Improving Ireland with Sligo Rovers

TheNotSoSpecialOne said:
Absolutely gutting that result against Basel!!!
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Yeti01 said:
**** - I am frustrated by the Basel result and this isn't even my save!! Here's hoping you can do the business against Steaua.
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It was a hard result to take, still can't find out the best role for the striker in the tactic or else I'm sure we would've won that comfortably!
 
Europa League Group Stage Quest

Two games against Steaua Bucharest were between the Europa League Group Stage and us. The first leg was away from home and a goal 7 minutes into injury time put us in the driving seat.

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And in the second leg, we actually took our chances!

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Which means finally, after 4 seasons, we have got the group stages of a European competition!

It’s done no harm to the bank balance and the board have finally agreed to upgrade the scouting range!

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It means we can scout amazing prospects from South America but they won’t join us because of our reputation. Great.

For the Europa League Group Stage draw we were seeded 4th ​and we have an interesting group.

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Ludogorets are a team I think we can overcome, the other two I’m not so sure about but we’ll have to wait and see.

As for the league, we can't stop winning matches and it’s only a matter of time until we’ll be champions.

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However we’ve not prepared in the best way for our first Europa League group stage match, which is away against Ludogorets. We somehow lost to Cork in the FAI Cup.

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We had 45 shots and 2 goals compared to Cork scoring 4 times from 5 shots!

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We’re the best team in Ireland but still haven’t won the cup yet! Hopefully we’re better at converting chances in the Europa League.​
 
Europa League Proper

In our first ever group stage match in European competition I wanted to get off to a good start against Ludogorets. And by good start I mean not conceding after 25 seconds.

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And it would’ve been nice if we didn't concede an equaliser 5 minutes into the 4-minute injury time.

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I don’t know who Claudiu Keşeru is but apparently he’s the best free kick taker in the world cause he scored two 30 yarders against us.

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That slightly strange start to the Europa League group stage was followed up by us winning the League of Ireland cup.

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We actually took our chances this time! It’s the second time in 3 years we’ve won the competition.

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Zenit St Petersburg were our first opponents at home in the Europa League group stage and for some reason the game took place at Cork’s ground.

After going in behind it turned out that calmly telling the players that they have been unlucky was the way to go about things.

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It was an immense second half comeback and £500k for a win isn’t bad going!

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And literally two days after that game we had a league match, which confirmed our second league title in a row.

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The board have set stupid (stupid as in good) budgets for next year but I’m honestly not sure that we’ll be able to persuade good enough players to join us.

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Anyway before worrying about transfers we have 4 Europa League games left. The knockout stages are starting to look realistic!

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Great result against Zenit mate! Fingers crossed you can get through the the knockouts!
 
Europa League Fun

With £5m in the bank and counting, it was about time we got some facility upgrades.

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We’ve improved the junior coaching, youth and training facilities

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We’ve only had one good player emerge so far from the Sligo academy and that was in this year’s intake. Striker Steve Keady recently became Sligo’s youngest ever player.

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Next up for us was our third Europa League Group Stage match away against Feyenoord.

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A 1-1 draw was a good result but we actually should’ve won and it left the group very close after 3 matches.

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Because of our Europa League run our last 4 league games were in the space of 6 days!

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Of course we won them all, meaning we finished with 99 points and a 92+ goal difference in the league…

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Our final league match of the season was our 60th​ of the campaign!

The amount of cup games we play each year is ridiculous but at least now we could solely focus on getting to the Europa League knockout rounds.

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That task was made easier when we absolutely smashed Feyenoord at home. I’m not saying Ryan Cassidy is the best player in the world… but he sort of is.

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He has 6 assists in the Europa League… and also has 6 assists in the Champions League.

So, currently, Ryan Cassidy has the most assists in the Champions League and Europa League!

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However that win against Feyenoord made things easy and why would we want things to be easy?

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We lost our 5th​ group stage game to Ludogorets meaning that going into the final match against Zenit any two teams from the group could still go through to the last 32.

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Anyone else nervous?​
 
End of Season 2021


Our final Europa League Group Stage Match was away to Zenit St Petersburg. All we needed to do was draw in order to get through to the last 32 of the competition, however defeat would mean we would be knocked out.

It was a goalless first half but straight after half time Artem Dzyuba scored for Zenit.

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I thought the name seemed familiar and turns out he was the big lump who started up front for Russia in last year’s World Cup.

Things were not looking good so I made two changes, one of those being Northern Irish midfielder Shane Dunne who we signed for £10,000 as a 16 year old.

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And ten minutes later he scored a worldie.

