True Football Manager

After winter transfers I got the same problem as I had in the very beginning of the season – poor teamwork between old an new players. Vicente, Niculae, Taison and Blasi were bought to be the main squad Leeds players. And I started to use them in the main squad with the first matches.

Leeds matches

Actually the first one was against Fulham when we won with 3-1 score. But only Marius Niculae took part in it. Then other newbies started to participate in the matches. And as a result all next 4 games were not won:

Well, of course, 3 of them were very tough against grand clubs of English football (Man City, Man Utd, Arsenal). And we even managed to get a draw with Premier League leading team - Manchester City. It was lucky one with 23 shots vs 5 shots from our side!

Anyway I felt my guys got problems in understanding one another due to 4 newcomers in the starting squad (though Blasi was injured and played only once). Sure, it’s temporary problem and teamwork should increase closer to the season’s end.

 

Best victory and worst defeat

And now I want to boast the most impressive Leeds victory during this season:

Goals of Mark Beevers and Jermaine Beckford were decisive in this match. It was very nice styled performance by my footballers. I used Counter strategy, 3-5-2 formation (moved AMR to MR in this game) and Pass to Space touchline instruction to achieve that.  And I wouldn’t say Chelsea had a high advantage by shots:

The worst game was against Middlesbrough where I had sold Oscar Trejo for $17M. Trejo scored twice and burned my hopes of getting to the 5th round of FA cup. Leeds board minimal expectation was getting the 5th round… If you look at the stats below you’ll see that they made 4 shots on target (all goals!) and we made 8 shots on target having 7(!) Clear Cut Chances. Janczyk scored only once failing 3 other goal moments…

 

Finally - Premier League table:

 

I think we are on the right course.

 

Verratti and other players

You know I have a young leader in the team – Marco Verratti. He is an absolute wonderkid! I managed to buy him one year ago (previous winter transfer window), and what I want from you – try to compare his values of attributes now and year ago:

Current attribute values

One year before

His growth during trainings is really amazing!!! I haven’t seen anything like that before in any previous  version of Football Manager!!! Pay attention Verratti is only 19 at the moment. And, of course, he has already got many European clubs interested in his person. Therefore I set up asking price to $99M :

Don’t want to loss my Italian “Cesc Fabregas”!

 

Traditionally I provide you with players stats of the whole first team:

Good thing that Taison and Niculae started to score goals from the very start of their Leeds careers! Due to poor performance of other forwards – Carroll, Janczyk and Beckford -  and also transfer of Trejo, central defender David Prieto took leadership among goal scorers . All 8 goals were created during corners.

 

News about patch 10.3

I want to share the latest news about Football Manager patch 10.3 if you don’t know. The patch along with the January data update is expected to be released around the end of February/early March. Here the official link of the news - http://community.sigames.com/showthread.php?t=188308.

 

Previous posts about season #3 of Leeds:

Squad changes during winter transfer window

Complicated Premier League start

Leeds transfers before the 1st season in Premier League

Before return to Premier League…

Hello my dear readers! Today’s post is devoted to the second Leeds transfer campaign which I suddenly decided to take during winter transfer window.

I have to confess the transfers before the season were not the best. Some of you criticized me even. But don’t forget - I am an ordinary man and do mistakes pretty often. But anyway I can’t say about Leeds new players that they are not useful. The most disappointing summer transfer is Titus Bramble currently. Regarding Andy Carroll I hope he will adapt and prove me his significance.

 

Players out

If you want buy new players you should sell old players It’s the common rule when you have no money for transfers.

The point is in that I spent remainder of transfer money to edit budgets and increase limit of wages. Therefore I had to sell several Leeds players. But actually I was happy about that because there are many of them who don’t correspond to high Premier League level.

(all transfers are in US dollars - $)

The most noticeable transfer – Oscar Trejo to Middlesbrough for $17.75M. You probably remember Trejo was “the best of the worst” among Leeds strikers. Several clubs wanted to buy him and his price was about $9.5M. I merely set transfer value to $17.25M and offered Trejo to clubs. Middlesbrough was among those who agreed to pay such high amount of money.

