Finland; Nordic Failures To Nordic Force

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I won the Manager of the Month award for September...kinda feels like a cheat award when you only play 2 games in the whole month!

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Two of our players were also named in the team of the month!

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There was a good 3 week gap between the cup final and our final 2 league matches, so I thought I'd catch up with what the national side had been up to this year. After all, I have one eye on that job in the future! So far this year the national side have won two friendlies against weak sides, but failed to win a single one of their four competitive matches in the European International League!

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Our penultimate league game was against PS Kemi Kings who are already relegated and had nothing to play for. And they played exactly that way, as we thrashed them by a ridiculous 9-0 scoreline!! Unbelievable Jeff!!

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During the game, nearly every player turned in an excellent performance, with young striker, Samu Alanko scoring 6 goals and a perfect 10.0 match rating!! Incredibly, Sebastian Strandvall also got the assist for 6 of the 9 goals, but that wasn't enough to score a 10.0 as well apparently!!

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The other big news on matchday was that our title rivals IFK MarieHamn only managed a draw!

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And you know what that means...

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Yes, an unbelievable double is complete in my first ever season at the club! Absolutely ecstatic!!


Which means we'll be playing Champions League football next season!!

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The final game was just a formality in the end, but it was nice to round off the season with a home win!

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What a way that was to start my managerial career in Finland...


Finnish Premier League: Winners
Finnish Cup: Winners

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It was no surprise that Sebastian Strandvall won the fan's award...he was pretty **** amazing this season and a massive contributor to our success! The surprise for me was that Auvinen beat Alanko to the young player award as I thought our young striker had done enough to win that!

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In the league, our winning margin of 7 points suggests we won the title much easier than we actually did. IFK Mariehamn lost on the final day of the season as well which gave us a wider margin at the top. HJK and SJK, the two pre season favourites for the title had massively disappointing seasons and neither club were ever in the title race and both of them fail to qualify for any form of European football next season!

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I mentioned the contribution from Strandvall this season already, but it really sinks in when you take a look at the player stats in the league. He recorded the highest average rating, most man of the matches, most assists and finished 2nd in the goalscoring ranks! Samu Alanko, our 20 year old Finnish striker took that honour....surely there's a national team call up coming his way soon?!

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Here's the stats for the entire squad!

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Incredibly, 10 of our players make up the team of the season!!

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Unsurprisingly, Sebastian Strandvall claims the player of the year award!

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Whilst Eero-Matti Auvinen picked up the rookie of the year award...closely followed by two of his teammates!

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And it's a manager of the year award for moi! I'd have been disappointed with anything less after completing the double!

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Finally, it was one of our players which picked up every individual award for goalkeeper, defender, midfielder and striker of the year too! A clean sweep all round!

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Plans for next season; Well the money situation at the club isn't great, so it's highly unlikely we'll see any star players coming into the team. Instead, I'll be looking to keep as much of my squad together as I can, whilst maybe trying to add a couple of decent freebies to the team! Now we are double winners, I might even be able to tempt a couple of good players on loan from some bigger sides in Sweden and Denmark too!


We'll obviously be looking to defend our crown in the league and cup as best we can, whilst doing whatever we can in the Champions League qualifiers. I'm realistic though and it's not likely we'll make the group stages this early on, but we will have some fun and hopefully our participation just in the qualifiers can generate some much needed financial relief for the club!


Whatever happens...this season has been great fun and I can't wait to get going again in about 3-4 months time!


Finland In 2019

National Team Ranking: 67th (down from 63rd in 2018)
Nation Coefficient Ranking: 38th
Finnish Teams In Europe; HJK Champions League 2nd Qualifying Round and then Europa League Champions 4th Qualifying Round, KuPS Europa League Best Placed 1st Qualifying Round, FC Lahti Europa League Best Placed 2nd Qualifying Round, Ilves Europa League Best Placed 1st Qualifying Round


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Couldn't of had a better first season! Time to get that sweet sweet Champions League money
 
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My Winter break started off in the worst possible way! If there's one player I didn't want to lose, it was Sebastian Strandvall! But when Saudi club, Al-Ettifaq came in with an offer of £250,000 for him, the board went over my head and accepted an offer that was apparently too good to refuse! He agreed a deal with them and has left the club immediately...now I've never cried over Football Manager but...

