Labor Omnia Vincit

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TheOtherSpecialOne

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Welcome to my new Football Manager story.
As you can see I will become the manager of West Bromwich Albion.
In this story I plan to live the life of a mid-table Premier League club while still attempting to make the club stronger and successful.
What do I mean with living the life of an average Premier League club I hear you ask.
Well I mean that if one of my star players wants to go and join a bigger club I will not stand in their way.
Take Southampton as an example, during the summer transfer window they have sold most of their star players to bigger clubs in the Premier League, in order to replace those players they brought in several new players most of whom where relatively unknown and they have looked towards their own youth.
Despite the prediction that they would struggle this season they have proven people wrong so far.
I will be attempting to do the same with West Brom.
I will attempt to live the "realistic" life of a mid-table Premier League club.

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Like I always do I have disabled the first transfer window so I won't be bringing in any new players until at least December, so lets take a look at our current squad:

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My initial impression of the squad is that they are definately good enough to finish in a safe mid-table position in the Premier League, with key players Claudio Yacob and Youssouf Mulumbu forming the heartbeat of the team. Another player whom looks very promising is young striker Saido Berahino and I will be doing my best to transform him into a world class striker.

The tactics that I have created for West Brom are counter based.
These are the formations and player roles:
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Pre-season gave me a chance to get to know my players and to tweak my tactics based on their performances.
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As you can see pre-season was pretty good, most of you might look at these results and think good? You lost to ****** Queen of the South man! And you would be right, but you would also be wrong.
You see I believe that the Queen of the South match was probably the most important match in our Pre-Season as it showed a huge flaw in my 2nd more attacking based tactic. Thanks to that match I had to rethink several things and that resulted in the tactic that gave us a 5-0 win over Energie Cottbus.

During pre-season a couple of other notable events also occured.
Firstly both Claudio Yacob and Youssouf Mulumbu came to me because AC Milan (Yacob) and A.S. Monaco (Mulumbu) showed an interest in them and they wanted to ask my permission to open talks with them as soon as a bid was made. At first I tried to persuade them that they wouldn't be playing as much as they would if they would stay, this however did not work.
In the end I gave them permission to talk to them IF a bid was made.
Since I have disabled the first transfer window I know for certain that no clubs will make a bid on them until the winter transfer window so that will give me enough time to look for potential replacements if they still want to leave then.
During pre-season we also had some unfortunate injuries:
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We got our first opponent for the Capital One Cup:
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We received news that all of our season tickets have been sold!
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And the board informed me of the expectations for the next season:
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The first prize of the season has been won by Arsenal.
They managed to beat Manchester City 3-2 in the final of the McDonals FA Community Shield.
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And that pretty much sums up all the things that have happened during our pre-season.
With the beginning of the Premier League at the horizon lets take a look at our fixtured for the month August.
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As you can see we start of our season with a tough away game against our rivals Aston Villa, we then face newly promoted Burnley at the Hawthorns. We then have a somewhat easier fixture in the Capital One Cup against Wycombe only to make the difficult away trip to Upton Park to face West Ham United.

Can we get off to a good start or will things turn out to be not so positive, find out next time.
Same Baggies-time same Baggies-channel.



West Bromwich Albion fact: Did you know that West Bromwich Albion were originally called West Bromwich Strollers? They only changed their name to West Bromwich Albion in 1880.



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The motto of the town West Brom is Labor Omnia Vincit, labour conquers all things, I certainly hope it does since the week leading to our first Premier League fixture has been rather unpleasent. Let me show you.

I was greated by this news in the beginning of the week
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Needless to say I wasn't thrilled, Yacob and Mulumbu are key players in my tactic so to lose one of them is quite a pain.
Then however came the real surprise
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... Yup thats probably the most important players of my team injured, still, not so bad I thought they will be back soon enough and will still have a decent defence without them.

Then came the day before the match,
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...Aha... AND THEN
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Now I don't know what you would call this but in my opinion this is more then bad luck. I dont know what those Villa fans did but let me tell you something they are dangerous!
Then came match day, selecting a team was ... problematic to say the least.
Wisdom, Baird, Lescott, Yacob, Mulumbu, Gamboa and Anichebe were all injured and Davidson was suspended. I had to bring in two (bad) u21 players because I didn't have enough substitutes to fill the bench.

Then the moment I had waited so long for arrived, not in the way that I had imagined it but it arrived nonetheless. The first game of the season, away at our rivals, and half my squad was unavailable. Can labour conquer all things?

The line ups were in
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Before the game I knew that Aston Villa have a lot of pacey players at their disposal and this would work right into the counter attacking tactics that I had been training to my team ever since my introduction.
I reminded my players of how much this fixture meant to the fans and then my task was done. Now I could only watch and hope that the tactics that I had instilled in my players would pay off.




