The Journey Person. From Field to Favoured Personnel. Episode 3 #FM23

January 12, 2023

In my last post we left Bangor top of the Championship 2 at the half way mark of season one.

Can we get promoted or will it all fall apart? Will we get a new contract, will we get the sack, or will we accidently resign? Read on to find out!

Transfer Window

Our last post took us up to the January transfer window, so where better place to start than there.

Having disabled the first window I was excited to start considering some signings. If you remember back in Episode One I outlined that I wanted to keep the save REALISTIC and one way to do this was to utilise staff more. With this in mind I have decided to only search for players that have been scouted by our three person scouting team. I have left the recruitment focuses to my Chief Scout but I have, from time to time, made requests to help direct the searches. Club chairman, Graham Bailie, employed a Director of Football, so I have decided to use him to negotiate any deals we decide to make, can’t wait to see what a negotiating attribute of 4 will produce.

With us sitting so well in the league I was retistent to actually make too many signings. If we got promoted I probably would need to strengthen the team significantly anyway, and if we stayed in the Championship 2 our targets would be very different. So I decided any major moves would wait until the Summer. That didn’t stop other clubs coming in for our players which soon became a cause for concern as the vast majority of them were on Amateur contracts. Let’s start there.

Outs

We lost three players in the window, all were offered contracts by other sides and simply left.

Gareth Beattie - decided to drop down a few levels and sign for Belfast Celtic. Beattie was a back up Full Back so no real loss here.
Darren Gibbons - Our backup Goalkeeper (aka “the Jockey”) moved to Ballymacash Rangers to become their Number one, we had cover in the reserves so again no real loss here.
Reece Neal - Our first choice Left Back, who had been performing pretty well, decided to move up a division and accept a contract from Championship side, Loughgall. This did cause me some concern, and added to the loss of Beattie I wanted to bring a replacement in. We did have Glover who I suppose would do a job for us until the end of the season if necessary.

What then were our targets? As mentioned in the previous episode it was the midfield that worried me the most, and specifically our lack of physicality in there. I was also on the look out for another forward. I was relying heavily on Michael Halliday as a Deep Lying Forward, and at 43 he was struggling to see out 90 minutes and our back ups hadn’t really offered much.

So we wanted;

A Striker
A physical Centre Midfielder,
A Full Back

Let’s see how we got on

Ins

We managed to fulfil only two of our three targets.

A Striker - Jack Sharvin joined us from Intermediate side Crewe United, on an Amatuer contract that was negotiated by our Director of Football - bravo. Sharvin did come through the Sheffield United academy so I am hopeful there is some underlying ability there.

I desperately wanted someone to win aerial duels for us in certain games and Jack’s Jumping Reach of 15 is fantastic for this level. His technical ability is also reasonable, and would be fine for the level above. At 23 we may not see any improvements but I feel he could do a job for us nevertheless, for a couple of seasons at least. There is a slight spoiler in the image above, you can see he has performed well for us since his move, more on that later.

Physical Centre Midfielder - 19 year old Lewis Barr joined us on loan from Premiership side Crusaders. You can see he immediately adds some physicality, and no little quality, to our midfield that I feel will be vital in the run in. Crusaders required no wages be paid by us which was even better.

I wasn’t able to bring in a full back, but around mid January I received the hallowed news item…A preview of our youth intake. According to my Head of Youth Development this was a “Golden Generation” and contained not one elite prospect, but four! Two of which were full backs. I decided to hold off on getting anyone else in, with the hope that our intake may provide the back up full back we needed.

One of them certainly would and here he is, Unambitious Antoni Saxton, Manchester born with Irish heritage apparently. He will certainly provide the cover we need on both flanks. For Newgens I have used faces created by @TheFMU which are available over at the View from the Touchline website. I think you can agree they look pretty cool and installing them is easy enough. I also asked an AI program to create a backstory for Antoni Saxton which you can read here if that interests you.

To be honest the youth intake was pretty good and if I was doing a one club save I’d have been pleased. The reality is though, I intend to be long gone by the time these 15/16 year old’s are ready for first team football. I’m really only interested in those that can help me now, or in the near future. I did end up signing seven of the players but only Saxton and one Romanian winger went into the first team squad. The other five could, however, be used as back ups in the next couple of seasons.

