Le Mont LS (Swiss 2nd Tier)

[Piemaster]

Following the spectacular failure of my previous dip in the managerial waters (http://www.fm-base.co.uk/forum/f81/the-random-newbie-challenge-t26336.html) I decided to start again, hopefully making less newbie mistakes and getting better results. Here are the things that I want to be better than my last story.

1. More leagues running
2. A better title on the thread (I didn't realise you couldn't edit it afterwards)
3. Not get fired during my first season


Game Setup

As before I selected a country at random from the 51 available, then chose a team randomly in the bottom tier of that country. Unfortunately there is absolutely no suspense this time as the result is in the title. But if you somehow missed it, or have forgotten, I randomly rolled Switzerland and then randomly picked the team Le Mont LS. This is already looking like a very tough challenge. They are predicted to finish 15th out of 16 teams and as the bottom two teams get relegated, I am actually very likely to last one season or less (as this is the bottom tier, I assume I will automatically get fired should I get relegated).

I have activated all 51 countries to at least 'watch only' to give a greater sense of immersion. In addition, the following 10 countries have been fully activated.

England - Top 4 leagues
France - Top league only
Germany - Top 2 leagues
Holland - Top league only
Italy - Top 2 leagues
Portugal - Top league only
Scotland - Top league only
Spain - Top 2 leagues
Sweden - Top league only
Switzerland (obviously) - Top 2 leagues

My nationality is set to English/Swiss. No idea what impact nationality has on the human manager in this game. I remember in some previous incarnations it was tough to get the national manager job of a big country if you weren't of that nationality, but that is less of an issue IRL now, so not sure if it is still simulated in the game.

It's time to get on the dancefloor and see if I have any moves...

 

[Piemaster]

June 2009

Okay, so let's see what we have here...

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Hmmm, only semi-professional? So the Swiss league only actually has one division that is fully professional? Wow. And the chairman doesn't seem like his heart is really in it either.

This is going to be an interesting challenge. Predictions for my team are that we will stink the place out, so I probably don't have to worry too much about getting fired this season. Our season expectations are that I "try to steer the club clear of relegation". I love that, not even "avoid relegation", our target is merely to try and avoid relegation into the abyss.

I took a look at my team and it doesn't seem to bad. Well, the players suck obviously, but we have a reasonable number of players at each position and a few loan players in and there are very few glaring holes. My only slight concern is my lack of depth at DC. My staff on the other hand are terrible. My physio has a 3 in Physiotherapy and the rest are nothing to write home about either.

I spend the first few pre-season games trying out various players to see who performs well and where. I just play a regular 4-4-2 to start with, although I think I will have to opt for a more defensive and containing tactic in order to stay afloat this season.

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I was actually quite pleased with what I saw. Although we were playing fairly substandard opposition, we seemed to have a good balance of players. The last game was the exception, but this was a result of us having 3 games in 5 days so all my players were exhausted by then. This made me hate my assistant manager for organising these stupid friendlies so close together (even though this has no basis in logic, I felt like blaming someone).

One weird thing I noticed is that most of the loan players we had in were not very good at all. This surprised me as usually these weak teams' best players are those they are borrowing from higher league clubs for a while. The only exception was a wide midfield player called Stephane Garcia, who was young, talented and played extremely well in all our preseason games.

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Such a shame I have to give him back at the end of the season

 

[bodgi]

I always love playing as random lower league european teams.
You need to have a poacher and finishers and a busy midfielder and you should be okay, if you're not use to rubbish european football, you'll soon realise that every game mostly ends in 0-0 or 1-0, make sure you get an above average striker...

Anyway good luck!

 

[cjfinno]

I'll be following this wiht interest, hope it last longer than your chinese outing! Good luck.

 

[Piemaster]

July 2009

Looking around the league, I was green with envy. It seemed everybody else had a considerably better players than me and considerably more financial clout. Even our chairman had decided that maybe it was better just to give up right now.

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I was also having a bit of trouble in the transfer market. I took it as a given that I wouldn't have much to spend, but what I didn't realise is how stingy the club would be on the wages. It seemed every time I tried to sign a promising player, on a free transfer or for pennies, he would ask for wages significantly higher than the club would allow me to give them, even though we were well under the wage cap.

So I decided that I would have to try and survive with superior tactics. I envisioned playing a Bolton Wanderers style defend and frustrate the **** out of your opponents, then hitting them with a shock goal type gameplan. I looked at my squad and decided that my strengths were in my defensive midfielders and my wide midfielders, so with that in mind I came up witht he following tactic:

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Let's see where that takes us. The rest of the preseason came and went, first with a quite lulzy fixture against Paris St Germain.