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It looks like the Finnish Cup format may have changed for the new season. There has been a group draw again, but rather than a mix of teams from all levels, we are drawn in 2 groups of 6 teams in what they are calling Premier League Qualifying! The top 4 teams from each group will go through to the second round! Teams from the lower leagues are in their own qualifying groups to also progress to the second round!

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With Seb Strandvall leaving the club, we lost a player that was involved in over 40 goals last season and it would leave a massive void in the squad if he wasn't replaced! The man I've brought in who now carries that weight of expectation on his shoulders is 26 year old Daniel Garcia who signs on a free. A lot of Strandvall's assists came from crosses last year, so I wanted someone who could match his ability in that area and Garcia is just as strong with his crossing! Garcia will join full time in Jan, but will be on trial with the club for a couple of weeks prior.

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I know he's not with us anymore, but I have to point out that Sebastian Strandvall won the Finnish Player of the Year for 2018! The Saudi's ain't taking credit for this when he achieved everything he did for us this year!

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My second signing through pre season is Ville Jalasto. A Finland international with 8 caps to his name, he joins on a free after being released by HJK. He's a perfect replacement for Aubrey David at right back!

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One of the big aims of this save is to try to bring youth players through into the first team as well, which will be especially important due to the league rulings in Finland (a minimum of 4 players in the starting 11 must be trained by a club in Finland)! So this year, I have promoted Ville Rantanen and Momodou Sarr to the first team with a view to introducing them to some senior football this season. Rantanen was our most promising looking player in the youth intake last season, whilst striker Sarr scored 5 goals in 12 games for our B team last season and at 18, should be ready to try first team football.

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Before the Finnish Cup gets started, we played a couple of friendlies against lower league sides, just to get the lads warmed up and a little match sharpness back!

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Our first venture into this year's Finnish Cup would be against (apparently) the best team in the country, HJK! Best team my ****...we cruise past them in probably our most comfortable win over them so far, as they only managed 3 shots on goal in the entire game!

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New man, Daniel Garcia, made a promising start to his career with us, bagging a goal and an assist on his debut. Maybe we won't miss Strandvall too much after all!

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A draw against Sami Hyypia's FC Inter followed and Momodou Sarr scored his first senior goal for the club on his first start for us...promising!

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Another pretty easy win over TPS keeps my unbeaten record in the Finnish Cup going...yep, that's right, I'm yet to lose a game in this competition! Not that I'm showing off or anything!

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We sit at the top of the group after 3 games and a top 4 finish is all but guaranteed! The other 3 places are all to fight for between the other 5 teams in the group!

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Since my last update, we've played another 3 friendlies around our final two group games in the Finnish Cup! Whilst the squad was rotated for the friendlies to try to increase everyone's match fitness, we played full strength teams in the cup games and won them both!

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We were the only team in our group to remain undefeated and finished a very comfortable top! It's FC Inter and TPS who won't progress to the knockout stages!

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New boy, Daniel Garcia will miss 5 weeks of action through injury!

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Shortly after that, we lost Nicolay Solberg to injury as well. Although they should both be back and fit for the start of the new league campaign, we could be very short on wide men for the remainder of the cup competition!

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Last year we signed the legend that is Edgar Davids to our coaching staff. This season, I've added another legend of the game to the backroom staff as Carles Puyol joins us as a scout.

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On second thoughts, we will have our injured players back for the next stages of the Finnish Cup as with the changed format this year, the knockout stages don't continue until the end of April where we'll play First Division opposition in the second round.

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Last year we were predicted an 8th placed finish in the league and were a massive 100-1 to win the title. This year, the bookies have our odds at only 33-1 (which still seems like a ****** good bet to me), but only a 6th placed finish is on the cards as far as they're concerned! I'm gonna put it out there...I think they're wrong! Our title defence is likely to depend on how well we cope with the European games that will be thrown into our schedule this year!

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Talking of the bookies, they make Samu Alanko the favourite to repeat his goalscoring form from last season and top the charts again!

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While Eero-Matti Auvinen is amongst the favourites to win the young player of the year award again!

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Three more friendlies and three more wins completed our pre season campaign, including a good result against Swedish giants, AIK.