Results

Having reached the half way point of the season top of the league, suffering only one defeat, with a seven point advantage over second place Dollingstown, I was fairly confident we would secure automatic promotion to the Championship. The board were happy too, offering to extend our contract by another season on the same £1,700p/m; which I readily accepted.

Could we keep the form going?

After our imperious first half of the season, results in the second half were mixed. I felt we were starting to lose control of games in defensive transitions but our scoring ability (aka Jordan Hughes) meant we managed to keep going. The defeats against Moyola, Armagh, and Dollingstown could all be excused, in a way, as these are decent sides, but it was the 2-2 draw with Distillery, and the 5-3, 4-3 wins against Banbridge and Tobermore respectively that concerned me more. These were games we should have won easily but conceded poor goals to allow the opposition back into the game. Having played FM for so long I play the game by feeling how it is going more than deep tactical insights, and in these games I just felt we were too open and this was further compounded by a really poor showing against Queen’s when we were simply played off the park by a mid table side.

Once everyone has played each other twice the league splits in half with the top six sides playing each other once more to determine the final league placings. The side who finishes top are automatically promoted, while second place enter a playoff against the 11th placed Championship team. Our final day defeat to Queen’s meant Dollingstown passed us and moved into top stop just as the league split.

All was not lost, we had five games left to retake our rightful position at the top of the league, Armagh surely wouldn’t catch us, would they…

Our first game after the split was against Queen’s once again. Having lost twice to them already, the most recent of which was less than a week prior, I felt I had to change something. I noticed on the change list of the latest ME patch that there had been a change to how often/when the AI manager used a Segundo Volante so I thought why not give that a go and drop the two CMs back to the DM line and play a Volante alongside a standard DM. The more I think about it, the more it makes sense to use 2DMs in a 4-4-2 as this is generally how modern teams line up in the defensive phase of play. Remember that the positions you see on the tactics screen show how your team will line up in the defensive phase of play.

I also dropped our mentality down from positive to balanced in the hope we could control things better rather than get involved in a basketball game. I had also enjoyed using Foster as an attacking wing back on the right but I had noticed, in games we struggled in, we were being countered on our right side constantly. To avoid this I have gone for two standard full backs, on support, to ensure we always have defensive cover. I removed the wide midfielder, who was sitting narrow on the right and replaced him with a winger on support. I feel this change allows us to play on the counter attack more as we don’t need to retain the ball whilst Foster gets forward to provide width. We could now hit either flank in transition or go through the middle with our Segundo Volante. Add to this I was still using new signing Sharvin up front who’s stats were showing a high level of aerial prowess, I felt we had more routes to goal now and also became more defensively solid at the same time.

That was the theory anyway. With this tactic being mainly built to deal with Queen’s I decided to play a higher defensive line as they had very little threat in behind. I will probably toggle this up and down depending on the opposition forward players.

So how did we fare? We had a point to make up on Dollingstown in five matches.

A lovely turn of results, I was particularly pleased with our control of the games. No 4-3 or 5-3 results here, and more importantly no defeats, as well as two very enjoyable 1-0 wins. Those of you paying attention will notice only four results here, instead of the promised five. Up until this point Dollingstown had won all their games so it looked like we would be remaining one point behind them going into our last game, who would be against…Dollingstown!

However Armagh City did us a little favour.

So we would play Dollingstown last in the knowledge that a draw would see us Champions and automatically promoted. I was confident we could do it, given our recent form. That was until Jordan Hughes picked up a yellow card in the 48th minute against PSNI meaning he would be suspended for our pivotal last game. By this time Hughes had scored 49 goals in all competitions.

We simply couldn’t fill this gap and we lost the title decider 2-1, which meant if we were to gain promotion it would be through a playoff against the Championship’s 11th placed team, Knockbreda.

Look at league positions history :vomit:

Playoff

Going into a playoff was a bit of an unknown really, I wasn’t sure what to expect from Knockbreda but I didn’t think the gap would be too big between the top of Championship 2 and The Championship. I was glad to bring back 49 goal hit man Jordan Hughes to the line up and hoped he could fire us through this two legged affair, achieving a promotion in season one of my Journey would be fantastic.

