Dorchester Town Story — January 2012

Hello dear friends and welcome to the year… 2012! The Dorchester Town story moves into a new year with an optimistic atmosphere at the club as we were top of the League Two table at the end of December, four points clear of the second placed team. A good run in the cup competitions also boosted the club’s finances, our balance is not in red anymore and that surely is a good sign.

Despite all those positive aspects I still was a bit concerned by the amount of depth I had in the squad so I decided to make some moves on the transfer market. As you know from the last post I offloaded two backup players but my transfer budget was still limited to zero pounds, zero pennies. I went on looking for loans and surprisingly got a couple of players from Arsenal on three month deals.

The first one is a Brazilian right/left winger called Anderson, a very talented and determined youngster that could at least provide some backup during those three months. I think that he is the first Brazilian that ever played for Dorchester :)

I mentioned before that veteran striker Leonardo Biagini announced his retirement at the end of the season and he was already showing signs of losing most of his pace and abilities. I thought that paying his wage was unnecessary at that point so I offered him another position in the club, a new job as a scout for a much lower wage than he was getting as a player. He accepted so I had a new scout but needed another striker :) Luckily Arsenal agreed to send Rhys Murphy on loan for three months, a strong striker with decent technique that should cover our attacking department pretty well. Oh, and if you were thinking that Arsenal became our parent club, think again! I asked the board to find a parent club but they failed to comply yet again!

With the signing of Anderson as a winger I decided to offload another one of my Romanian backup players, winger Carol Domondi. I offered him to clubs and asked an unlikely 200,000 pounds for him. There was some interest from his (and my) homeland and eventually he was sold for a staggering 150,000 pounds to a Romanian second division club!

Alright then, let’s move on to the pitch for a while. Our first game of the new year was at home with Port Vale, the team that knocked us out of the FA Cup in December. It was a pretty unjust result, we dominated that game and hit the woodwork no less than three times so I was looking for revenge and so were my players. The first minutes of the game saw us taking the game to our opponents, we were knocking on their door time and again but their defense was not showing signs of cracking. We needed something special to break the deadlock and that came courtesy of new signing Rhys Murphy, he scored on his debut with a powerful shot from the edge of the area, straight under the crossbar! Around the hour mark Omar Koroma doubled our lead after stealing the ball from a defender and sliding it past the keeper. We could have scored a few more but I guess the fans were happy with the display.

The next game was away at 16th placed Yeovil and I was looking forward to another win. The first half was fairly even but entertaining, there were quite a few shots from both sides but most of the attempts were off target. We showed more bite after the break but since my strikers were lacking inspiration centre back Stefan O’Brien stepped up to score a double blow from corner kicks.

We had another away game coming up as we were traveling to meet 21st placed Northampton. It wasn’t a very spectacular game by any means but we settled it during the first half when left winger Rosalia and striker Kazmierowski rounded off good team moves to give us a comfortable lead. The second half was much more quiet but Australian midfielder Chris Herd saved the overall impression with a spectacular last minute goal, he fired the ball in with a vicious strike from 30 yards out, straight into the top corner.

Now let’s get back to the transfer market for a few moments. With Domondi‘s record sale the board slipped around 20,000 pounds through their fingers so I finally had an above zero transfer budget! I was pretty excited so I made several offers for players that I had been monitoring since July but eventually I could sign only one of them. I spent 12,000 pounds, a new record transfer for the club, on Romanian right winger Tiberiu Paduraru. He is a pretty skillful player and I hope that his technique will be appreciated by our fans. He never went past the Romanian second division for some reason, I am counting on his determination to prove that he deserved to play on better stages in his career. Go to the next page to read the rest of the story.

Go to the next page to read the rest of the story.