Well, here I am. I have decided to put pen to paper, err, fingers to keyboard and I'll present you my dealings with my Luton Town side in FM2005. Why the title you may ask? Kenilworth Road is the name of where the Luton Town Hatters play their home game
I am quite addicted with this game right now, and despite a pretty busy family life, I try to find a little 20 minutes every evening to at least play a little, at least get through one match (league or Cup). That way, I went through my 2004-05 season in about 3 and a half weeks. I'll see how often I'll update this dynasty, or how deep I go into details, but I have found I need a place to talk about my team, and what happens with the players, opponents, the team board, etc.
First things first, why Luton Town? It all goes back to a few months ago, when I played CM4 for the first time. CM4 was my first foray ever in the Championship Manager/Football Manager world. I had read about it many times and knew about people taking a low team and making it a championship caliber team. I wanted a challenge, but not a crazy kind of challenge, at least not for my first experience. Luton fit the bill pretty well, as they had a little transfer budget ($36k IIRC), had just been promoted from division 3 (now League One), and their fans were expecting them to battle relegation with pride (or something like that). I thought "Perfect!" So I started reading about them, even signed up for their real life email newsletter. I played with CM4 on and off over the Summer, waiting for FM2005 to be released. When I got my copy of FM2005, there was no way I could manage anybody else other than the Hatters and their Orange and Blue shirts. The Challenge was on.
Luton Town start the 2004-05 season in League One, and we are now in the middle of October 2005, meaning I have already played one season (2004-05) and the beginning of a second one. The 2004-05 season was rough. I experimented with tactics a lot before finding one I liked and the result was a long stretch of losing at the beginning of the season. IIRC, we lost 8 in a row at some point, putting us in a very rough spot, in 22nd place of 24, with about 15-18 games to play. Just so you know, the bottom 4 teams in League One get relegated to League Two. When I started playing with my 4-3-3 I started seeing wins happen, and when we were not winning, we were always in the game, as opposed to sometimes losing 1-4 or 0-3 before switching tactics. With that 4-3-3, we are creating scoring chances, we are very often outshooting the opponent. I like it and will keep on using it, even though I'd like to develop another tactics, if only to throw a wrench in my opponent's gameplanning
When I read about Eaglesfan27 getting the dreaded vote of confidence, I smile a little. I smile because I have received it numerous times when the team was in the dump. All I wanted of that first season was to survive it, get to the next season without relegating, since I was about sure that I'd have been fired if we had relegated. I also knew I had to survive until the following season, since I had signed 8 players on Bosman transfers and they were all going to get to the team on July 1st, 2005. I had to be there to welcome them
We finished in 15th place and, thus staying well out of relegation zone, but it took us up to the 45th game of the season to secure us a spot in League One for 2005-06. The board was at least satisfied with my managing of the season, taking my name off the "insecure" list in the jobs security screen. phew!
Signing so many players had a bad effect on the team's finances though, and me being kind of a newb still with managing a soccer team, I saw the team's wage bill grow from being 5k under budget to a whopping 20k *over* budget! Great, one more thing for the team board to complain about. I knew I had to win, or else that would be a long season. And guess what, the pundits didn't like my chances either, as they set the odds of my team winning the title at 40-1, down from the 20-1 odds they had set for me only a season ago... The wage thing got itself sorted out when the team board allowed me more wage budget after I transfered out the Fans favorite player or last season, a bold move, but one worth it, as it netted us 750k in transfer money. Because of that sale, I still have roughly 500k available, and I'm starting to think about what I could do with it
We started the offseason with a some rough times, but we played Aston Villa twice at home for good money, but they were easily better than us, so I took the losses with a grain of salt.
The season is going fairly well so far. We win or draw fairly regularly and the times we've lost, we were usually in the game. Weird thing is I get the feeling that we are playing through maybe the toughest part of our schedule, as we played the teams in 2nd, 4th, and then 5th place in back to back to back contests. And through all that, we were in 5th place at some point!!! We are currently in 14th place, with 3 wins, 4 losses, and 3 draws for 12 points after 10 gamesand a +1 goal differential. As I said, I'm happy about this start to the season, as it seems we have played a bunch of tough teams so far. There will come a time when we'll play the bottom feeders...
A word about my tactics. I play two types of 4-3-3, but they both could be called 4-2-1-3, as I have 4 in the back, 2 DMC, one MC/AMC (depending on the version) and 3 strikers on top. Here are two pics of my tactics...
I started with only outward arrows on both the FCR and the FCL, but I recently added forward arrows on the two fullbacks and backward arrows on the two centrebacks and I have seen some good results, including back to back clean sheets when I started doing this. I adjust the different sliders of the team tactics a little every game, and some players have special individual orders, but I won't get into them now, maybe later.
Next up, a look at who these Hatters of Luton Town are...
FM