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With that, we shut up shop and hoped for the best.

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And it worked, Shane Dunne’s goal took us to the last 32 of the Europa League!

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Dortmund, Porto, Arsenal and Roma were all in the draw but we will face AEK Athens who finished top of Group L with 14 points

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If we can beat Feyenoord and Zenit then we can beat them!

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The Zenit match was our last of a very long season. We played 64 games in total! 64!

Airtricity Premier League: Winners
FAI Cup: Lost in QF to Cork
League of Ireland Cup: Winners
Irish President’s Cup: Winners
Champions League: Lost to Basel in 3rd​ Qualifiying Round
Europa League: Finished 2nd​ in Group Stage

Despite walking the league, only 4 Sligo players were in the team of the year.

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I’m not even going to count how many goals we scored in our 64 games but it was a lot! Matty Willock scored 21 goals from central midfield and was named player of the year in Ireland.

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However it’s clear our team revolves around Ryan Cassidy. He’s just signed a new contract and it’s imperative we keep him at the club if we want to progress.

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As mentioned before, we’ve got a £3m budget but we’ll have to wait and see what work we can do with it.

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Until then we’ve got a 2 month wait until next season, where our first game of the campaign will be at home to AEK Athens in the Europa League 1st ​Knockout Round!

Irish Football Summary – 2021

National Team Ranking: 60th (was 58th​ in 2020)
Nation Coefficient Ranking: 32nd (was 35th in 2020)
Irish Teams in Europe: Shamrock Rovers and St Pats Europa League 2nd​ Qualifying Round, Cabinteely Europa 1st Round.​
 
Cassidy looks like a gun. Where are you using him mainly?
 
The Worst Pre-Season Ever

We’ll start our 2022 season preview with the announcement that two Sligo icons have left. Rhys McCabe and David Cawley have both been released.

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It was a tough decision but we can’t keep players here because of sentiment and neither were trained in Ireland so did not help with European registration rules.

As for the transfers in, we obliterated our transfer record by signing Eoin Sheridan from Shamrock Rovers for £925,000.

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He scored the winner in the 2019 FAI Cup against us and I’ve been following him since.

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It might seem like a risk but we need to think about registration rules for European competition and he’s one of the best Irish players at his age.

We also signed young centre back Paul Douglas from Cork for £425,000.

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Again a young, talented Irish player is a must buy when they’re available.

It all went downhill from there though.

Firstly, the Europa League knockout game against AEK Athens is our first match of the season and it’s very difficult to get players back to full match fitness before then. But that’s okay we’ll deal with that over time.

Then we received the news that first choice right back Alpha Dionkou was injured.

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Annoying but we have adequate backup at right back. Then it got worse.

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Our best player Ryan Cassidy is injured for our most important games as Sligo manager. Typical.

The only way it could get worse would be if one of my best players had a release clause that I forgot about…

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… And Sheffield United trigged that release clause.

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Yep, Dylan Levitt has gone.

What made it worse was that I offered him a new contract as soon as the bid came in, which he accepted, so it gave me some hope that he’d stay.

Them shoddy transfer dealings leave us light in midfield and wide areas but I don’t want to sign players for the sake of it. We also have a lot of talented youngsters (all regens) on loan so I need to think of their futures too.

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But we’ll have to worry about squad depth later, for now we have to focus on beating AEK Athens over two legs.

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With no Levitt or Cassidy it would be a miracle. Stranger things have happened though…​
 
Madness Against AEK

It turns out the injury madness had not stopped before our game against AEK. Literally the day before the game Alan Judge picked up a 6 week injury

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My patience was truly getting tested.

The injury crisis meant that new signing Eoin Sheridan’s first game for Sligo would be in the Europa League knockout round.

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But the injuries were forgotten 7 minutes into the game.

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Shayne Lavery opened the scoring for us and it remained 1-0 until the 78th​ minute…

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Until Raul Uche made it 2-0! Moments later we were in dreamland.

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Conor Masterson scored from a corner to put us 3-0 up against AEK. He has been on loan at Sligo ever since I started the save and has constantly been our first choice centre back.

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After the third I immediately went to the tactics screen and aimed to shut up shop. The only problem was that I forgot to pause the game and all of a sudden AEK scored.

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So with that, I decided to not go defensive and keep things exactly as they had been all game. Bad idea.

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Brilliant. 3-0 up with a depleted squad with 2 minutes left and we manage to concede 2 late goals. Only at Sligo can we make a win feel like a defeat.

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That left us needing a minimum of a draw in the away leg.

