Hello again folks, I had a lot of works to do lately, so only little spare time to spend with my favorite game, Football Manager 2009. My Chester team is still standing strong right in the middle of the Premier League Table after 20 games were played and another 18 are still to be played. The media expected us to be last, so being 9th is definitely a surprise for everybody. The year is almost over and the January transfer window is almost here. I don’t want to sign many players, but I definitely want a few more options for the Attacking Midfielder (AMC) role, as the players I have now didn’t perform too well. I wanted to sign Georginio Wijnaldum, the Dutch youngster, but I could’t reach an agreement with him, so I had to find some other targets. Finally I chose two attacking midfielders, both young and promising.
The first one is Portuguese regen Rui Almeida, a very promising creative midfielder. He played around the globe at Levski, Slovan Liberec and finally at Los Angeles Galaxy from which I bought him for 3 million euro. I really hope he will show his talent in the Premier League.
The other attacking midfielder that I segned, for free this time, was Swedish hot prospect Albin Ekdal. Formerly a Juventus player he didn’t get the chance to prove his skills in Italy, so Juve released him on a free transfer because they couldn’t renew his contract. I offered him a very good deal and the prospect to play regularly so he chose Chester over clubs like Leverkuse or Benfica which offered him good contracts too.
I sold some of the players that didn’t prove to be worthy of the Premier League, but that’s now very important right now. Let’s see how the next games went.
Matchday 21: Chester — Tottenham 2-1
They dominated the game and we won… Well, that’s better than the games we dominated but lost :) Anyway, another brilliant performance from my young strikers, they scored twice from only a few chances they had.
Matchday 22: Fulham — Chester 3-1
As I said, mybe it’s better to play badly and win than to play well and lose. We played a decent game at Fulham but we were unlucky to concede three goals in the first half, it was like a nightmare in which every shot they had was going in. As a matter of fact they had only 2 shots on goal and scored 3 times, with our own goal!
FA Cup 3rd Round: Blackburn — Chester 1-2
A very tight game in the FA Cup against one of the better teams in the Premier League. My lads were very determined to go through to the next round and they made everything they could to make that possible. Unfortunately the draw wasn’t too good: we were going to play against Liverpool in the 4th round. And Liverpool was our next opponent in the League too.
Matchday 23: Chester — Liverpool 1-1
A very entertaining game in which we were again a little bit unlucky to put the ball past our own keeper. It finished 1-1 with chances on both sides and a good solid game for our young goalkeeper.
Matchday 24: QPR — Chester 0-2
QPR were firmly standing in the last place and I was certain that we wouldn’t have too much trouble with them. We played a quiet game, not giving them too many chances to show their skills and we proved again that we were the better of the two teams.
FA Cup 4th Round: Liverpool — Chester 2-0
We couldn’t repeat the performance that we displayed against Liverpool in the last Premier League game, we were beaten at Anfield Road although we had many chances to score. A bitter defeat which knocked us out of the FA Cup.
Matchday 25: Reading — Chester 0-0
One of the ugliest games I’ve seen this year, with Reading trying to defend and with my boys trying to forget the defeat against Liverpool. We didn’t manage to break the defensive wall that Reading put before us, so it ended in a draw after a game that we should have won.
After 25 games played we were safely in 8th place, so I guess relegation is out of the question. There are another 13 games to be played, only a disaster could get us relegated.
Stay tuned for the next episode, some beatiful games still to be played!