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Left back, Jesper Engstrom, is given the captain's armband for the upcoming season, whilst last season's rookie of the year, Eero-Matti Auvinen is made his deputy.

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With the kickoff to the league campaign just around the corner, the board send me their expectations for the upcoming season. Considering we are the reigning champions, I was surprised to see their low expectation for the league, but if it keeps the pressure off I'll take it all day long!

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Our first game of the season was away at FC Honka. A team I haven't yet lost to, but a team that was predicted to finish above us in this year's table, despite the fact that we won the division last year, whilst they struggled against relegation. Either way, I had every reason to feel confident going into the game and my confidence was not misplaced as we kicked off the season with a win...not a big one, but a win nonetheless.

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Despite dominating the game against FC Inter, we had to settle for a draw!

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A pretty poor showing against TPS who are predicted to finish bottom of the league, although we did just about still scrape the win!

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At this point, we lost our captain for a couple of weeks! How much of an impact would it have on the team?

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Well we might have lost a bit of creativity down the left flank, but it didn't stop our good run of form as we recorded 3 straight wins including progress to the quarter final of the Finnish Cup! There is a chant that's becoming pretty synonomous with our fans - "1-0 to the VPS, 1-0 to the VPS"!!

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And we followed that up with a very comfortable win over SJK in the quarter final of the Finnish Cup! **** you Keith Armstrong...**** you!

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We have a decent chance of making the final again too after drawing a side from the division below in the semi final! I'm not even going to attempt to say their name!?

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Back to league action and against Ilves, it looked like we'd nicked the win with an 86th minute goal, only to concede in injury time! Disappointing to walk away from this one with only a single point!

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It was JJK up next in the semi final of the Finnish Cup and although they were First Division opposition, we couldn't take them for granted as they came into the game on a 4 game win streak and have knocked two Premier League sides out of the cup this season already!

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The game was one way traffic for a full ninety minutes, as the match stats reflect below...

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However, the game still went to extra time as we'd failed to find the back of the net once and the score sat at 0-0! Now our aim was to avoid the dreaded penalty shootout...half an hour to get the job done!!

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But we didn't and the game went to penalties!!


VPS: Hakola scores! 1-0
JJK: Kari scores! 1-1
VPS: Lahti scores! 2-1
JJK: Leppanen strikes but Meerits saves! 2-1
VPS: Jalasto scores! 3-1
JJK: Manninen scores! 3-2
VPS: Jama scores! 4-2
JJK: Vielma scores! 4-3
VPS: Alanko scores! We did it the hard way but a perfect penalty shootout which we win 5-3 sees us through to back to back finals!

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No waiting around until September for a cup final this season. In fact, it's only a couple of weeks away and we'll take on none other than HJK!

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Two more league games and our form has taken a dip as we fail to win either!

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Eight games into the league campaign and we sit 3rd. We've only lost one game so far, and although we have a very solid defence, it's obvious that our problems lie in attack as we have only scored 9 goals so far! We are already 7 points off the leaders, KuPS, and have some work to close that gap!

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I sign another new contract with the club, although I'm slightly annoyed that the club will only commit to me for one season at a time. I mean, I brought a double to this club, which included their first ever Premier League win...you'd think they'd want to tie me down!

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Anyway, I'm off as I have a Cup Final to play!


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Going into our cup final against HJK, the bookies have us as slight favourites to win, although everyone is expecting a tight game!

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It's disappointing that the fans don't even come out for a cup final. The small stadium will only be just over half full! Do people in Finland just not like football or something??

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We have no reason not to think we can get a result in the final. My team have played HJK 6 times since I took over and we've won every game!

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The first significant piece of action came in the 29th minute. Jesper Engstrom picked the ball up out wide and looked to cross from a deep position with players lining up on the edge of the 18 yard box!

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From the 3 players, it was Daniel Garcia that was unmarked! And the ball cleared everyone to find him perfectly at the back post!

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And on the volley, he puts the ball past the HJK keeper! There's that chant from our fans again...1-0 to the VPS!!

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By half time, we looked completely in control of this game, dominating the possession and creating double the amount of chances of our opposition! However, with only a 1 goal lead, the lads were told to ensure complacency didn't creep in and see the game out in the 2nd half!

