually added some players. None of them are a goalkeeper, and we've only got one defender, but it's a start.



The bookies have made us the favorite for the league crown despite only having 7 players signed. I'd like to imagine it's because they understand my greatness, but it's more likely because we have a ton of money to spend and our players so far are better than the semi-professionals who play at this level.



We've also held a trial day, hoping to find some players from the local area who can fill holes in the team. I didn't expect to find any of my starting 11 from this, but I've made offers to several players for depth and to fill our currently empty under-21 and under-18 teams. Some of them could turn out useful, and none of them were asking for much money. The scouts say that a couple of them could be with us all the way to the Championship if they develop.




Signing players is going poorly, as players who are good enough to earn their keep in better leagues need to be blown away by our offer This guy, for example, flat out refused a transfer after hearing my initial, generous, offer. The only thing that assuages me is that they'll be sorry when we're knifing through the ranks and they're still stuck as a backup in a backwater.

I won't deny panicking over our lack of goalkeeper, either. We were shortly before our second to last friendly and still hadn't found a suitable keeper, so when one demanded a knock-me-down offer to get his interest I ended up giving him nearly £5,000/wk. I've paid players less when I was in the Premier League! It was not my finest hour. It's only a one year contract, but I still feel embarrassed.



My scouts continue to sift through the dross for players. For every 20 player's scouted there might be one worth looking at. You'll want to look at the scout report, where under the potential rating they'll tell you how good they think a player can get. As a lower league manager you should be looking for guys with the ability to grow into players that can hang in leagues a couple above the one you're at while being useful at your current level of play.



The purpose of these friendlies is for the team to get match fit. Match fitness is essentially how in shape a player is. Players who aren't in shape tire out more quickly and often can't go a full game without getting badly fatigued. As such, I've scheduled four friendlies against small teams to get our sea legs and let the players build up some rapport on the pitch. In this coming match we're 20-1 favorites against an opponent I picked just because their name is so quintessentially English.




All of our players need to improve their match fitness. Our striker pairing is Target Man Hester in support of Rosetti, our Advanced Forward. Duchamps is playing as an Advanced Playmaker, seeking to set up play for the strikers and Wide Midfielders, Mudd and Terry, while Gallagher plays more defensively as a Deep-Lying Playmaker. Our back line has two Fullbacks, Stamp and Edwards, on automatic duty, which means they're responsible for both attack and defense, while the Limited Defenders Milner and Stevens don't contribute much to attack and instead focus on keeping things tidy at back. Stevens isn't even a defender by trade, but we don't have anyone who can play the position signed yet so he'll just have to do his best.



The team didn't play as well as I would have liked, but sometimes you need to boost the morale more than you need berate sloppy play. This was the first game they'd ever played as a group and while the opposition was uninspiring they did a good job in the second half to take a 3-1 victory.

The ratings you see are for halftime and fulltime. Ratings of 6.7-6.8 are about average. Ratings above 7 indicates playing well, while anything below a 6.5 indicates playing poorly. They're not the be all and end all of player evaluation, but they give a quick and dirty sense of how someone played. The team significantly improved after the half, which I'm going to credit to my inspiring halftime pep talk.



Now that we've got some players on the team, we can start assigning them individualized training. Your coaches can provide advice on what players should work on, but I prefer to set their focus to a specific role that I use in my style of play, so instead of various players working specifically on one attribute they work on one role. That way they'll become better fitted to my style, even if they weren't a perfect fit initially. That only goes so far, you're not going to turn a central defender into a winger, or a striker into a defensive midfielder, but it helps improve a range of skills that are most important to a position and tactical role. This naturally doesn't work as well with older players, part of my preference for young players is the chance to mold them as I deem fit.



I've been putting off the tactical side of things because it's one of the more complex parts of the game to explain, especially in this format. But it would be malpractice of me to not set the list of who takes free kicks and throw-ins, especially as some of our players would struggle to throw a soccer ball into a garbage bin from three feet away.



I've told the players to look for long throws, so that Edwards tries to use his world class Long Throws attribute to get the ball into the penalty area to create goals. Rosetti is by far and away our best free kick taker, and hopefully can steal a couple goals from dead ball situations. None of our players have a decent corner kick stat, so I've set them to aim for the near post because it's closer to them and they're less likely to screw it up.



I don't know who our captain and vice captain will be yet. The players with strong Determination and Leadership scores are very young, and beyond not wanting to put too much pressure on a teenage player several of them will be either backups or playing on the youth teams. Parrack could be an option, but he folds like a cheap suit when things get tough. Hopefully by the time the season starts we'll have slightly better options here. For now, though, we need to play the rest of our preseason.



We might be in real trouble. Or Football Manager might have finally fixed the way that the game determines player ratings and players no longer always end up around a 6.7-7 when they don't have a big mistake or score a goal. Either way, we lost two games that we should have won. The game against Rokycany, a Czech team, was never even close, we went down 3-0 before I could blink.



While we've wended our way through the preseason I've been signing players and trying to get everyone into playing shape, so at no point has our best 11 been on the field at the same time. But we're on the verge of the season opener against Brackley Town, a vibrant metropolis of 14,000 in the English Midlands, and I still don't have a good feel for this team yet. There's only one way to find out what these guys are made of, and that's to play the games.