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Note, I didn't arrange this, this was already on my fixture list when I joined the club. Who on earth had the crazy idea that our outfit should play against PSG?! They have Makelele playing for them for God sake. Just one of their first eleven is worth about 25 times the combined value of my entire squad, including loan players. I was actually quite pleased with the result, we even had a couple of shots on goal.

Next up were a couple of games against random teams from the dregs of the European league pyramids.

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A couple of good results and performances at home there. Then we had a couple of weeks of R&R before our first meaningful fixture of the season - an away league match versus Locarno.

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Yeah, I think I'm going to be seeing a lot of that this year, especially away from home. We put together a few promising attacks but never really threatened that much.

Let's see if we can't put up a few points in August...

 

[Piemaster]

August 2010

It was time to get down to the grind of trying to score some points and it wasn't going to be easy. Despite the aforementioned troubles in the transfer market, I did manage to make two signings. Nothing fancy, just players that filled holes and glaring weaknesses in the squad.

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The month started with a hhome fixture against Wil. Every game in this league is hard, but I needed to find a way to get some points. Somehow, somewhere...

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That's more like it! I good dogged defensive performance, just the kind I will need if we are to stay up. Next up was Servette away from home.

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Very frustrating! Although they did have the majority of possession and chances, we defended well and they never really looked like scoring. Until they did, with a 30 yard goal from nothing. Very disheartening to lose a point that I thought was well within my grasp. Back at home I managed to pick up another point.

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These guys were supposed to be my relegation rivals, but they were actually top of the table when we played them. No idea what was going on there. We could have won this one, but can't really complain about a draw.

Next up, another run of the mill loss away from home.

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And then annoyingly our first home loss of the season:

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This loss put us in the bottom two and really needing some points fast. As Autumn and Winter descend, it's time to see if we have what it takes to survive the season...

 

[Piemaster]

September

Don't seem to have too many followers on this thread. Maybe it's the promise of unending suckage and likely relegation and job loss that makes people not that interested. Maybe I'll make my next story about Man City or Barcelona. LOL, who am I kidding, that will never happen. Ah well, I'll keep soldiering on, on the off-chance that there are people reading and just not replying.

Anyway, back to the game. My chairman had a bit of a crisis of faith over the summer and decided to split on the club before things got any worse. No fireworks here however, just your standard board member handover.

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The new chairman seemed nice, although I don't think he's about to offer me any big transfer budget or anything.

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Maybe that's because the club has debts that they neglected to tell me about when I took the job.

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But anyway, enough of that boardroom stuff, it's all boring anyway. All the fans really care about is success on the pitch right? If only I could deliver some!

The month started with an away game against probably the best team in the league. I even admitted in the press conference that we probably weren't going to get anything out of this game.

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However, we actually came out and played pretty well. We had several chances in the second half to pull level and defended well for the most part. No points, but an encouraging display.

Next up was the first round of the Swiss Cup. This is an oddly structured competition where the lower league side always gets to play at home and it also seems to be seeded so that Super League and Challenge League teams can't meet each other in the first round. I was drawn away against some bunch of nobodies and I managed to scrape through.

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After a goalless first half, I changed from my normal 4-5-1 tactic to a more conventional 4-4-2 and we eventually managed to scrape a goal. Hardly the most convincing win against inferior opposition, but I'll take it. We were rewarded with another away game against another non-league outfit in round 2.

Our last game of the month was a home league game against Lausanne, a team at the opposite end of the table to us. However, the grit of the home side shone through with another fine defensive display and our second win of the season, courtesy of a second half dodgy penalty.

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This pulled us out of the relegation zone, although only just. I don't mind if we lose every away game of the season so long as we can keep picking up a few points at home. I have a feeling this season is going to go right down to the wire...

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[cjfinno]

I'm following mate far more interestin than the i'm "barca" or "liverpool" threads. Hope ya can avoid the chop and keep this story going!

 

[Piemaster]

October 2009

With a closed transfer window, a fairly settled starting team and only a 16 team league, the months are flying past pretty quickly now.

It's kind of fun being a bottom dwelling team. Okay, so you don't get the excitement of going for trophies, promotions etc, but any achievements that you do have are magnified several times over. For me, every draw feels like a win and every win is worth at least one fist-pump in front of the monitor. I'm not sure what I would do with an away win or a last-minute winner, but it may well involve laps around the study with my t-shirt over my head. Losses do not matter so much, providing the teams around you are also losing (which they often are at the bottom). All in all it's a different and quite rewarding experience.