A first half hattrick from Jordan Hughes took his tally to 52 for the season and put us in a commanding 4-0 lead at half time. The first half goals are below, please note the following, Low Cross, Long ball from the back to Sharvin to flick on, and pace in behind all are evident in these goals. The recipe for success for a 4-4-2 like this in my opinion.

I was very confident going into the second leg, to be honest 5-2 flattered Knockbreda, and I felt we would beat them away from home too.

So it proved to be a 3-2 victory at Breda Park (where I snogged a girl once back in my school days) again flattered Knockbreda and did give me food for thought regarding our defence once we move up a division. That’s for another day, today we celebrate our 8-4 triumph, get ready for the Championship boys!

Me - The Manager

All this is lovely but it is not what this save is about. This save is all about ME (not Match Engine), and my progression through the game. If you remember back in Episode one I said that my aim will be simply to please my employers and improve my reputation. So if my employer wants boring defensive football, that’s what I’ll try and deliver. If they care about the cups, that will be my focus. In this case back in Episode one my Chairman stated they required me to work within the wage budget and finish the top half - TICK. In the cups they only asked that we be competitive, which we were -TICK.

What about my own personal progression, we managed to convince the board to send us on a coaching course and we got our National ‘C’ Licence, which led to a decent improvement in our attributes, 10 for discipline - NICE. We also now earn £2,000p/m having been promoted which makes us the highest paid manager in the Championship so I can see us staying here for a little while yet.

As ever many thanks for reading this far, I’m really enjoying FM23 this year and can’t wait to see where this save ends up.

If you come to CoffehouseFM often you may wish to sign up to our newsletter that will send you an email (not very often - promise) collating all the latest posts into one handy little newsletter. I’ve provided the link below and we promise not to sell your email address to the Russians.

Over and Out

FMEadster!

The Journey Person. From Field to Favoured Personnel Episode 2. #FM23

January 3, 2023

In the last episode I introduced you to the first club of a journey person save, my hometown club, Bangor. In this episode we will go through the first team squad, take a look at my starting tactic and discuss my thoughts behind it. We will finish with a look over the first half of the season as we begin our quest for the top.

First Team Squad

Goalkeepers

At the outset I should say only seven players in my first team squad actually have a contract, the rest are on Amateur deals so could be taken on a free at anytime, so don’t get too attached to anyone. Looking first at the goalkeepers, Taylor and Gibbons, and to be honest I’m not too keen on either of them. My coaches love Taylor, rating him as one of the best players at the club which is a worry in itself. He is better than Gibbons mentally and has decent distribution but Gibbons out scores him in the goalkeeping fundamentals of Handling and Reflexes. I’ll probably trust my coaches on this one and start with Taylor, but at 38 who knows how long he will be around.

Defenders

We only have three recognised Centre Backs at the club and one of those is Ryley D’Sena who is on loan from Premiership rich boys Larne. I’m happy with Ryan Arthur, I can see him being very dominant at this level, with his aerial prowess and decent mental ability, he is also one of the players who holds a contract at the club earning £220p/m. Boyle and D’Sena will battle it out for the other spot which will probably be as a no nonsense centre back. Given their lack of technical ability I think it would be best for them to concentrate on defending our box and clearing the ball downfield. At Right Back we have another loanee, Seanna Foster from Clitonville who I rate as the best player at the club. One thing Iike to do is to play the best couple of players in their preferred positions or roles when I first join a club, to me there is less chance of mucking the whole thing up when I do that. So, although, at this level, Foster might do a lot of damage on the right wing, I will start him in his favoured position as an attacking wing back. On the left side our coaches love Reece Neale who is technically poor but mentally and physically strong, so I will be less adventurous with him, so will probably start him as a Full Back on support. Beattie can provide cover on the right or left, while Hume could play on the left or potentially as a fourth centre back looking at his jumping reach. I’m reasonably content with the defence although I can some concerns regarding pace, and first team cover could become an issue if we suffer from a lot of injuries or suspensions.