So it was nice of Eoin Sheridan to score his first Sligo goal in our most important game of the save.

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Suddenly we began to believe that we were actually going to get through. But then AEK scored their obligatory 30 yard screamer, assisted by Nathan Redmond who is for some reason living the life in Greece.

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All we needed was for the score to stay the same and we would be through to the last 16 of the Europa League. And you know what? It did!

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How jammy are we? Somehow we’ve got through despite having what seemed like half of our squad injured.

We were rewarded with a tasty tie in the next round.

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What a draw that is!

We’re probably going to get smashed but who cares, Celtic await us in the Europa League Second Knockout Round!​
 
Celtic Double Header

So Celtic Park was the latest venue in our Europa League journey. Celtic were 4-6 favourites and had a lot of very good players.

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And those players made the difference in class very apparent. Marko Pjaca is very good at football.

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We weren’t even that bad, it’s just they were too good for us. Although our centre back John Mahon played a 5.3, I didn’t even know it was possible to have such a low rating!

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One of our key players Adam Lewis picked up a bad injury in the game, standard practice nowadays.

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The second leg was not as one-sided but the damage had been done at Celtic Park

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We won 2-1 but there was a lot more to it.

Celtic went down to 10 men after 23 minutes when we were already 1-0 up. I honestly started believing that we could win 4-0 at that point. But the game fizzled out and it was not to be

Still, our Europa League exploits ended with a win against Celtic and we got a nice £1m just for losing.

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Attention now turns to playing the bulk of our league games. From now until the summer break at the end of May we pretty much have two games a week.

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We’ll be scouting all over to see if we can get players when their contracts expire at the end of June, I’m hoping to make some new additions to the squad going into the European campaign in July.​
 
At least you won the second leg. To make it that far though shows how far you've brought them already and can only help in making the club more attractive for transfers
 
Celtic is a tough assignment mate - unlucky. Hopefully next year the draw is much kinder.
 
leckuno said:
At least you won the second leg. To make it that far though shows how far you've brought them already and can only help in making the club more attractive for transfers
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We're up to 108th for the European club coefficient rankings so I hope it helps out with transfers!

Yeti01 said:
Celtic is a tough assignment mate - unlucky. Hopefully next year the draw is much kinder.
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Didn't really mind as we were never expected to get past the group stage anyway, the prize money from the knockout rounds was a bonus!
 
Irish Invincibles

We have now played 20 league games this season… and won all 20

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We’re far too good for the other Irish teams now. We’ve conceded 6 goals all season in the league and Mitchell Beeney already has 14 clean sheets.

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The top 7 players in the league are all at Sligo and significantly 4 of them are aged 20 or under.

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Dundalk and Shamrock Rovers continue to disappoint, so much so that Mick McCarthy has been sacked by Dundalk and Nestor El Maestro has took the job at Shamrock

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Meanwhile Celtic beat Everton in the Europa League final so it wasn’t at all embarrassing to get thrashed by them in the last 16.

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One of the players to impress for us is Steve Keady. He’s still only 16 yet has 6 goals and 3 assists in 12 league games.

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We’ve also managed to change his personality from a mercenary to fairly professional so he could have a long and successful career at Sligo.

Another young Irish striker on our books is Alan McCabe. I signed him at the start of the season and loaned him back to Dundalk. He hasn’t impressed much there but picked up his first cap for Ireland in March!

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As we enter the start of June we’re going to have a prolonged battle to keep Adam Lewis and Ryan Cassidy at the club. Both are wanted by a number of Championship and Premier League clubs.

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I also hope to permanently sign Alpha Dionkou and Conor Masterson when their contracts expire next month. Both are currently demanding huge wages though.

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I’m hoping we can improve the squad in time for our Champions League qualifiers. We will play the champions of Bosnia and Herzegovina in the first qualifying round.

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It depends on if we bring in new faces in the summer but reaching the group stage of the Champions League has to be the aim this time round.​
 
Second Job

Only a few weeks have passed since the last post but we’ve been busy. Firstly Adam Lewis and Ryan Cassidy have signed new contracts to stop clubs from being interested in them… yet Cassidy is still wanted by Sporting Kansas City.

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We also took the plunge and offered Conor Masterson and Alpha Dionkou big money contracts to sign them permanently.

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Yet the main transfer news is that we’ve signed 2 Uruguayans on free transfers, left back Enrique Pintos and midfielder Gustavo Ferreira.

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They represent a huge turning point in the save in that we are starting to attract quality regens from abroad. Hopefully there are a lot more to come!

There’s just one more thing to report…

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Hopefully we’ll have a second job soon.​
 
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