So I felt I'd like to do a set of little blog posts that I write alongside my main update posts that highlight the games that stand out to me! Here's my first one...
In-game date: 17 September 2015
I’ve just had solidly one of the more exciting and pleasing games of my Football manager career. It wasn’t a massively important one or one that relished in goals, it was just one felt great to watch when you see your team play brilliantly and do everything you want them to do!
We played AZ in only the first game of the group stages of the Euro Cup, but it was a very interesting game indeed. Throughout the first 10 minutes of the game, I felt we were in control, creating all the chances, Erikson and Jorginho were dominating the passing in the centre of the park and Depay (Ayew picked up an injury in the 3rd minute) and Lamela causing some problems for the full backs. It all came wrong because of my assistant manager to be honest!
It all began when he commented “we should take advantage of our dominant possession”, I took this to mean that we should change my passing style to more direct to get more chances on goal, so I switched to this, along with early crosses. However, almost 10 minutes after this change, Aron Jóhannsson went ahead and caused an upset with a goal in the 23rd minute. 4 minutes later, Dedé went ahead and made a rash challenge earning himself a yellow card and giving away a penalty to a team on the up in confidence; Celso Ortiz and stepped to put them 2-0 up in the space of 5 minutes in a game I felt we were dominating. 7 minutes before half time, they finished off their rout with a goal from Guus Hupperts which really caused some anger on my behalf. Throughout this scoring period, I was mashing the ‘Demand More’, ‘Push Forward’ and ‘Show some Passion’ team talks assertively to no avail. At half time, I Aggressively told them to show some passion and asked if they even wanted to win the game, I also had personal team talks with each individual position assertively telling them that I needed them to perform how I knew they could - this apparently was exactly what they needed! Every player reacted with a motivated boost and a generally positive response.
In the second half we came out with much more conviction, going back to controlling the ball in the midfield and settling down a bit when it came to the defence, as a result making more intelligent tackles and choices. The first break came within the 52nd minute with some lovely play around the box which finally resulted in a ball out to Rose who whipped a ball across the box for Jorginho to get on the end of far post, blasting in the first goal towards a potential comeback. At this point I felt that there was no way we could come back from this and that AK only needed one more goal for this to be unrealistically out of our reach once again. However, 8 minutes later, on the hour mark, Balanta came up with a goal from the near post from a corner. It got me really excited and made me realise, that we had half an hour to score just one more goal to come back from an 3-0 loss. Currently we sat at 3-2 and were dominating in possession, we very rarely lost posession, if at all from the highlights that I saw. Lamela and Depay were dominating the wings, whipping in some great balls for Erikson, Jorginho and Vela to get on the end of; Jorginho and Stambouli were giving the opposing ‘keeper, Esteban some long shots to think about. Then finally, on the 78th minute, we’d been dominating for the majority of the second half. Erik son played a cross in that is cleared to Depay on the edge of the box, he appears to head back towards his own goal before quickly planting a back heel right at the feet of Lamela who lets it run infant of him before blasting it into the roof of the net causing the fans and me to all jump up screaming. Scaring the life out of and demanding a high five off my girlfriend was my celebration for this goal as it was a game that had made me felt cheated by the game and then made me feel like we’d really earned back the draw!
The highlight players that stood out for me have to be Christian Eriksen, Erik Lamela and Jorginho. These were three players that throughout the whole match constantly showed the composure and ability to perform their respectful positions to a high quality consistently! Jorginho showed his incredible passing skills once again with the highest Pass Completion of any player on the pitch completing 58 out of his 66 passes throughout the game. When it came to the passing game, Christian Eriksen managed an incredible 6 Key Passes throughout the game, Guss Hupperts for AZ was their highest with 3. Christian Eriksen also completed the most successful Runs Past Opponents stat with 6.
Erik Lamela didn’t really have a statistic that highlighted his performance, but his goal and overall work rate was impressive enough for me, covering 8.3 miles throughout the match, only 0.1 miles behind Jorginho whose job as an advanced playmaker is to explore the pitch, covering a lot of ground.
This was one of those games that Football Manager is famous for; it makes you feel like those dots on your screen are real players and that everything they do is as a result of personality, your training, your touch-line commands, your tactical choices and when it pays off you feel a real sense of accomplishment. If you don’t play Football Manager, this won’t sound possible, if you do, it is definitely possible!
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