The month started off well with a well-earned point away to Bienne.

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Then things started to go a little bit Barry White. First up I had my 2nd round cup tie.

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What the ****? I dominated the game, but went 1-0 down to a goal completely out the blue. Then conceded a second to a dodgy penalty while on overload at the end of the game, all the while wasting a bucketload of chances at the other end. I was starting to see sloppiness in our play, which is something I hadn't seen so far. Incompetence and lack of ability sure, but not sloppy errors that I was seeing in this game. Maybe it was complaicency.

Unfortunately the sloppiness carried over into our next league game. I think I encountered a bug in this game.

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See how the pundit 'can't look beyond' our team wining even though we are nearly 4/1 to win the game. So naturally when we lost it came with all the 'you were expected to win' rigmarole, with the fans disappointed etc. We lost 1-0 BTW, probably deservedly so.

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The last league game of the month saw us register another defeat:

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Combined with some oother teams around us perking up, this left us at the bottom of the league, although admittedly it was all very tight, at the end of October.

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I was starting to get very annoyed with the lack of production from our strike force. I think what somebody said earlier in the thread about a goal poacher being key is probably correct. Our strikers look okay on paper, but miss too many CCCs, while our defence plays their heart out every game. When nearly every game finishes either 0-0 or 1-0, missed chances are extremely annoying. Just 3 extra points at this stage would be the difference between being 13th and out of the relegation zone, and where I am now at the bottom. Unfortunately I have no transfer budget and not a lot of wiggle room under my wage cap, especially after signing my most important players to new contracts so they don't Bosman my *** at the end of the season. I start to look for potential loan strikers, but pickings are slim. I'll have to make do with what I can for now and see what comes up.

cjfinno - I definitely hope to keep this story going. Even if I am fired I have a lot of leagues running so I might stick around and see if I can get another job.

Let's see how November goes...

 

[Piemaster]

November 2009

Let's cut to the chase, this may well be the month that has broken me. We only had two games this month, both of which I felt we could have got something from, and we lost both.

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The Lugano result was especially damaging as they are a relegation rival. This leaves me bottom of the league and 4 points from safety. A long way to go, but the first few notes of my death knell have started to play.

The transfer window opens soon andI really want to bring in a Striker who can knock a few goals in. My strike force this year has been absolutely woeful! I started off by hiring a better scout, because it's difficult to have faith in a scout to find me the right player when he has JPA 8 and JPP 6.

Not a lot else to say about this month, so I leave you with the Premier League table, because no matter how bad things are going, it's always funny to look at Liverpool in the bottom half of the table at the beginning of December.

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[Piemaster]

December 2009/January 2010

This is the winter break in Switzerland, so not a lot going on. I did play one league game at the beginning off December, which was another frustrating defeat.

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After that we had a string of friendlies. These were a mixed bag against mixed opposition and not particularly interesting, but I do have to share one game with you:

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We beat Karlsruhe 3-1. This is ridiculous as the difference in class between the two sides is huge. Admittedly I got very lucky, I think I had 5 shots on goal all game to their 20 or so. Why can't I have luck like this in the league?!

My search for a striker to score our way out of the relegation zone wasn't particularly successful. There just isn't that much talent available to a bottom-dwelling Swiss team with no money to spend. However, I did manage to lure this guy in on a free transfer.

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He's 35 years old so he won't be an every game player, but he looks good and even if he can score us just 3-4 goals in the second half of the season it will be a godsend!

 

[Piemaster]

February 2010

The season got back underway in February. To add to my list of woes, the club is now in a deep financial crisis, losing money steadily each month. This is hardly my fault as I haven't exactly been splashing cash around on wages and transfer fees, but nevertheless it will no doubt be muggins here who will feel the consequences if we don't turn it around. As there isn't really much I can do about the problem before the off-season, I decided to just concentrate on the results on the field.

Two games were played at the end of February.

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Although one point from two games isn't really much of a return, and we were still a number of points adrift from safety, there were a few positives to come out of this month. The point at Kriens was a good one, as are all points away from home in my situation. The Locarno game I completely dominated yet somehow managed to lose. As Locarno were second in the league at the time, this was quite encouraging. In both games we gave very good performances.

Of course you don't score points for style. We're starting to run out of season in which to play well but come away with nothing. It's only points that matter now. And with games against both our main relegation rivals coming up in March, points would be doubly important next month.

 

[Piemaster]

March 2010

Do you remember this guy?