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Now the 2nd half went pretty much exactly as we'd want...boring with no real chances for either team at all! There were no sweaty moment for us to worry about as HJK just couldn't break us down! And just as it looked like we were going to see the game out and win by our favourite scoreline, HJK had a thrown in, in a very attacking area of the pitch in the 93rd minute...

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And they worked a cross into the box...**** this looks dangerous!!

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But Engstrom wins the most important header of the entire match, which allows Jalasto to hoof a clearance up field!

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Sarr holds the ball up, allowing us to regroup and form an attack of our own. A cross comes into the box which bobbles about from head to head, before landing at the feet of an onrushing Omar Jama...who strikes from the edge of the box...

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...which works it's way through the crowd of players...

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...and into the back of the net! GOOOOAAAAALLLLL!!! 2-0 VPS with only seconds remaining!!

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It's back to back Finnish Cup trophies for us!!

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Our next game would see us take on league leaders KuPS, who were now 10 points ahead of us! Yes we have a game in hand, but losing to them in our next game would put us 13 points off the pace and even at such an early stage of the season, we could potentially see this year's title slipping away!

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And the lads gave me a solid effort to bring us right back into contention again! This was probably the best we've played all season! Omar Jama, our goalscoring hero from the cup final last week, gets himself on the scoresheet again here!

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There's no shying away from the fact that we have struggled to score goals this season! In 8 of our last 13 competitive games, we've scored 1 or less goals! However, we are stil creating lots of chances, so I'm blaming the issue on my strikers not doing the business up front. In an attempt to rectify this, I've brought in 18 year old Nabil Touaizi on loan from Manchester City for the rest of the season. Immediately, he is my best striker at the club and I'm hoping he can bag plenty of goals for us over the next few months!

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Next month, we'll take on Moldovan side, Sheriff Tiraspol, in our first qualifying game for the Champions League!

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Eero-Matti Auvinen, possibly my best player now, will be leaving the club at the end of the season on a free transfer! I'm absolutely gutted to be losing him (especially for no fee), but I've been trying to get him to sign a new contract all season but the maximum wage I could offer was £1.1k and couldn't get near his expectations! He will be following Strandvall off to Saudi Arabia where he will more than treble his wages! This is going to become a very frustrating part of this save if I am to lose my best players every season!

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After less than a year in charge, Sami Hyypia is sacked!

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Six more league games played with 3 wins and 3 draws! We continue to struggle for goals, but the defence remains the best attribute of our game and we're proving an extremely tough team to beat!

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We're now 2nd in the league, still behind KuPS by 6 points! However, our game in hand could close the gap!!

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Last year's standout player was Sebastian Strandvall by an absolute mile. However, with him leaving the club, our best player at the half way point of this season has been centre back Timi Lahti...he's been absolutly solid for us!

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Our first ever venture into the Champions League (albeit the qualifying stages) would involve a trip to Moldova! It was Man City loanee, Nabil Touazi that starred on the day as we record a comfortable away win and put ourselves in a strong position to qualify for the next qualifying round!

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A comfortable win over newly promoted HIFK followed and that's 4 wins on the bounce in all competitions now!

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The job was done away from home against Sheriff, so some players were rested here and we still managed to win the 2nd leg as well.

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Swedish champions, IFK Norrkoping await us in the next qualifying round now!

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They just about scraped through their qualifier with only the 11 goals across 2 legs.

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After 5 straight wins in all comps, we faltered slightly against Keith '********' Armtrong's SJK team and had to settle for a point! It was our wide men that thrived here with both getting on the scoresheet as we dominated the wings!

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As we're about to take on IFK Norrkoping in the first leg of our Champions League qualifier, it's worth noting that they have 12 players valued over £1 million! We have two players valued over £250k! You could say we're up against it!

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I went into the away leg with a target in mind...don't concede too many and make sure we get an own goal! So you can imagine my delight that we came away with a huge 3-0 win! This young lad I have on loan from Man City is fast becoming a bit of a Champions League hero for us!

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We are shockingly **** against this lot! No excuses, we just struggle to beat them and again were well below par here!

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The job was done and all we had to do was keep things tight in the 2nd leg against Norrkoping. We did that job perfectly and a 0-0 draw will do just nicely!