Midfielders

It is the midfield that concerns me the most, and having disabled the first transfer window there is very little I can do about it. Only three recognised Centre Midfielders are at the club and one of them is Lewis Harrison who is unbelievably listed as the club captain and has a proper contract, stealing £110p/m from the club. I can see absolutely no use for him at all apart from some aggression. Strength 2, Bravery 5, Tackling 4, there is no way I’m trusting this fella in my midfield. That leaves us with just Aaron Harris and Dylan O’Kane, both of who are ok at best. O’Kane is decent in the tackle and Harris has some technical quality so perhaps a simple CM(d) and CM(s/a) combo is the way to go. Tom Mathieson could maybe work as a CM(a) with his pace and reasonable first touch and finishing, but strength 2 really makes me soft in central positions. On the wings we have Scott McArthur on the left who I like the look of as an old fashioned winger, good pace, dribbling, and touch means he should be able to beat a man and get the ball into the danger zone for us on a regular basis. Glover is still young and looks good as a back up winger or full back on that side. On the right, we have Mathieson who my coaches like and while he is quick he lacks the technical quality of McArthur on the left. Conor Sullivan is interesting, a 6 Foot 4” winger who also has good pace but very little else at this point of his career. As mentioned, I don’t like the midfield at all and when you look at them collectively you can see we really lack strength, bravery, composure and concentration across the whole unit. They are also really small, Sullivan and Glover aside, none of them are taller than 5 Foot 10, I will need to watch all this in our early games.

Forwards

I’m more encouraged with our attacking options than I was for our midfield. We have six forwards on our books but two of them will be reserves at best so I haven’t included them. Jordan Hughes looks like he could be a great advanced forward, Finishing 13 and Composure 11 are more or less elite at this level. He also has good pace which I love for at least one of my strikers. After that things are a little less clear. In real life I have watched a bit of Bangor and have been impressed with Ben Arthurs’ hold up play so I was hoping for more physically in game than I got. I still think he could do a good job as a Target Forward linking up with Hughes. My other option is veteran Michael Halliday, who at 43 is older than me and that’s saying something. I remember him at his peak playing for Northern Ireland’s greatest team, GLENTORAN. He still has great technical ability 15 first touch, 11 Finishing and 10 Technique are all encouraging, add this to decent vision and passing I can see Halliday operating as Deep Lying Forward and linking up with Hughes, or perhaps a static role in AM strata such as an Enganche or simple Attacking Midfielder support depending how I finally set up the team. Adam Neale, brother of FB Reece Neale, will be my back up advanced forward. Once again, Arthurs aside I am concerned about a real lack of strength and jumping reach in the front line.

The Tactic

It is time to look at a formation and style of play for Bangor. Usually I start with one of the presets and adjust from there but this year I am going alone. In real life there wouldn’t be a handy preset to get a new manager started.

After reviewing the squad we learned / decided the following;

We have only 3 CBs at the club so this probably rules out playing any variation of a back 3.
Our CBs aren’t quick or that great positionally so a high line is out of the question.
Seanna Foster will start as a Wing Back on attack.
We only have three CMs who are actually very weak so we probably can’t play with any variation of a midfield 3 either. Given the state of the CMs should we bypass midfield altogether?
Scott McArthur will start as a Winger on the left.
Jordan Hughes will start up front as an Advanced Forward alongside either Ben Arthurs as a Target Forward or Michael Halliday as a Deep Lying Forward.
Our best Forwards can’t jump

With the seven points above in mind, the most obvious starting formation for me is a flat 4-4-2.

Roles

We’ve already discussed the player roles in the squad review so none of them should be a surprise. The one role I didn’t mention was the use of a Wide Midfielder on the right. As discussed, Foster is one of the best players at the club and I am using him as wing back on attack on the right side. I want Foster to be our main attacking outlet on the right, and to give him the required space I have opted to use a wide midfielder ahead of him who I have also instructed to sit narrower. I feel there are two advantages to this, first it gives the flank to Foster, and second, it will hopefully help bolster our central midfield where I think we are particularly weak physically and technically. The only other player instruction I am using is on Reece Neale at Left Back, who we noticed, in the squad preview, was poor technically so I have told him to take fewer risks with his passing. I want him to just give the ball to McArthur who I will rely on to break the defensive lines through his dribbling and crossing ability.

