Afan Lido: Year 1 Review

Up the Lido!

I am proud to say, that after our first season in the Welsh Premier League, that we have NOT been relegated! I know it might be a shocker, and it was an outcome that was certainly in doubt at the mid-way point, but by some miracle of fortune (I think SI patched the game), we pulled off a dramatic turn around for survival. I’ll do my best to keep this as brief as possible, while still giving as many details as I can afford. As such, I’ll be breaking this into a few segments. First up, my secret weapon!

My Manager:

My secret weapon, my ace in the hole, my mastermind! I give you the man who will lead this team to success, a man who you shall all come to (hopefully) know as one of the greatest football minds of all time, I give you:

That’s right…Jeff Goldblum! You’ll come to be quite familiar with him over the coming months, and he’s bound to lead us to great success (after all, he destroyed an alien menace and survived a T-Rex attack not once, but twice).

 The Season:

I won’t lie to you, I made some major mistakes at the beginning of the season. I threw all common logic to the wayside, and began haphazardly signing anyone who my scouts gave more than 3 stars. I didn’t check the spider graph, I paid only cursory attention to attributes, and I didn’t concentrate on ensuring I had enough depth. I’m not sure why I did these things, but I’ll attribute it partly to over-enthusiasm for both the save and for finally having FM12 in my hands. Regardless, the early going was ugly:

Fifteen (or is that sixteen?) games in, and things were looking dire. More Adam Resurrected, less Invasion of the Body Snatchers. Clearly something needed to be done, and I buried my head into the scout reports. This time I ignored my scouting reports, and this time I bothered to check the attributes. This time, oh yes, this time would be different. I knew this, because I’d found Him. He who would save us from the seemingly inevitable throes of relegation. I found…Marlon.

A Brazilian with an Italian passport, Marlon was miraculously, incomprehensibly without a club. I snatched him up on a free transfer, and immediately set to work. To say the change was drastic would be the understatement of the century. Words cannot adequately describe the turn around, so I’ll let the fixtures do the talking for me:

His benefit was two-fold. For starters, he shored up our unbelievably porous defense. Behind his leadership, we were finally able to get out of our own half for significant parts of the game, and this gave us more attacking opportunities (seriously, we went from 45% possession to nearly 60%). Secondly, with his height, jumping ability, and skill with the header, he contributed a handful of goals and way more than the two official assists he was credited with.

Of course I’d be remiss if I gave him SOLE credit for the turn around. I did bring in handful of other, less significant (though still important) players, and switched from my haphazard 4-4-2 to the default 4-4-2 tactic that came with the game. And despite winning a majority of our remaining games, we were too late to emerge from the bottom six and found ourselves in the Relegation Group come the league split. Of course there was an upside to playing the 5 worst teams in the league:

The 0-4 loss to Prestatyn aside, I thought we did pretty well! We finished the second half of the season on a very strong note, and as a result, I found this little surprise in my inbox:

As you may recall from introduction to Wales, we have a 5-team playoff for the final Europa league spot, and we’d managed to land ourselves in that playoff! Unfortunately, due to our league position, we’d have to go the long road and that started with a play-in game against Bangor City. This was a team we’d struggled with during the year, and I was quite nervous going into the match. It turns out I had legitimate reason:

If you’ve never seen a grown man losing his mind over a video game, you’re missing out. In one of the more nerve-wracking games I can recall, we but just barely managed to squeeze by Bangor. Unfortunately, this gave us a date with one of our fiercest rivals…Llanelli.

Unbelievable! Absolutely unbelievable! Despite going a man down early in the second half, we managed to hold against all odds and squeak out a win in extra time. How we pulled this off I’ll never know, but if you notice who scored our goal, we can get a pretty good idea. Incomprehensibly, we now found ourselves moving on to the final where we would be facing a very strong Carmarthen squad…

If you look at our first half of the season, you’d think for sure we found ourselves relegated. Instead, we now found ourselves with a place in Europe! Unfortunately it did seem to confuse the game a bit…

Erm, not quite, but we’ll take it. This of course means we have a great deal of work to do during the off seasons, but it’s an inconvenience I’m willing to accept. Sadly the club has decided not to turn professional this season (I tried, trust me), and they’ve lowered my wage bill by nearly a thousand pounds. This probably has something to do with us being about £110k in debt, but I like to think they’re just trying to increase the challenge.

For the curious, the final table looks like this:

And that wraps up our first season of what I’m sure will be many! We have a long road ahead of us yet, but a miracle comeback is certainly a good omen. The next post will be the Season 2 introduction, and I’ll try to actually include the majority of our transfer activity this time. Oh! I nearly forgot (yeah, I don’t edit this, I just write as it comes)…here is our final first team roster at season’s end (you should see a few familiar names in that list):

Okay, that’s it for real this time. See you guys next time!