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We will take on Bulgarian champions, Ludogorets in the next round. Their a team that made it to the first knockout round of the Europa League last season, so they're a decent side and we'll do well to get past them!

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In the 19-20 months I've been managing VPS, this was already the 3rd manager I've played FC Inter under! And under this one, they played the shittest they ever have against us and we dominated all the statistics!

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But somehow we lost the ******* game!! Unbelievable!! We were absolutely shocking in front of goal and my strikers were given a firm kick up the **** at full time!!

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We've dropped down to 4th in the league but because of our hectic European schedule, our games in hand are racking up and a few wins will put us straight back in the title race again!

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[FONT=&quot]It's our away form that's got us through the first couple of qualifiers in the Champions League...and again here we were absolutely outstanding against Ludogorets and have given ourselves a shot at making the next round! We didn't win the game, but two away goals and a draw are worth their weight in gold and if we can just hold it together in the 2nd leg...

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[FONT=&quot]The youth intake this year still wasn't amazing and most of the players that joined the club only have a 1.5 star potential rating. However, we do have reason to be excited about centre back, Aleksi Hirvonen, who apparently has the potential to become a 4 star player! We'll be working on him over the next few seasons for sure!

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[FONT=&quot]I was a bit nervous going into the game with RoPS as I'd made 8 changes to the starting 11 in an attempt to rest all of our best players for the 2nd leg against Ludogorets! However, my nerves were set straight as the lads gave me a sterling performance and a comfortable home win to get us back to winning ways in the league!

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[FONT=&quot]The 2nd leg against Ludogorets was a proper ding dong battle with the game swinging in favour of both sides throughout! But a wonder strike from about 25 yards out into the top corner from Nicolay Soldberg eventually was enough to see us through! We have surpassed all expectations through this qualification campaign so far and now find ourselves only 1 tie away from potential qualification for the group stages!

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[FONT=&quot]All that stands in our way of a Champions League Group Stage place now is Romanian side, Dinamo Bucuresti!

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[FONT=&quot]I'm starting to think that playing HJK is a guaranteed 3 points ya know! Considering these guys are meant to be the best in the country, we've now beaten them for the 9th game in a row!

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[FONT=&quot]Even having to play most of the 2nd half against Bucuresti in the 1st leg of our Champs League Qualifier wasn't enough to give our opponents any sort of sniff at a result against us! We were relentless, chasing down every ball, working our socks off and were rewarded with a massive 4-0 win! Surely...Surely we will be playing in the group stages of the Champions League this season!!

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[FONT=&quot]Back to league action and a big win away at HIFK has us keeping up with the leaders! It's been difficult to follow the league properly as we're so far behind on games (and points)...but as long as we keep winning, we'll be there or there abouts come the end of the season!

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[FONT=&quot]With a 4-0 lead from the 1st leg, surely this game against Bucuresti was just a formality! However, with Bucuresti scoring as early as the 7th minute I had to give the lads a stark reminder not to take anything for granted! Luckily, the lads got their heads down and their concentration back and when we tucked away a penalt on 25 minutes, it was pretty much game over from there as Bucuresti would now require 6 goals to go through! That never looked like happening and we're off to the Champions League Group Stage!! I'm absolutely ecstatic!!

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[FONT=&quot]SHOW ME THE MONEY!! Since I took over at the club, we have hovered between £500k and £900k in debt!! So this Champions League dosh is going to do absolute wonders for our little club!

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[FONT=&quot]Now any group in the Champions League was always going to be tough for us...however, I think we could have had it much worse than this! We'll struggle for sure, but we have a small chance of making 3rd and going into the Europa I feel!

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[FONT=&quot]With the new influx of cash, the board agree to invest money in new data analysis facilities, increased the wage budget and put more money into youth recruitment and junior coaching!

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[FONT=&quot]Amazing what Champions League football can do. All of a sudden the club's value has jumped from £850k to over £8 million and we're now the most valuable club in the country (HJK second at £5.1 million)!

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Great job there getting into the CL group stage! The money has really got to help, hopefully you'll be able to stop your top players from leaving on frees, unless they get even greedier!
 
dporter8999 said:
Great job there getting into the CL group stage! The money has really got to help, hopefully you'll be able to stop your top players from leaving on frees, unless they get even greedier!
Click to expand...

