Chester Season 2009-2010 The Conclusion
Hello folks! I wasn’t able to write the last part of my Chester 2009-2010 story although I desperately wanted to. The reason is that I was a little bit sick, I somehow managed to get chickenpox :( That’s very weird because I had it in my childhood, so I wasn’t supposed to catch it again. anyway, here I am, it’s been itching like hell and I also had a tremendous fever. Things are better now but I still have to stay inside my house for a few days.
But let’s get back to Football Manager. As you know from the previous post we managed to finish the first half of the League One championship in 3rd place, so it was pretty clear that we would be able to fight for promotion to Coca-Cola Championship right till the end. We still were a poor team, no money for transfers, so in the January transfer window I signed only one player, Hungarian young winger Sandor Vaida — pacey, good on both sides of the pitch. I guess you’ll hear more about him in the future ;)
The first game in January was against Premiership side Sunderland, in the FA Cup 3rd round. We didn’t have much hope of going further, and Sunderland punished us 4-0. But my players were only thinking about the league games. The next game was pretty important, against first placed Colchester. In the first game of the season we managed to beat them 3-1 in front of our own crowd. I was very happy to get an away win over them too: we won 2-0!
The rest of the month went pretty well, 4 wins, 1 draw and one defeat.
We were still up there, but there were two things that made me sad. First of all, my star Argentinian player was injured again, pretty painfully too.
Secondly the pitch at our own Deva Stadium was looking more like a swamp :(
We didn’t have any money to invest in the stadium facilities, so we prayed for less rain… The good thing was that we climbed on top of the table again, we were first!
Ant the next game was crucial: at home against second placed Carlisle. If we won this the road to Coca-Cola Championship would have been a lot easier. The game was dramatic, but we managed to pull it off. Our central defender Yannick Konki scored with a powerful header from a corner kick and we won 1-0.
Another 2 wins and 2 draws until the end of the month and we were up there, first placed. But the competitors were not far away, we had to keep up the pace.
The first March game was a spectacular home match against Leyton Orient. We scored 2 goals but we conceded 2, so the three points that we wanted didn’t come our way. There were another 10 games to go, and the table was very very tight at the top: four teams at the top with 67 points!
We finished March unbeaten, with another 2 wins and 2 draws.
We lost the first place to Milwall, but the competition was so tight that any team from the first 10 places could claim the first place at the end of it all.
Our next game was against first placed Milwall, at home. We had to win, the lads were determined to do it. We scored early, in the 17th minute, but we didn’t manage to get another goal before the break. In the second half we relied on couter attacks and our pacey striker Febian Brandy finally managed to get the second goal. We won 2-0, so we had our first place back.
Our last difficult game was against Stockport, away. With 3 games to go we were lying in 1st place.
The Stockport game was highly spectacular: 5 goals were scored, we finally managed to win 3-2 after living dangerously…
Our left back Scott Golbourne netted the decisive goal 8 minutes from time with a placed header.
The last two games were a formality, we won both of them easily agains weaker teams. The Chester City team made another miracle! Another wild dream came true! We won the League One championship, we were promoted to Coca-Cola Championship!
The board, the fans and the club legends were all in dreamland, they were pinching themselves, they couldn’t believe it was true!
The best player was definitely Febian Btandy, pacey striker on loan from Manchester United. He scored 33 goals for us, made 12 assists, he was crucial throughout the season.
Here is the best 11, the players that the Chester fans will remember for years to come.
As for me, I won the Manager of The Season award, I was thrilled.
We celebrated for a whole week, the impossible dream was becoming reality! We were going to play in the Coca-Cola Championship! Nobody knew what to expect from the next season, but nobody wanted to know just yet. We were just celebrating and leaving the thinking for later. We’ll see…