Dan: Not Who You Expected? Again…

Hi there!

Long time no see, I think the last time I posted here was almost 3 months ago! Well the time has come for my first attempt at an FM12 story, however you may have noticed the club crest for the post was not what you expected so I figured these may be some questions you could want to ask…

What happened to Blackburn?

Well I have an answer for that question, although a slightly wimpy one. I tried to be Blackburn 3 times on the demo and lets just say it wasn’t happening, lack of funds, stingy owners, and in all truth a team that was woeful (no offence to any Blackburn fans reading). In the end I decided that there was no way that I would stick with Blackburn if things didn’t go well right from the off (which they rarely do for me in FM).

Why did you choose Celtic?

Well I have no clear answer for that, I tried and failed with Rangers last year so why not try Celtic this time around. Plus it has something to do with the fact that I’ve been inspired by Celticman whom I’m sure a lot of people have after reading his blog.

Couldn’t this turn out to be a really boring story?

It could but I’m hoping that won’t happen. Although Scotland is pretty much a 2 horse race each season (although not so much this season) I think that the challenge of Rangers is a good one, plus I’m sure you guys will enjoy all the blood, sweat, and tears that are guaranteed when I struggle against the odds in Europe.

Well with my reasons out of the way, we’ll get down to it. Yesterday afternoon I decided to download FM12 and thanks to Sky offering no more than a 1.8MB download speed it took a while, 3 hours 23 minutes to be exact. That wasn’t the only problem, after about 1 hour 30 minutes Steam decided to go mental, and crashed, I restarted the computer and then 20 minutes later Steam crashed again! Anyway I pushed on and after 3 hours 23 minutes, 2 Steam crashes, 2 computer restarts, and seeing Newcastle crash out of the Carling Cup, despite looking something like this:

…I persevered and finally downloaded the game, problem being that I then couldn’t be bothered to play on it so guess what I’ve done all day today! :D

So onto the actual game. As you’ve probably guessed by now I’m Celtic, if you haven’t already guessed then now you know. Inspired by Celticman’s blog on FMCrowd I’ve decided to see how far I can go with Celtic and hopefully that means lifting a European Cup at some point. So here’s what you first get when you look at Celtic…

Not bad. I’m actually quite surprised to see them predicted 1st since Rangers really seem to have opened the gap between them this year. The club also possess top training facilities and good youth facilities. You can throw well established youth recruitment and good junior coaching into that category too. The club also finds itself only £525K in debt which will be wiped out by the season end and also find themselves (although rather fortunately) in the Europa League.

For the first season, just for speed purposes I’ve only selected 2 nations which I will add too as regens begin to appear during the 2nd season. Those leagues are…

Along with this I’ve also enabled attribute masking to add to the challenge and I have France as view-only since there were a couple of players I wanted to sign but that never actually happened. I’m not using the real fixtures either just in case anyone was interested in that piece of information.

Now let’s look deeper into the green side of Glasgow…

Certainly not a bad record, 92 competition wins, 1 Champions League title, and 1 EURO Cup final appearance shows me that this is possible since the club has more resources available to it now that it would have done back then. The club has also lifted the Scottish Premier League Trophy no less than 42 times and finished runners up 31 times! These numbers are quite incredible.

So onto the team that will be aiming for domestic glory this season and maybe even Europa League glory with a bit of luck…

The team is very strong through and through and while it looks as though we may need a goalkeeper I’m going to keep faith with Forster whom will hopefully join us permanently some time in the near future. The centre of defence looks very strong too with experienced players such as Majstorovic and Wilson mixing with less experienced players like Rogne. At right back we have Adam Matthews who I’m excited about for the future yet the left flank is tricky, although El Kaddouri appears good enough, he inability to dribble or cross is making me doubt whether he fits in, and due to his high wages I may look to cancel the loan.

Midfield is clearly the strongest area of the squad. We have extremely gifted players such as Kayal and Ki Sung-Yong mixing with hard working, versatile players like Brown and Ledley. The centre of our midfield is so good that 3.5 star Ki Sung-Yong doesn’t even get shown on the team report! Also some young talent is coming through in this position with Forrest on the right wing and Wanyama in central midfield.

Up front we also look strong but I have my doubts about Stokes and I’m not sure why. Hooper is our best forward at 4 star but I think that Bangura might actually be better than him since he’s more adept in the air. We’ve also got some talent coming through in this area of the team too but their names evade me at the minute.

With all this information in mind I decided to get to work on my 3 formations for the coming season and this is what I came up with…

Celtic 4-4-2 Attacking — For Domestic Competitions

As much as I dislike 4-4-2 I felt as though this was the way to go in domestic competitions, straight forward and ruthless. Please remember that none of these are set in stone and will probably have changed by my next post since they’re in the early stages of testing. Anyway, like I said this is the main formation for my team and this is how I expect them to be spending most of their time playing…

Attacking emphasis with a hint of control since I’m better than most opposition I’ll be facing. We don’t want to be losing possession constantly but to be honest I’m not too bothered with possession domestically since I think my strikers are more capable of scoring than most other strikers in the league.

My other 2 formations are as follows…

Celtic Controlling 4-3-3 — When 4-4-2 Fails to Work

Although I have faith in my 4-4-2 formation, at the end of the day, it’s only a 4-4-2 and many teams are now capable of playing against that formation. So, when that fails to work I’ve got an answer in the shape of this formation…

Much like the formation we saw when I was Hull, in fact, almost identical but hopefully with a higher class of players available this version will work better at a higher level including against European opposition. Again the emphasis is on short passing with a target man up there with 2 poachers to mix things up a bit.

Celtic Cautious 4-5-1 — Mainly When I Think We’ll Get Hammered

This formation was made just for those instances when I think we’ll get the proverbial kicked out of us against much better opposition…

As you can see this is very cautious in the fact that a lot of players have a supporting role in order to help out when the likes of Messi are tearing my full backs apart. Not much to say other than I hope that I don’t need to use this formation too often.

As for set pieces I’m using Darren’s Stoke designs but they’ve yet to have the desired effect with Celtic and I’m not going to bother with screenshots since I’m sure all of you have already seen that article and are putting it to good use :)

Well that’s all I’ve got for you today. Just a short post to get you guys interested (hopefully) and get myself back into the swing of things. My next post will be an in depth look at the clubs pre-season, squad, and finances before we kick off the campaign.

Thanks for reading!