Vauxhall Motors Story: Starting Life in League Two

Hello folks, I finally managed to prepare another update of the Vauxhall Motors Football Manager 2011 story! I hope you are very curious to see how we started our season in League Two after bringing in so many interesting players during pre-season… I won’t make the introduction any longer, let’s see what happened!

In fact, the post will also be shorter than usual and that’s because I was ill, I spent a lot of time in bed and with only a few other options to spend my time I chose to run Football Manager on my laptop while having hot tea and pills… That’s how I managed to play no less than three months of the new season!

August 2012

Well, our debut month went so well that I really couldn’t believe my eyes! First we swept past Bury with debut goals from midfielder Peter Leven, striker Darryl Duffy and winger Joe Griffin and then we managed to pull off an upset in the Carling Cup by knocking out League One side MK Dons in the first round. Then striker Omar Koroma stepped up and scored two consecutive hat-tricks! First we beat Morecambe 3-2 and then we recorded a shocking result: 7-0 away at Crewe! The month would have been perfect if we wouldn’t have been beaten by Newcastle in the Carling Cup but I guess it was a bit too much too ask, after all they are a Premier League team! They didn’t outplay us though and they only managed to win thanks to a late goal…

The away game at Crewe was absolutely stunning: they were the favorites to win the game but we were simply unstoppable! Omar Koroma netted a hat-trick, centre back Oliver Nicholas bagged a brace while Darryl Duffy and Peter Leven also found the back of the net. It was by far the best performance I have seen from my team since starting the career two seasons ago. Enjoy the highlights, there are quite a few goals to see! :)

After such a good month my players were dominating the awards, Duffy was elected Player Of The Month while Leven and Koroma were ranked just behind the Scottish striker.

September 2012

After three straight league wins I was expecting a setback, I just knew it was going to come. Things continued well though as we beat Aldershot 3-1 away from home and then beat Crewe again, but with a lower margin, in the Johnstone’s Paint Trophy. Then, as I feared, we crashed back to earth… We recorded two consecutive league defeats, at home against Stevenage and away at Burton, and both of them were due to two reasons: we were incredibly wasteful upfront and extremely sloppy at the back. Then we recovered with two wins, away at Bradford and at home with Darlington as the team seemed to have regained some composure in defense.

The home game against Darlington, the last match of the month, was a pretty tough one and we were a bit lucky to get the three points. Darlington took the lead from the penalty spot just four minutes into the game, then Oliver Nicholas pulled us back level but our opponents could easily have scored another two goals before half time as they missed a penalty kick and another good chance. We did a bit better in the second half though and Darryl Duffy scored the winning goal.

Despite the two defeats we remained top of the table but I was perfectly aware that the season was far from being over.

October 2012

I played the month of October after installing the latest patch and I don’t know if it was because of that or not but my players wasted enormous amounts of chances in each game. Luckily the defense was tight enough and we conceded just two goals in six games. As a result of that we recorded four 1-0 wins, three in the league and one in the Johnstone’s Paint Trophy and a 1-1 draw against Gillingham in the league. The only game that saw decent finishing was the one against Torquay, a refreshing 5-1 win.

That win over Torquay saw a great performance from Darryl Duffy, the Scottish striker played very well and would have deserved at least a hat-trick. However, the good finishing from this game didn’t last more than the 90 minutes as we returned to the wasteful habits in the last game of the month.

Duffy was praised by the media after that performance against Torquay and he totally deserved it after scoring 9 goals in 16 appearances this season.

So, after three months and 13 league games we are top of the table, two points clear of second placed Southend. But since the top three will gain automatic promotion I guess we should rather look at the gap between us and the fourth placed and it stands at a solid seven points. I guess we do have a good chance of getting promoted if we keep it up!

However, fitness seems to be a big problem. Whenever we had two games in three or four days we had fatigue problems and due to injuries I wasn’t always able to field two different elevens. November will have no less than seven games in store for us and that could mean that we will face some fitness problems again.

That’s how it was my friends, I will probably get back to my usual posting style from the next update. Thanks a lot for reading this update and I hope that you enjoyed the video highlights. Oh, and if you didn’t do that already, join our forum as we have quite a few interesting discussions there. You can also win a FM 2011 DVD for Christmas if you register! ;)