It will be interesting to see what budgets I'm given by the board for next season....I really hope they whack the wage budget right up and give me a couple of million for transfers....I could do so much with just 2 million in this league!
 
Surely they will offer you a bigger contract now, double in 1st season and qualifying for champions league has seen the value of the club go up c1,000%
 
Just caught up! Incredible results in the Champions League, youll be getting even more money with the away legs and everything! Wheres that jamacian striker, surely deserves a chance away in the champions league lol
 
NashBigginss said:
Just caught up! Incredible results in the Champions League, youll be getting even more money with the away legs and everything! Wheres that jamacian striker, surely deserves a chance away in the champions league lol
Click to expand...

His record is sooooo bad!! Played 28 games under my management and scored 3 goals....and I think one of them hit him and rebounded in lol!
 
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Two more league games, two more wins, including a big victory over league leaders KuPS!

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It seems weird to say we're in a commanding position in the league when we're currently 4th!! But that's exactly the situation...we are only 8 points off top spot and have 5 or 6 games in hand on the top 3!

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So we'll be playing our Champions League games at the national stadium as our ground doesn't meet the requirements!

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And despite playing one of the biggest teams in Europe in our opening game, we still can't sell out the 19,800 capacity stadium! I'm shocked to be honest as I thought fans all over Finland would be flocking to this game to see the likes of Cristiano Ronaldo and Paulo Dybala!

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No surprise to see that Juve were hot favourites despite our home advantage! Although I thought we'd be slightly bigger odds to win this one!

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32 minutes...that's how long we held out for before Douglas Costa gave Juve the lead!

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And I thought the floodgates might open from there, but they didn't. Yes, Juventus went on to win the game pretty easily, but the scoreline wasn't an embarassing one at all!

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And the stats even showed that we didn't just roll over to get stuffed and gave Juve a relatively competitive game!

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The game against Juventus brought in a record attendance and £250k in revenue!

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Steven Morrissey is the latest player to announce that he has accepted a contract elsewhere and will be leaving the club at the end of the season. It seems that even Champions League football isn't enough to make the players want to stay here!

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And Nicolay Solberg follows him out of the club, but will be leaving immediately. Another Saudi club has come in and met his minimum fee release clause and he has opted to leave! Yes it's great business to sell a player for over £150k that I only paid £9k for 2 seasons ago, but I'm still left gutted and ****** off to lose another of my best players!

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And another....right back, Hindrek Ojamaa will also leave for Saudi Arabia at the end of the season in favour of a £2,000 per week pay rise that I couldn't get anywhere near!! Aint going to lie, this is starting to **** me off and is actually ruining the save for me!

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Since the Juventus game, we've had to play 4 league games in just 9 days as we try to catch up with everyone else on games played! It hasn't really halted our progress too much as we've won 3 of those!

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And with 5 games remaining (for us), it looks like it'll be tight between us and KuPS, with the rest pretty much out of it! We still have to play KuPS again and that could be a title decider!

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Our 2nd game in the Champions League group was away at Benfica and it's fair to say we were outclassed from start to finish!

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Three more league games and 7 more points fires us to the top of the table! With only 2 games remaining, it looks like our next game against KuPS will be the title decider as predicted!!

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But before that, we had the Champions League game against CSKA Moscow. Now I was put in a really ****** situation again here, as our best chance of making 3rd place in the Champions League group is to get results against CSKA... However, if I want to win the league title then we have to get a result against KuPS... And guess what, there was only a 2 day gap between games so something has to give with regards to squad selection. I decided it was better to rest everyone for the CSKA game and keep them fresh for KuPS! Let's hope I don't regret it!

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Well that's a turn up for the books...with three quarters of my first choice team rested, the second string pulled off an amazing win over in Russia!!

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Back to league action quickly then and the squad was rotated as planned. We went into the KuPS game knowing that a win would secure us back to back titles...back to back doubles in fact! After going 2-1 down after 25 minutes and looking under pressure in the first half, we came out fighting in the 2nd and bagged two goals to secure the win that wins us the league again!!

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With the league title won, it was time for the moment of truth...what were the board going to give me to spend!

