Chester Season 2014-2015 Part One
Hey there folks, my 7th season in charge of Chester City is beginning! I have high hopes for this season, I want to win the Premier League title! It will be a tough battle, but I think that with the new players that I bought, along with my youngsters, we will be able to make it. It will be a long season, and it began with a very tough challenge, the European SuperCup match against Arsenal (we won the Europa League last season and Arsenal won the Champions League). It was an epic battle, my players fought for every single inch of turf, and finally we won the game 2-1, the second trophy in the club’s history!
In the Carling Cup we faced a difficult game right away, against Chelsea in the 3rd round. We managed to win the game and we also won against Reading and Tottenham to qualify for the semi final where we’ll meet… Arsenal again!
You know that we finished 4th in the Premier League last season, so we qualified for the Champions League. We were not seeded for the 3rd qualifying round draw, so we were drawn a pretty tough opponent, French side Bordeaux. There were 2 very tough matches, but winning 1-0 away was a huge advantage that we managed to keep in the second leg. We were drawn in a very difficult group, with Barcelona, FC Porto and Anderlecht. My goal was to qualify for the first knockout round, or at least finish third to go further in the Europa League. After six huge games we got 4 wins, 1 draw and only 1 defeat, against Barcelona. I guess we proved to be a very strong team :)
We finished 2nd in the Champions League group and we will meet allmighty Internazionale Milano in the first knockout round, there will be two cracker games to play!
And now, the Premier League, the first half of the season. We started with a wonderful streak of 5 wins, then we lost our first game, against Arsenal, but the season went very well so far. After 19 games we had only 1 draw, at home against Liverpool, and 2 defeats, against Arsenal and Manchester United.
At the halfaw point of the season we were strongly in first place, 8 points above Manchester City and 9 points above league champions Arsenal. If we’ll be able to keep this pace for the rest of the season I can’t see how they’ll manage to steal our title!
Brazilian attacking midfielder Willians Santana was a crucial player in our great first half of the season. I bought him during the summer transfer window for 10 million euro from Hamburg, and so far he’s worth every cent. He scored 8 goals and provided 9 assists, but the best thing about him is that he can play in various roles — central midfielder, attacking midfielder, left or right winger or even as a striker, he’s the main reason for our good run of results so far.
The best eleven so far looked like this, with 4 new players out of eleven.
As you can see I’m using a 4-2-3-1 tactic, with a lone striker and an attacking midfielder, along with 2 pacey wingers. But I’ll tell you more about the tactic in a future post, now I’ll get back to play the game, I’m so eager to win the title :)