Swindon Town: 2012/2013 Pre-Season

Hello everyone and welcome back to my Swindon Town story. We left off last time with Swindon managing to stay up in the Premier League mainly thanks to other results going our way but sometimes you need a bit of luck now and again.

We returned from our summer break in which we saw Norway surprisingly become Champions of Europe and in some ways gave us renewed hope for the forthcoming season by showing us that it is possible for the underdog to win who also knocked out England in the quarter-finals

Some other unexpected news was that Man Utd offered me the managers position which I politely turned down as I really wanted to stay in the West Country. I’m not sure why they did that as I wasn’t excactly successful last season?

So, it was then onto the business of assessing the squad and determining who should stay or go. I’d been handed quite a substantial transfer budget by the board almost double that of last season but the salary budget had only been increased by 20,000 which as it turned out would be a major stumbling block in bringing in any new players. My main targets were Otamendi, Toivonen, Canales and Demidov all of which refused to sign even though my offers were accepted by their respective clubs.

My first transfer in was Slovakian striker Adam Nemec who looked to have all the makings of a great target man and as he wasn’t going to cost me anything I couldn’t resist.

Following that I focused primarily on defensive type of players as last season I felt that challenging for the ball was one of our weaknesses especially down both flanks. Keeping in mind then my difficulty to obtain the players I wanted (in addition to those already mentioned) I ended up with the following players which overall are not that bad, though one or two maybe just Championship standard.

After theses players were brought in news came through  that Inter Milan announced a link with Swindon which gave us a new goalkeeper, Damiano Cocco  on loan for the season and maybe useful?

My biggest expenditure of the summer went on two Austrian players, again defensive types with the most money being splashed out on right back Gyorgy Garics who is an experienced international and the right flank seemed to be the area which was always exploited last season.

Here’s the other Austrian who will play at central defence.

Below then is a full round up of the transfers so far but there could be a couple of more during August as well. I did pick up a lot of youngsters but for now I’ll just leave them on this overall list and may feature them individually if they get some first team game time.

For the pre-season games I decided to go with a basic 4-4-2, nothing too fancy and adjust from there. As you can see from the results below we started out great against Inverness and then totally fell apart in the following three games and ended up being slaughtered by Rangers. Out tour of Portugal got off to a good start but then turned sour as all our defensive problems returned and so as we enter into August with our moral low, tactics not working and the bookies have made us 2000 – 1 to win the title.

The season will kick off against Hull City and we have only two other games following that. It’s not an easy start but at least we’ve avoided any big clubs so we have a chance at picking up some points at least.

Into August  we go and what is looking like an uphill struggle already!