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Well they didn't disappoint! A whopping £11 million is made available for transfers and the wage budget was increased by another £4k.


However, after a bit of tinkering, I have adjusted things slightly and this should ensure we have a **** load of money for wages to attract good players to the club and more importantly, keep our current crop as well! Now to put it in perspective, although I have more than doubled our wage budget, even if we maxed it out the prize money for only one Champions League win in the group stages pays virtually that whole wage bill for the whole year!

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On top of that, I also encouraged the board to spend some of this new found fortune on updated the facilities at the club!

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Oh, did I mention that I'm now 8th on the Finland hall of fame too...Keith '********' Armstrong I'm coming for you!

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One final league game was still to be played and it's always nice to finish on a victory!

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The final league table shows that we beat our points tally from last season by another 2 points! Again we only lost 4 games all season! Where as last season was based on our phenomenal attack, this year's title was definitely down to our awesome defence!

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Only 6 players in the team of the year this season, although it's no surprise to see our whole defence in there!

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And it's back to back Manager of the Year awards for me!

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Two of our players took position of the year awards...goalkeeper and defender! What was interesting was that our young Man City loanee finished 2nd in the striker vote despite playing only 13 league games this season!

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While all this end of season stuff has been going on, we still have Champions League action to come. Our home game against CSKA was up next and unfortunately we wasn't able to repeat the victory we earned out in Russia!

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We are still 3rd in the group though and as long as CSKA fail to get any sort of result against Benfica or Juventus, then we could go into the Europa League knockout stages still!

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Right, I'm off to have some fun with 10 million quid!!
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So what to do with all this new found cash in my bank account! Well, why not throw in a bid for the league's best player this season...

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And the deal is done! £500,000 for the league's best player over the past 7-8 months ain't bad business! And he's Finnish...And he can play both my central midfield (defend) and box to box midfielder roles...And he will be my best central midfielder at the club! All round, this is a great piece of business and a brilliant way to spend my first bit of cash!

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Looking over our current squad stats for the past season, our goals and assists were a lot more shared out amongst the team, rather than having 1 or 2 players who just smashed the **** out of the stats like last year! Samu Alanko was again top goalscorer, although he didn't reach the heights of last season, and our wide men in the midfield again produced a large number of assists, while attacking left back Jesper Engstrom also chipped in with a fair few of his own! Quite a few players finished the season with average ratings above the 7.0 mark which is encouraging! Momodou Sarr got a lot of football in his first season in the senior team, but was largely disappointing!

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32 year old striker, Douglas, has been released! His contract expired and with the money I have available I can buy a much better striker!

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My second signing has been made and in my opinion, is a bargain at only £140k! We needed a backup left back for Engstrom as he is our only recognised left back in the whole side and who better than this guy...another Finnish player and if you go back to the start of this update and looking at the players who scored the highest average ratings in the league this season, you'll see Jonas Levanen finished 3rd! So I've now officially signed 2 of the top 3 players in the league this past season for only £640k!

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Another Champions League game and we lost in Italy...it was probably to be expected in all honesty!

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CSKA also lost in Portugal though, which means we still have a chance at finishing 3rd!

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Champions League football seems to throw some of the end of year posts out of sync as I'm only getting these over a month after the season ended! But the overall best 11 is announced and there's a couple of surprises for me in the first 11. The first is how Touaizi makes it in up front when he's only played half a season for us, and the second is Kalermo beating Lahti into the side at centre back!

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The end of season awards don't throw up any surprises as our left back and captain Jesper Engstrom wins the fans player award. Right back, Ville Jalasto, takes the signing of the season!

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Another awesome season for us this year...


Premier League - Winners
Finnish Cup - Winners
Champions League - Group Stage

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Finnish Football In Europe Summary;


IFK Mariehamn Europa League Best Placed 1st Qualifying Round, KuPS Europa League Best Placed 1st Qualifying Round, RoPS Europa League Best Placed 1st Qualifying Round, VPS Champions League Group Stage (ongoing)


Before I sign off on this update, I have a third signing to announce. £87k has been forked out for 17 year old Ivorian striker, Thierry Koffi Konan, who looks like a very promising youngster who could do a job for us even at such a young age!

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