By the way, Trejo has already managed to score two goals in Middlesbrough – Leeds encounter in FA Cup But I’ll share more details about the match in one of the next posts.

Adel Taarabt was one of the leading players in the previous Championship season. It turned out that he is not able to show good performance at the highest league level.

Another Leeds AMC – Neil Kilkenny – has almost similar story with the only difference he played is more versatile than Taarabt and can tackle the ball and perform nice long shots. But anyway he was still pretty young and I didn’t want to miss chance selling Neil for good money of $8.25M.

 

Players in

Here they are:

(all transfers are in US dollars - $)

Djorje Babic, Steve Williams (regen) and Victor Perez were signed for reserve team and future development during trainings.

Other four players were bought with intention to increase strength of the first squad.

Manuele Blasi

Blasi was transfer listed. And I won not really high competition for his person. His experience and excellent mental skills will certainly make our midfield more wise. Hope Manuele will be a real ball winner!

Vicente

Another well-known player. There was a time when he was really successful in Valencia and Spanish national team. But now Vicente is pushed out the main squad by David Silva and Oscar Serrano. Therefore he appeared at the transfer list in my game and I seized on this opportunity to increase attacking force of ML position. It’s important because I am not that impressed by attacking crosses and other actions of Matty Taylor.

Marius Niculae

And now – drum roll! Marius Niculae! The most old blog readers should remember him by his importance for my Southampton in Football Manager 2008. Marius is one of the legendary players of this blog. If you don’t then read the following posts and you’ll understand why I love this guy and decided to spent money in spite of his age:

- Unbelievable and dramatic season ending. Back in Premier League!

- Pretty season ending by Southampton - we are 13th!

- Finishing the season... Little progress by Southampton

- Starting New Season: the First Achievements

- New Strength in Premier League - Southampton!

Marius Niculae will be rotated together with Andy Carroll at the left central forward position with role of Target Man.

Taison

The most important transfer. Sure I think Taison has to better than Oscar Trejo. He possesses high Pace, Acceleration, Anticipation, Flair, Finishing, Agility, Creativity… It allows to make conclusion that he is most dangerous forward of Leeds potentially.

First of all I would like to offer you to read this interview - http://fm-legends.co.cc/2010/01/27/interviewing-a-football-manager-idol-for-you-vitaliy-mokosiy/

Samir Batista, the author of FM-Legends, interviewed me asking many interesting questions. So if you want to know more about me and my Football Manager experience just read it using the link above

 

Bosnia & Herzegovina, Euro 2012 qualification

The main point of this post is my first matches as manager of Bosnia & Herzegovina national team.

In this post I showed you that my team on the 4th position in the group. It’s a pity but in the end we went down to the 5th position…

I played only 4 matches. And I was feeling myself quite confident after two first games against Andorra and Serbia. Especially Serbia. It was excellent work to beat rival and more strong national team with 2:1 score. Though the game was equal.

But then we lost both matches to Norway and Greece…

The most sad was loss in the last match when we had quite high advantage by shots. 17 against 8!

But Bosnian defence is weak and couldn’t compete with keen counter attacks by Greece. It’s the main problem for me now. Don’t really know what to do at the moment…

In all 4 matches I have been using attacking 4-3-1-2 tactics. By the way Miralem Pjanic missed the last game due to injury and therefore Misimovic is at AMC position on the screen shot.

Defenders of Bosnia and Herz. are really weak. My conclusion: probably I should start thinking to change this tactics on more defensive one. There can be several cases of defensive formations:

- 4 defenders + 1 DMC

- 5 defenders in line

- 3 defenders + DMC + DML + DMR

- 5 defenders + DMC

- 4 defenders + 2 DMC

It’s always interesting to know opinion of FM community when I entangle such kind of complicated question. What would you advice me?

