Notts County Story — Autumn 2016

Hello my friends, welcome back to the Notts County Football Manager 2010 story! As you know this is my last season at Meadow Lane and the first month went pretty well, we managed to bring another two pieces of silverware back home. This will be a rather quick update of the next three months, I’ll go back to the detailed monthly updates starting with December 2016. Let’s see what happened.

We started off September with a couple of unlucky draws, 2-2 with Manchester United in the Premier League and a 0-0 away draw at PSV Eindhoven in the Champions League. Then we got back on track with an easy League Cup win over Championship side Crystal Palace and a dominant 6-0 demolition of Stoke City with Sergio Aguero bagging in a nice double.

The last game of the month was at home with AC Milan in the Champions League, we needed a win to boost our qualification chances. We didn’t play particularly well though, Milan were launching lethal counter attacks and they took the lead as a result. We got back level from a corner kick just after the break but I had the feeling that we didn’t deserve to win it. We had a much better possession than our opponents but we failed to create pressure on their defense. Even more, we exposed ourselves to their quick counter attacks and I guess we can be satisfied with the draw on that day.

Sergio Aguero started to convert more chances in October, he banged in a total of 6 goals in 6 games, he was beginning to show more and more of his skills. The worst moment of the month was undoubtedly the goalless draw at Ipswich, they parked the bus and although we managed to create quite a few chances we were unable to hit the back of the net. In fact, most of our opponents start the games with very defensive set ups making it very difficult for us to score.

The most spectacular game of the month was the Carling Cup match with Liverpool. No less than seven goals were scored in the first 45 minutes due to poor defending from both sides. The second half was completely different, less football and more and more fouls and cards but I was happy to go through to the next round. Go to the next page to read the rest of the story.

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

We got off to a great start in November with solid wins over Rapid Wien and Tottenham.

Then we absolutely demolished 5th placed Aston Villa, one of the best teams in the league. It was by far our most convincing performance of the season with Sergio Aguero netting his first hat-trick for the club. Andrea Romano ended his goal drought with a nice double but we also had a reason to be sad: Sam Hinshelwood just made his comeback from injury 20 minutes before time but I had to take him off, Joe Mattock sent him right back to the hospital with a brutal tackle. Poor Sam has to stay away from the pitch for another couple of weeks, he played only one game this season!

The home game with PSV Eindhoven in the Champions League was extremely important, we had to win it in order to go through to the next round. The lads fully understood the importance of the game and produced an impressive display with clinical finishing. Sergio Aguero and Andrea Romano were developing into a great duo, Aguero scored from Romano‘s assist and Romano scored from Aguero‘s assist.

The biggest surprise came from Wien, Rapid beat Milan 1-0! With that result we were already sure to finish top of the group before the tough away game at San Siro.

Although we were still unbeaten I wasn’t too happy about our league performances, five draws in 15 games are a bit too many. As a result of that we were sitting in second place, two points behind Chelsea. It looks like we are going to face a tough battle for the title, that should make my last season way more interesting! ;)

My pair of world class strikers, Romano and Aguero, did pretty well so far scoring 32 goals between them. Their performances are getting better and better so I hope they will rip the league apart in the next months.

December will be the most important month of the season so far, we’ll travel to Australia to play in the FIFA Club World Cup. We are going to enter the competition directly in the semi finals and we’ll probably meet one of these exotic teams from Africa, Asia or Oceania. Then we should most likely meet Estudiantes in the final and I reckon that won’t be an easy game.

That’s about it folks! As I said I will switch back to the detailed monthly updates starting with the next post. Until then, don’t forget to vote for the next team I’ll be managing! (big thanks if you already did that)

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