My fourth season with Chester was about to begin. After the first two seasons board and fans alike were delighted with our performances, we went from League Two to the Coca-Cola Championship by winning both League Two and League One. Last season we managed to avoid relegation from the Coca-Cola Championship, we finished 11th, right in the middle of the table. The team was beginning to gel and the promising young players were getting more and more mature and reliable.
But the financial problems took our board to accept offers for some of our best players, but I was confident that we could grab a play off spot at the end of it all.
The season began but the transfer window wasn’t over, and our club was besieged with transfer offers. I refused most of them, but my chairman decided to accept an offer from Q.P.R. for our very good Moroccan left winger, Zouheir Dhaouadi. So I lost him for only 975,000 euro. I was quite desperate because if I was going to lose another left side player, defender or midfielder, I would have been in very big trouble.
And that offer came one week before the end of the transfer window. My Romanian regen left back Andrei Paun was wanted by several Romanian clubs and one of them offered 825,000 euro. If I lost him too I would have had only one left back in the whole squad, and that left back would have been a reserve left midfielder too. I would have been left with only one left back and one left winger. The difficult thing was that I didn’t have any cheap transfer targets for these roles.
But I was lucky. Although Paun didn’t want to extend his contract with us he refused the contract offer from Otelul, the Romanian club, and the transfer window finished! I was releived. The season was tougher than I expected: our squad lost depth after we lost some of our best players and as if that wasn’t enough we entered a deep injury crisis. I had to bring players from the youth team to be able to live through it.
We were somewhere in mid-table by the end of September, but in the Carling Capu we had a big match to play: third round at home against almighty Chelsea! Although we lost the game our fans saw a great display, at least from our attackers.
Our defender James Chester was named player of the month for September in the Coca-Cola Championship. He was the only player that was in our squad since the first season in League Two, when he was sent to us on loan by our parent club, Manchester United. After that first season his contract expired, so I did all that I could to make him come and sign a contract with us. He finally agreed and he became a reliable player for us.
Our first half of the season was not bad at all, although at times we were struggling with injuries and low morale. We grabbed 13 wins and 4 draws in the Coca-Cola Championship and we lost 6 games. Towards the end of the year I decided to change the tactic that I’ve used to get Chester from League Two to the gates of the Premiership because we were letting our opponents create too many chances every game. But I’ll tell you more about the new tactic in another post. Here are the results:
Our league table position after 23 games was pretty good, we were in 3rd place behind Middlesbrough and QPR, by far the best teams in the league, both relegated from the Premier League. We had to hang on and reach a play off place, we simply had to.
Since our star striker, Federico Almerares, was sold to Boca Juniors we needed a new star upfront. We didn’t have the money to buy some big-shot striker, so we had to push our youngsters to perform better. And they did. Our young pacey striker Danny Welbeck, signed for free last season from Manchester United, had an awesome first championship half. He was the player that gave our team crucial points by scoring great goals time and again. He scored 15 goals in 23 games in the Coca-Cola Championship.
If Danny Welbeck will continue to play the way he did until now I think we’ll be able to finish somewhere between the first 6 in the league and have our chance of getting to the Premiership. We still don’t have any money for transfers and our wage budget is pretty tight, so I’m going to pray that I won’t lose any more players in the January transfer window…
