Meet the Team. The First Challenge.

First things first, I guess it wouldn’t hurt to have a little background on my RC Strasbourg Alsace playing squad. I’m not going to get into all sorts of narrative detail, as I might have back in my FM Stories days, but I’ll give it a quick once over.

As I mentioned in my opening post, I’m midway through the first season – just entering the winter break, in fact. As things stand my entire playing roster looks like this.

It’s not massively different to the ‘Out of the Box’ squad, should anyone decide to load them up. My budgets were fairly tight, non-existent until I sold in fact, so my early business was limited. I let Gauthier Pinaud go to CA Bastia, a bit of a gamble as he looks a decent player but he was one of a number clearly unsettled by my arrival; their offer would at least give me some cash to play with. My only other exit didn’t come until the winter window, with a teenage goalkeeper (Dylan Ruer) heading off to FC Metz.

New Year's Revolution

As 2014 draws near I’ve come to a conclusion, and one that is something of a strange one to admit to. For many years I’ve played Sports Interactive’s Football (previously Championship) Manager Series, but despite being very successful I don’t think that I’ve often been very good at it. 

I started out with the 97/98 incarnation of Championship Manager, albeit that I picked it up a couple of years after its release as a bargain bucket purchase. I was hooked. Back then it seemed that all you needed to do was pick a formation and get the right players for it. There wasn’t a lot more to it than that; I picked Ipswich, added in Björn Heidenström and Ibrahim Bakayoko, and that was as good as job done. Okay so I may be over simplifying a bit, but it is only a bit.

I didn’t stick with 97/98 for long, moving on to the classic 01/02 edition as my first ‘new release’ purchase. A 22 season rampage with Blackburn Rovers saw the beginning of my support for that particular club – I’d always been an armchair neutral until then – and shortly after I began a save with Northampton Town which saw me begin writing about the game.

My writing was largely creative, for the SI Games forums – specifically the Stories Forum. I found it a great way to immerse myself in the game and make it come more alive. In 2010 I hung up my keyboard on the stories forum, having enjoyed great ‘success’ on the writing front, and mixed results in the game(s).