In short, my Leeds United started the Premier League season rather poorly.

League table

Only 15 points instead of at least 20 points expected by me in the very beginning of the season. Well, 16th position is not so bad anyway and board won’t sack me for that.

Interesting fact that Man City and Man United are on the top and Arsenal is only the 6th.

 

Let’s analyze matches

Yes, let’s analyze, and we’ll find out reasons of lost matches

But at first I would like to boast the most unexpected victory of my team – the one against The Gunners:

A red card shown to Eboue was the decisive moment of the game. Just right after the incident Leeds newcomers scored 2 goals. The first one was tragic for Almunia because he didn’t manage to catch ball from curled free kick from David Beckham and Andy Carroll was the first to strike the ball to a net. Then marvellous long shot by Matty Taylor amazed Leeds fans and brought us the first historical victory over English grand-club in Premier League.

But there were only 4 victories in 19 matches. The most games were lost to other Premier League clubs. I want to show you one interesting thing. Here are 3 screenshots:

 

If you are attentive you may notice equal amount of shots made by Leeds and opponent team in every game. What conclusion can we do being based on this fact? Leeds forwards were bad in dangerous moments realization. Look, there were 6 clear cut chances in “Leeds – Aston Villa 0:4” match!!! So my attack is a problem #1 now

The second but no so keen problem is defence. Sometimes Leeds defenders make errors but in the most cases they are fooled by opponent attackers of higher quality. 

By the way the worst Leeds match was League cup 2:5 loss to rival Sheffield United. I was really angry!

 

Let’s analyze players

Here is the full list of Leeds squad sorted by average player rating:

There are only several persons whose performances meet the case of Premier League:

- David Prieto. My best and quite reliable central defender, the one who is able to score from corners pretty often.

- Marco Verratti. Rising star, Leeds playmaker. His attributes grow very fast during trainings.

- Jonathan Howson. The best Leeds player who was in the squad from the very first season.

- Vincent Enyanma. Confident keeper making saves-miracles sometimes. He considered the best player in the squad by assistant manager.

- Adolphe Teicou. He is consistent performer though I am not sure about him because he had a long-termed injury and participated only in 7 matches.

Other players of Leeds United doesn’t reach that level at the current moment. And, as I have already written, the biggest problem is our attack. I would like to make some kind of forwards rating:

1. Oscar Trejo. 14(5) – 5 goals, 2 assists.

2. Andy Carroll. 14(2) – 5 goals.

3. Jermaine Beckford. 5(5) – 1 goal, 1 assist.

4. Dawid Janczyk. 11(2) – 1 goal, 1 assist.

Dawid Janczyk

It’s stunning to see Janczyk (the best Leeds player of the previous season!) at the last position of this rating. I don’t know what’s happened with him. He cannot merely score goals. Pepe Reina or Craig Gordon, for instance, made saves after his strikes without serious problems. Look at Janczyk shot statistics:

He had 15 shorts on target and only 1 goal! I am going to repeat myself – I don’t know what’s happened with him

Jermaine Beckford

The same can be said about Beckford. He is really explosive forward and outruns opponent’s defence quite often. But when he comes out one-on-one with goalkeeper he is not able to perform good curled shot. Then ball is easily caught by keeper. Beckford’s attempts to score look even funny and that makes me angryHis shot statistics:

Andy Carroll

The transfer of Carroll became the most discussed one due to high price paid - $14.5M. And I can’t say he proved that he is worth that money. Let’s look at his shot statistics:

He has better percentage of goals than Janczyk and Beckford but his ability to shot on target suffers undoubtedly. We’ll see how he will perform in the second half of the season when Leeds team play will get better.

Oscar Trejo

Obviously he has the best statistics among all strikers. But I still don’t really like it. Trejo can perform better and can score more I believe. If he doesn’t increase his effectiveness Trejo will find himself on substitution bench.

 

Weird calendar

Some humour in the end. Look at these 6 home matches in row:

Isn’t it weird?