Dorchester Town — The Journey Begins

Here we go folks, fasten your seat belts, it finally begins! After the extremely rewarding career with Notts County you voted and sent me to manage Dorchester Town, the weakest team in Blue Square South, predicted to finish last. My goal is to bring this small club all the way to the Premier League so I guess we could be in for quite a long story. Let’s get it started then!

First a few technical details. Here are the leagues that I loaded, the database was set to «large» with the option to load all players from my homeland, Romania.

And now a few details about the club. Although it’s one of the oldest teams in the South West of England, founded in 1880, they never went past the current level. They never won anything and maybe the most interesting fact about their history is that Harry Redknapp played a few games for them in the early 1970s.

The Avenue Stadium, or Weymouth Avenue Railway Stadium by its full name, is our home and it has a pretty big capacity, 5009 spectators, but only 697 seats.

And now, the most interesting thing about this tiny club. Two brothers own the club. So far, so good. They are aged 18 and 21. What? That’s right, my bosses are two youngsters that received ownership of the club from their father, Tom Mitchell. Here’s what Josh, the younger brother, had to say about this opportunity: «My mates can’t believe we have a football club of our own. We used to play Football Manager on PCs in our shed at home, now we are playing it for real — it is completely bizarre. It is such a great opportunity and we are both determined to give it a full go and make a success of the club.» (you can read the full story here) Well then, I could get sacked by a pair of teenagers, not bad :)

Back to the business then, the board expected me to try to avoid relegation. I told them that I can achieve a mid-table finish but that didn’t add a penny to our transfer budget. It did increase the wage budget a tiny bit but you can’t get too many players for 530 pounds a week.

Then I headed to the backroom to see what the staff had to say. First, I was announced that we have an old squad.

OK I said, they are giving me the bad news first. And now for the good news… Sorry, no good news: we are way below average on every possible aspect except determination, fitness and strength. Well, with those characteristics we could start a successful track and field team but not a football team!

The assistant manager report didn’t look to well either. As a side note, how can you be confident with a goalkeeper named Coward?

The best player in the squad was Kyle Critchell, a versatile right back that can cover most roles in defense and midfield. He came out through the youth ranks at Southampton but his biggest achievement so far is playing 10 games for Chesterfield in League One. Anyway, he was one of the few players that I kept at the club. Go to the next page to read the rest of the story.

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

I went to the under 18 team to see if there are any promising youngsters. There were not, I chose to release all of them on free transfers after telling them to focus on school and try to pursue other careers that don’t involve too much physical activity. Then I released quite a few first team players, I just couldn’t stand seeing them in training. I guess I was mean but I told them that there should be a law to keep them away from football boots and shirts. I had to find better players on the transfer market but after trying and failing for a while I decided to try and grab any half decent free player that I could find. I made offers for several English players, around 20 or so, but most of them refused to come to my club. Only one of them accepted but I guess that’s because he was injured :)

I was desperate. When things are rough, where do you go for help? That’s right, to your family! I went to Romania and grabbed a plethora of non-league footballers, not world class players by any means but still a lot better footballers than the bunch of amateurs I had at the club. Here’s a round up of the transfer activity, 17 players in, 30 players out!

I was hoping that the board would find me a parent club to get some players on loan. Unfortunately the board failed to understand what a parent club means, so no loan players for me…

Now let me introduce the best signing, probably the only player at the club that truly deserves to be called a footballer. His name is Edvard Lasota, he is a Czech midfielder and a quite experienced one too. Maybe too experienced since he’s 38 years old but still, he is a great player at this level. He has 15 caps and 2 goals but that’s all in the past. Overall he’s the only player in the team that could take a decent free kick or corner kick, that could make a big difference.

Here’s an overall look at the squad: 22 players out of which 13 are Romanians, 4 English, one from Wales, one from Ireland, one from the Czech Republic and last but not least, an African from Ghana.

I decided to try to have some fun in the friendly games so I employed this bunch of players with the tactic that I used during my last season at Notts County: aggressive, attacking and fluid. I don’t remember if I put the file up for download until now, so here it is.

There were some friendly games already arranged when I arrived at the club but I chose to add a couple more to test the squad. I was surprised by some of the performances, the team was playing far better than I expected. The first six games produced 4 wins and two draws but most of those games were against amateur teams. The last two games were the most important tests, against Blue Square North side Droylsden and Championship side Yeovil. To everybody’s surprise we managed to win both of them and that 3-1 over Yeovil gave me quite a few reasons to be optimistic.

I am still trying to get a few players on loan but so far I wasn’t successful, everybody seems to run away when they hear about coming to Dorchester. Despite signing 17 players the wage bill is actually lower than it was when I came to the club. I was surprised by that because I had only players with part time contracts in the squad and all the new players that I brought in were given full time contracts. Anyway, I decided to give everybody at the club full time contracts because I think that is the first step towards building a serious club. I don’t want anybody complaining that they played badly because they had a bad day at the office on Friday, we’re going to be a professional club that is going to treat football seriously.

I don’t know if we’ll get relegated or not, I have no idea. What I know is that I have a better squad now but the new signings will need some time to adapt and that could cause quite a few problems. To be honest I didn’t expect the initial team to be that bad but I guess that makes the challenge even tougher and the story even more interesting. Thanks for reading and please tell me if you know any free and decent players that would agree to come to Dorchester, we need every man we can get :)

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