Team Instructions

If you remember the season preview from episode one Bangor are joint favourites with Moyola Park to win the Championship 2 this season. This influenced my decision to start games on a positive mentality, although I am open to drop this back to balanced if I need to get better control of the game. In possession I considered increasing the passing directness to slightly more direct but in the pre season friendlies I felt we were going long too often and without any physical presence upfront we rarely managed to build any meaningful attacks this way. I also considered focusing our play to the flanks but again I didn’t feel the need to “force” this to happen. I hoped it would happen naturally anyway, but if not I would turn it on. In the end the only in possession instruction I went for was low crosses as neither Halliday or Hughes were good in the air but both had relatively good off the ball movement.

In transition I haven’t gone for the ever popular counter press as I just don’t feel we have the physicality across the side to adequatley pull this off. It would also upset the defensive structure of the 4-4-2 and leave us open to counter attacks. Given we are going to start most games as favourites we may be playing into our oppositions hands by offering easy counter attacking opportunities. Counter is definitely an option and I have had it on sometimes but it is not something I want to start with in games, if we find ourselves pushed back or ahead early in a game I will certainly tell my players to counter more often but otherwise we will be sensible upon winning the ball. Once again I have only ticked distribute to Full Backs for our Goalkeepers. The reason for this is I really hate just spaffing the ball forward aimlessly especially to small forwards. I feel our attacks are best built through our full backs, If Neale gets it he won’t take risks and we should be able to get the ball to the talented McArthur fairly easily. If the Goalkeeper opts to use Foster, he is very attack minded and has the quality to carry us up the pitch with the help of the wide midfielder on that side.

Out of possession we have already decided we don’t want to play with a high line and this effects our line of engagement as I want the team to remain fairly compact so a mid block is perfectly fine although I do want us to press “More Often” once the opposition reach our block. A new instruction this year is the ability to ask your defensive line to step up or drop back. Initially I left this on default but after a few games I noticed we were conceding a lot of chances to balls over the top. This “issue” was later addressed by SI in a recent update but prior to that I decided to ask my defenders to “drop back” once the press was beaten. I found this largely solved the issue and didn’t impact on the rest of our tactic too much, even before the patch, so I have left it as is since. I certainly think it has helped hide the limitations of my centre backs pretty well. If you are interested in what exactly this new instruction means I recommend checking out the Cult of FM Athletico Madrid save on Youtube where Jack explains it very well. Jack’s stuff is very informative and there are no histrionics that we see from other, more popular, visual content creators, he also works for SI so knows what he is talking about. I’ve enjoyed discovering his channel this year.

Variations

I also set up a variation of the base tactic which I intended to use in games when I believed we were the underdogs or during games when I wanted to hit the opposition on the counter attack. The first big change is the introduction of Ben Arthurs as a Target Forward instead of Deep Lying Forward, Michael Halliday. Consequently I removed the low crosses and now told the team to hit early crosses, if this didn’t produce enough balls in behind I would turn on pass into space. We now also counter upon winning possession, everything else remains the same apart from mentality which I have dropped back to Balanced in this variation.

Results

So how have we done? Well things have been going really well, but to be honest I’m unsure how much is down to me and how much is down to the fact we are one of the favourites for the league anyway.

Those of you still paying attention will have noticed that the vast majority of our goals have come from Jordan Hughes. He has been absolutely fantastic for us, his relative pace in behind defences has caused problems for our opposition in almost every game. A large number of his goals have come from balls over the top of the opposition defence so it may be the case that his effectiveness will be reduced post patch but I haven’t seen any evidence of that so far. My other concern is the fact he is responsible for around 68% of our goals in the league and he could be snapped up by any other club at any time as he only holds an amateur contract with us. Behold his four goals below against Banbridge that included a perfect hat-trick (HEART EMOJI).

At the halfway point of the season Hughes has 32 Goals from 22 starts in all competitions (there are a load of them) outscoring his XG by 12 clear goals which is a fantastic return. Checking out the @FMStag benchmark stats we can see that his chance conversion of 29% is Elite level along with his shots on target per 90. Put these metrics together and you can see why his goal return is so high. My only concern is whether my tactic is capable of producing goals from elsewhere in the side should Hughes move on or get injured, I’m not so sure it does, but for now I will enjoy it while it lasts.

That’s all for now, in the next episode we will see how the season finished and discuss any transfers I manage to make during the January window. It certainly would be nice to get promotion in my first season as a manager!

In the meantime you can catch me on Twitter

Over and Out

FMEadster!