So, my eighth season at the helm of the Blyth Spartans begins… After tying to make my team better in pre season I was quite confident that we could achieve something nice this season too. And there was silverware on the table right from the start, the Community Shield! We had to face Tottenham, the team that won the FA Cup last season. It was an even game but ultimately two of my new signings made the difference: Daniel Aquino scored on his debut and goalkeeper Sergio Asenjo kept a clean sheet with a few nice saves. There was another trophy for the club but there were some bad news to go with it: Mickey Wordsworth was going to be out for five weeks and new signing Simon Vukcevic was going to be on the sidelines for two months!
Ironically, the first game in the new Premier League season was away at Bolton, at the stadium where we celebrated winning the title last season. We won 4-1 back then and we did something similar now, we won it 3-0 although Bolton had some very good counter attacks and they deserved to score a consolation goal. Unfortunately for them there was a great keeper in our goal :)
Next up, at home with Fulham. We dominated the whole 90 minutes of it but we missed enormous chances… The referee was in a generous mood, he gave a penalty kick for each team… When the strikers miss the defenders must come to the rescue. Gianni Zuiverloon did just that, he scored his first goal for the club and brought us the three points.
We had only the UEFA Super Cup game ahead of us in August but right before that they announced the Champions League groups. We were seeded 3rd, I didn’t hope for an easy group but… They handed us one of the toughest groups, with Real Madrid and AC Milan! It’s going to be tough but we’ll do our best to get to the first knockout round…
And we had a chance to test Real Madrid and see what they’re made of before the group games, the UEFA Super Cup in Monaco! It was a thriller, a very beautiful game with both teams trying to score goals. I’ll let you watch the highlights, just two quick mentions before that. One of their defenders got sent off during extra time. The other thing is that I sent in Cristian Suarez in the… 106th minute to replace an exhausted Tiberiu Radulescu. What he did in those 15 minutes he had to play will go down in the history books!
You can call it inspiration or pure luck but he had a couple of chances to make it a hat-trick! Anyway, here’s another trophy for the Spartans!
We’ll get to know AC Milan in September, they’ll be coming at Croft Park! Our fixtures were quite messed up due to the Champions League games and international call ups, I hope they won’t have us play 3 games in 4 days like last season…
It was a great start to the new season, with two trophies in our hands and two Premier League wins. If it wasn’t for those two injuries it would have been perfect!
curtkoz
5 сентября, 2009 at 15:19
tough group there johnny , sure you will get through though.
JohnnyKarp
5 сентября, 2009 at 15:27
Thanks Curt. I’m not so sure though :)
marvin
5 сентября, 2009 at 17:36
well, another trophy in the cabinet again, the more i read your posts, the more i know that you are a legend in playing the game. Unfortunately, I’m not having the same fate as yours, i’m handling dorchester and after four years we’re still stuck in the blue square premier. We won the blue square south during my second year as manager but on the next year we narrowly missed promotion; losing in the playoffs. So the next year, i tried to revamped my defense and it was successful but on the other end our offense became stagnant .This was because my star striker Paris Cowan-Hall who is on loan from Portsmouth was loaned to Ireland. I often had 1-1, 0-0, 1-0 scores. Midway in my fourth season we are in 17th position and 12 points below the playoff spot.
-Sorry for the long post…..
JohnnyKarp
5 сентября, 2009 at 17:48
No problems with the long post Marvin, no problem at all. I’m sorry to hear about your misfortunes with Dorchester but if you have a solid defense you should be able to build on that, get a better striker, maybe an experienced one or a promising youngster, and go for it!
Goran
6 сентября, 2009 at 00:33
Very good start , like you say it would be perfect without injuries. Now i’m little sad cuz my norwich game had a problem with loading and i can’t load it ,i was secon in CH one month before end of season :( . Now i’m started with Port Vale L2 team and after one month we’re 3 on table :)
btw what pitch size you use now and are you use it in lower leagues (what you recomend for pitch size )?
Can’t wait for next month your story :)
JohnnyKarp
6 сентября, 2009 at 01:30
Goran, try to go for uncompressed saved files and maybe auto save every week to multiple files if your disk space can afford that. That way you could avoid the corrupted saved game file problem. About the pitch size, I always used the standard one, I don’t like to make things complicated where they shouldn’t be. Good luck with Port Vale, hope you get promoted!
marvin
6 сентября, 2009 at 03:30
what’s the stature of your team in the football world????
eddie eddie
6 сентября, 2009 at 04:36
Well done good results this month tough draw for the champs league good luck for them!
Curtkoz
8 сентября, 2009 at 00:32
I’m having a problem with my fm formation , it puts my players out of position randomly , how do I fix this ?
JohnnyKarp
8 сентября, 2009 at 11:21
Sorry for the interruption folks, I had no internet connection since Sunday, so I wasn’t able to reply to your comments. Here goes.
@ Curt
I never had this problem, seems a bit weird. Does that happen on a regular basis or just from time to time. I have no idea about a solution though… Do you have the latest patch installed, 9.3 ?
@ Eddie
Thanks mate.
@Marvin
The club’s reputation is now listed as «continental» :)
marvin
8 сентября, 2009 at 18:47
hello again johnny, how important it is to have a good training schedule? does it increase the attributes of a player?
curtkoz
8 сентября, 2009 at 22:32
yehh i have 9.3 why?
JohnnyKarp
9 сентября, 2009 at 13:14
@Curt
I thought it might be a bug but since you have 9.3 that might not be the case.
@Marvin
I think it’s fairly important, a good training schedule might bring the best out of your players if you have good coaches too.