And pay off they did!
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West Bromwich Albion Fact: Supporters of the team celebrate goals by bouncing up and down and chanting "Boing Boing".

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Overal we had a very good start to the new season, I would have liked to have beaten Burnley but you can't have everything. Still I am very pleased that we managed to beat Villa and West Ham especially given our injuries, talking about injuries:

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Lucky for us though Yacob, Mulumbu, Lescott and Anichebe are all coming back from their injuries.


Lets take a look at the Barclays Premier League after 3 matches played:
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Our good start has put us in 3rd place, the real surprise however is Burnley at 2nd place, this makes me feel a bit less sad for drawing against them.

Next month we have a couple of tough fixtures coming up:
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After a short break we play a tough home game against Swansea who have also been performing very well, we then face Crystal Palace at Selhurst Park. After that we meet Burnley again in the Capital One Cup and then we have the very difficult task of containing Manchester City at the Hawthorns.



West Bromwich Albion Fact: West Bromwich Albion were one of the founding members of the Football League in 1888.​
 
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What a month!
Things didn't start well for us as we lost 1-2 to Swansea at home but after that we improved massively.
I am very glad that we managed to get into the next round of the Capital One Cup as I have hopes that we could go pretty far in that competition. We did receive a tough draw for the next round however:

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As for our injuries 2 of our central defenders got injured, one of them is out for almost two months while the other should be available again soon.
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Now that you have seen all of this months results lets take a look at the table:
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As you can see we are still going strong, Swansea is the only team that we lost to and like I said they are performing really well right now so I am pretty pleased with our overal performance.

Lets take a look at our fixtures for the next month:
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We start of the month with a tough away game at White Hart Lane we then face Sunderland at The Hawthorns.
Next we have another tough fixture as we travel to Liverpool to face Everton and we end the month with an home game against Stoke City in the 4th round of the Capital One Cup.




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West Bromwich Albion Fact: West Bromwich Albion have won five FA Cups, their most recent win was in 1968 against Everton.
 
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As you can see I also accidentally played the first game of November so I decided to add that one aswell.
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A poor start to the month saw us lose against a much better Tottenham.
We started the game well enough, then in the 13th minute Tottenham received a red card, at that moment I decided to switch to a more controlling mentality as we had one man more but as is evident from the statistics it simply didn't work.
We've been struggling to get good amounts of possession for the entire season so far and this game was no exception. In the end Tottenham deserved their win 100%​
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Another game in which we didn't get the most of possession or the most shots but we still managed to win very easily. Despite what the statistics suggest Sunderland never really looked threatening in their attacks, in fact their goal came from a corner. We on the other hand have been very clinical in most of our matches and that was shown today with us scoring 4 goals from 11 shots.​
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Another unfortunate away loss, in this match we actually played pretty well, the problem is that Everton however played better. ​
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In this game we were simply pathetic, there is no other word for it. Stoke simply dominated us at The Hawthorns in what can only be called a shameful display. One thing to add however is that both Foster and Ideye got injured during the first half so I couldn't do much in terms of substitutions for the rest of the match but to be honest I don't know if I could have done anything anyway.​
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And this was the game that I accidentally played, probably because I was so disappointed with our performances in October so I quickly wanted to move on.
Anyway there is not much to say about this game to be honest, Berahino again put in an excellent performance and managed to score the only goal of the game in the 1st minute.
After that there weren't any real chances or events that are worth mentioning.

All in all October has been an extremely disappointing month.
Our major weakness this season has been the inability to keep possession of the ball.
Most of the time this doesn't matter as we are very clinical and usually still end up with the 3 points this month however things didn't work out like that instead we simply weren't good enough and need to improve if we want to get back to our good performances of August/September.
Still November started in a somewhat positive way with a good home win against QPR.

In terms of injuries this month Ideye has managed to pick up two injuries, this one was right before the match against Tottenham:
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And this one happened during the game against Stoke City
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This however is not too concerning as Berahino has showed his class more than once this season and as a backup striker we also have Anichebe who isn't bad either.

So what is our League position after our dissapointing month of October?
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Yup, we are still in fourth place (potentially fifth if Sunderland win their game), not bad at all.
One loss however could see us tumble down the table so we still have to improve and learn from October if we want to stay where we are right now.

Lets take a look at our remaining fixtures of November:
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First we have to face Stoke again at The Hawthorns, I certainly hope that we play much better this time then we did in the Capital One Cup otherwise this could turn out really badly, we then face Hull who have been doing really badly this season and end the month with a home game against Southampton.

West Bromwich Albion Fact: In March 1966 West Brom won the Football League Cup for the first and, so far, only time by beating West Ham United over two legs.
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