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You probably don't. I mentioned him very early in the thread as a player I had brought in to fill a hole. Basically I wanted to play with an AMC, but I only had one on the roster, who was getting on a bit. Unfortunately Johny arrived at the club severely lacking in match fitness, so annoyingly his performances in the first half of the season were mostly limited to second half cameos. It seemed no matter what I did his match fitness never returned.

Well, during the season break, I gave him a run in the team in a few friendlies and finally he got match fit. He played pretty well and so I left him in the team once the season restarted. If you are super-observant, you may have noticed that he scored one of the goals in our 2-2 draw with Kriens last month.

Anyway I just thought I would fill you in on this guy because he crops up a bit in this month's results.

We opened the month with an extremely important match away to Gossau. You may remember me saying earlier in the season that they were expected to be relegation candidates, but somehow found themselves top of the league after a few games. Well, since then they had been on a non-stop slide down the league and were now third from bottom. Although I never expect anything from our away games, a loss here would be a disaster and make our position almost hopeless.

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Well, what do we have here, an away win? I secretly thought we might be able to get something from this match, but when one of our DMs was sent off midway through the first half (our first sending off of the season) hope started to drain away. I reverted to a formation that was sort of 4-4-big space-1 and tried to hang on for a draw. We coped quite well while a man down and then miraculously managed to steal a winner 8 minutes from time on a counterattack. We're back in the game!

Next up was an away match against Wil, which we didn't expect anything out of.

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And it duly delivered. We played quite well and twice came from behind with two goals from Johny, but they had just enough left in the tank to take the lead for the third and definitive time. Next was a home game against mid-table side Servette. A far superior team to us but, at home, we did have a hope of nicking something.

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Well what about that, two wins in three games! We didn't look so good in this game and probably didn't deserve a win, but 3 points is 3 points and this was a huge 3 points. It took us off the bottom of the league for the first time in months and actually within sight of escaping the relegation zone.

I knew our next match was our most important of the season so far. A home tie against Yverdon, the only team below us in the league. Win this and we were probably out of the relegation zone. Lose and we were back to the bottom of the league.

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While we didn't completely dominate the game, we had by far the best chances and fully deserved the win. Johny was outstanding, completely unplayable. The first of his two goals he tackled an opposing player just outside our own penalty area. He then ran 60 yards with the ball, before fighting through a tackle on the edge of the box and banging it into the top corner. A goal that would have been considered great in the Premier League, let alone the Swiss second tier. That made 5 goals in 6 games since the season break for Johny. He was fast becoming the saviour of the team and darling of the terraces.

And what's this I see?

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We're out of the relegation zone for the first time since forever. We still have a ton of work to do to stay up, including a vital game against Bienne next month, but could it be that we've turned the corner?

 

[Nick.]

well done, congrats at getting out of the relegation zone

 

[Piemaster]

April 2010

After a fantastic March, we were really looking to build on that success in April. One more good month and we would be pretty safe from relegation, but the fixtures this month were a lot harder than the previous one, so it would be difficult. Plus of course we had that vital match against fellow strugglers Bienne.

First up though was an away game against mid-table Vaduz

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Disappointed to lose this one as we created plenty of chances, but just couldn't put the ball in the back of the net. I can't blame the strikers any more, it seemed everybody was having a good old miss today.

Next game was home to Winterthur. In my opinion this is the best team in the league. in fact, every press conference since Day 1 when I was asked who would win the league I have said Winterthur. The media call this a surprise choice, but as of now it's not looking a shabby prediction as they are right up there. For some reason my players tend to get upset whenever I tip them though. What, did they think we were going to win it or something?

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Yeah they won. Which means we suck, but that I'm right. Small victories!

Next came the oh-so-important match against Bienne. Obviously in football a win is always better than a draw, which is always better than a loss. However, in this match that was amplified tenfold. A win would be much better than a draw, which would be much better than a loss. To summarise:

If we win - We are 4 points clear of the relegation zone and look pretty good to stay up.
If we draw - We stay outside the relegation zone but it will look like being a scrap all the way to the finish.
If we lose - We are back in the relegation zone and favourites to go down.

So, no pressure then.

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I am quite angry about the way we played this match. We didn't attack well, we didn't defend well and we didn't convert most of the chances we did create. We could so easily have won this game, but instead we had to settle for a draw.

To end the month we had a tough away game against Stade Nyonnais:

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Oh dear, a crappy end to a crappy month. Can't really complain about this game, they dominated the first half and although we were better in the second, we didn't manage to sneak in the equaliser. A win for Bienne meant that we were back in the relegation zone.

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All hands to the pump, the emergency is back on!

 

[cjfinno]

Gonna need a minor miracle!! Good luck hope ya can avoid the chop!!