PSP

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.

I had this sat ready to start a new game all weekend, but I didn’t dare actually click the “Start Game” button.

You see, Football Manager scares me. For two reasons. The first is that I worry my life will be over once I start a game. That my head will be full of worries about the holes in my squad to the exclusion of everything else, that instead of working I’ll be pondering tactical changes that could improve my results, etc. The second reason is that I worry the first thing won’t happen, that I’ll start the game, do a couple of friendlies and find that the suspension of disbelief necessary for the game will be unobtainable this time round.

Finally, last night, in bed, I used a random number generator (my wife) to pick my team and started a game as Oxford United. The first thing I noticed was that the board expected me to reach the playoffs. That’s never good. The next thing I noticed was that there was no depth to the squad. Only two strikers and a severe lack of players able to play on the left of defence and the right of midfield. (Or the other way round, I forget.) Luckily for me, Oxford had space in their wage budget, so I bought some players from clubs, signed a few clubless players and got some more in on loan. I now have six strikers, which might be overkill, actually.

Next up, I’m going to have to work out who to put in my first team and then, maybe, play some actual games of football. But that will probably come much, much later.