My winning run continued for another two or three games yesterday. I won manager of the month for the BSP and the papers ran stories on how well we were doing.

And then my best striker got called up to the Nigerian squad, which meant a couple of games were rearranged while he was away. This left me with a couple of weeks without a game, during which time half of my midfield got injured in training. Then the Nigerian striker came back and another club offered £60,000 for him, which I refused. Which meant he got really, really annoyed with me. And then my goalie got injured in training.

The games following all this were a disaster. My Nigerian striker didn’t perform, my other goalie took several games to settle in and my midfield woes continued, with more injuries as I had to play tired players. At one point I had to move from 4-4-2 to 4-3-3 just because of the lack of players. I lost game after game.

And then my star midfielder, a kid named Wilshire I had on loan from Arsenal, went home.

Now we’re winning the odd game, drawing a few and losing more. I’ve had to bring players who didn’t have a club in from abroad to fill gaps. (It’s only this morning, thinking about all this that I remembered I had a reserve team I could have checked. D’oh, d’oh, d’oh!) But the wins are keeping me going, we’re still sixth in the table and the board like me again, after a period of disappointment. But that striker of mine is still unhappy. I think we’ll have to let him go in January.

It’s all a lot more interesting now than it was when every game was an easy victory. Let’s hope I get a chance to play at lunchtime, because I’m itching for more.

Incidentally, the 2D engine in this game is really quite rubbish. Between a third and half of all the “highlights” it shows consist of the ball suddenly shooting up into the air and going up and up and up and up until the map flicks off and I have to check the scoreboard to see if anybody scored. Doesn’t ruin the game at all, but I think the 2D engine was only included because the 3D engine was introduced to the computer version this year.