Chester Season 2012-2013 Part Four

Hello folks! We’re coming closer to the halfway point of the season and my Chester City team is still standing pretty high in the Premier League table. With a good first team squad and even with a decent squad depth I’m pretty confident that we can avoid relegation without having to wait for the last seconds of the last game. But let’s get to the facts, our next 5 Premier League games, a very difficult set of fixtures.

Matchday 16: Newcastle — Chester 3-1

This was a pretty confusing game. Although we dominated the posession and we created some chances Newcastle never seemed to let the game get out of their control. The gave us the ball, we didn’t make our posession count, they punished us when they had the chance and that was it. Our top strikers in the first games of the season, Luke Moore and Henri Anier were having trouble getting back into shape after being injured, so we had to fight hard in order to score.

Matchday 17: Portsmouth — Chester 7-3

We were leading quite comfortably, 3-1 in the 60th minute. What happened after that looked more like a plane crash for us than a football game. We were humiliated, destroyed by Portsmouth’s two great strikers, Peter Crouch and Danny Welbeck (remember, they bought him from us last season…). It was the most humiliating game in my entire career, I was ashamed to get out of the house the next day. I couldn’t forget the last 40 minutes although I was desperately trying to put all the bitterness behind and face the future challenges.

Matchday 18: Chester — West Brom 2-1

Finally, a win! After the disastruous defeat at the hands of Portsmouth I was quite pessimistic because none of my players seemed to have what it takes to lead the team out of the black hole we were diving into. And that’s how young reserve striker Michael Harper stepped up: he scored 2 goals and gave us a crucial win.

Matchday 19: Manchester United — Chester 0-1

This was a great opportunity for us to show our former parent club what we were made of. I was hoping to play a good game and maybe snatch a draw. My boys played a magnificent game and deserved a glorious win. Just take a look at the game stats, we dominated the posession and had quite a few chances to score. The Manchester United players did play a little bit rough, that’s why Rio Ferdinand was sent off, he even deserved to hit the showers earlier. A great win which brings us many hopes for the future.

Matchday 20: Blackburn — Chester 3-2

This is another game that we lost due to our defensive errors, too many mistakes, too many times our defenders were left off dreaming of a better future while their strikers were having fun with our goalkeeper. This is obviously a problem that I have to solve but I’m not sure that I know how to do that or if I have the players to do that. We’ll see.

Anyway, so far so good. We were 9th in the Premier League table, 8 wins, 4 draws and 4 losses. Relegation isn’t very close, but we have to be careful as a bad streak of defeats can bring us right near the relegation places.

The player that really led the squad in these 5 games was Michael Harper, a 20 years old English regen striker. I didn’t plan to use him as a first team player at the start of the season, but the injuries and the weaker form of my other strikers pushed me to give him a chance. He was a little scared at first, he played 12 league games without scoring a single goal. And then he exploded: 5 goals in the last 5 games!

I bought Michael Harper from League Two club Bournemouth this summer, and I really feel that he will be a very good player soon enough. He’s already a Under 21 player for England, he scored 3 goals in 2 games!

That’s about it, stay tuned to find out how the Chester adventure in the Premier League continues!