1.23 - Wilmslow Mega Titans

23.

Moss Side Celtic 0 - Wilmslow Mega Titans 3 (Nugent 14, Collins 19, Musa 30)

Second Half

The Mega Titans had some flaws:

• They were set up in a standard 4-4-2 but had a defender and a midfielder playing as strikers. Obviously these were the loudest, bossiest guys who had decided they could best serve the team by scoring all the goals and claiming all the glory. Meanwhile, they had natural strikers playing at right-back and right-mid. In short, their right side was built on sand. I instructed my team to play towards our left so we could attack these out-of-position dudes.
• They only had one sub, but we had three. We had more fresh legs than a French restaurant! If I used them well, we'd be quids in, especially in the last ten minutes.
• They didn't have me as manager. Roar! (A moment of fake confidence that I'm sure you'll permit, but seriously - they didn't have a manager of any kind. They'd be much slower responding to my tweaks, if they could respond at all.)

As always with these Sunday League games, the ball started deflecting around like the pitch was a huge pinball machine. I started tweaking everyone's individual passing instructions. Guys with decent passing and technique got to play mixed passes, i.e. they could try long ones when it made sense, while those with low numbers had to keep it short. It's actually not easy to play short passes, but the success rate is obviously much, much higher on a 5-yard pass than a 50-yard one. Amazingly, the pinball effect subsided and we actually kept the ball a little bit. Not like a Premier League team, and far far even from FC United. But it wasn't that bad! No manager had ever been so pleased by so little!

A quick comment on the players. Everyone on the pitch had CA 1. (Their PA didn't matter for this particular game, but no-one had a PA higher than 5.) So managing them was all about putting them in the right slots and asking them to do things - or stop doing things - depending on their attributes. Now, this wasn't exactly me testing myself in a curse-free environment but if I (hypothetically) managed these guys every week for a few months I'd surely get a curse-adjacent idea of their abilities. From that point of view, the curse was just a shortcut.

Was I deluding myself? Hard to say. (But yes. I was totally telling myself what I wanted to hear.)

That said, the main benefit of the curse was seeing CA and PA. Finding new, better players. If I could get a tune out of the players I already had, that would be me and not the curse, right? I could think of myself as a craftsman, as well as a trader. Making soup out of old leather would give me the self-belief to think that I was bringing some skills to the kitchen.

The game was going well. Mega Titans started the half confidently, and they were dashing around trying to get the ball off us. But every time we put together 3, 4, 5 passes, they wasted more calories chasing us, and they started to sense that something had changed. One change was incredibly obvious - on our side there was absolutely no bickering of any kind. We weren't exactly 300 Spartans defending our homeland, but we were all pulling in the same direction. Every player was trying to carry out my instructions to the best of his ability with no thought of status and no word of complaint. Now that was 100% the curse.

We got a corner and I had to decide to play the free hit or not. Getting an early goal would have hugely changed the match dynamic. But I hadn't been idle since the FC United match - I'd done some research and found that, at best, 3% of corners led to a goal. Using the free hit on a corner was a waste, an act of desperation. If my tinkering with the team worked, we'd be playing in the opposition half, and would inevitably get free kicks. A penalty, even.

Smith fires in the corner.

But he hits the first defender.

Hmm. That corner had been abysmal. In the FC United game, I'd used Gribbin as my set piece taker and he'd turned out to have wicked delivery. In this game, I had no clue who to use. After some thought, I selected the guy with the highest technique and put him on set pieces. The guy with the highest finishing got penalty-taking duties.

Five minutes passed. Ten. We were in control of the game and the Mega Titans seemed baffled that we weren't trying for offsides. Their strikers pushed up the pitch, but our defenders simply tracked them. When the strikers got the ball, there were always at least two defenders between them and our goalkeeper. They didn't have much of an idea of what to do. Maybe their strikers would have known, but they were playing out of position!

Talking of which, I made my first substitution. My first real substitution ever!

I had a fast right-winger and put him on the left with instructions to attack attack attack. I'd have traded 50 XP for a jet-heeled left-sided player, but I had to use what I had.

Soon, my whizzkid started tormenting the striker who was playing as a defender. To be fair, sometimes my right-footed guy would look extremely uncomfortable on the left side of the pitch, and he did dribble the ball straight out of play a couple of times. But a few other times he sped past the defender and either shot or crossed the ball.

One of these crosses led to:

Wiggins dribbles past Hoolihan.

Wiggins leaves him for dead!

Wiggins is free on the left side.

He tries a cross.

It's blocked!

Wiggins collects the rebound.

He floats it to the far post.

Okoje is there!

GOOOOOOAAAAAALLLLL!

As we celebrated, the Mega Titans huddled together and reshuffled their team. I saw it on the tactics page. They swapped their full-backs around. Is that it? You're not going to fix the real problem with your team?

Well, fuck you guys.

I told Wiggins to move onto the right, where he would still be against the out-of-position striker but now Wiggins would be on his favoured side. This was going to be brutal! And I made my other two subs, keeping the energy levels up and replacing a square peg with an oval one. Slightly better! John made some weird noises - apparently I'd subbed off a player who threw tantrums if you ever changed him. This time, he was good as gold. Not a peep out of the guy.

We had our first real setback, then. We were passing the ball around, moving it over to the left. With a groan, I realised that I'd forgotten to change our pattern of play and my guys were still under instructions to attack down that side. But the Titans weren't as weak on that side anymore; their new right-back was pretty solid. He cut out one of our attacks and boofed the ball down the pitch where, after a couple of unlucky bounces and one missed header, the defender playing as a striker scored a goal.

We were losing 4-1.

It was my fault. John was whispering - a stage whisper meant to be heard - to the players who had come off the pitch about how stupid it was not to play offside. It didn't bother me - I knew the chain of events. I knew what had really happened. It was interesting John couldn't see it, though. It was so, so obvious.

I changed our focus so that we'd attack down the right, and we were back off.

Now the action was coming thick and fast, and it was 80% in our favour. We had shots, we had half-chances.

Wiggins wasn't running the game like Gribbin had done. If Gribbin had been a puppeteer, masterfully tweaking three strings at a time, then Wiggins was a cheap, radio-controlled car. Much too fast for its own good, but when you lined everything up perfectly it went like the devil.

And we were using him again and again. He had fresh legs - the Titans were starting to run on fumes.

Chance after chance, and then, finally! A goal. AND ANOTHER!

We were 4-3 down but the most comfortable 4-3 of all time. I didn't have to use the tactics board - things were, finally, optimised. Still, though, I yelled some random football things every now and then. One part 'get in you slag' to two parts 'Mikey! Watch the underlaps. The underlaps!' It was just theatre. A grand performance, five stars, must see, played for the benefit of one man - John. Fucker didn't even pay for a ticket.

But time was running out. Ten minutes left and the Titans reorganised their defence again. I left Wiggins on the right - he was having a lovely old time. So there wasn't anything for me to do but watch... and hope.

And finally, the moment. Wiggins went zooming after a long pass, and one of the defenders - sick of seeing this happen again and again - lost his shit. He rushed over and hacked the winger down. Penalty!

Now, I knew that Wiggins was never going to catch that ball, and Wiggins knew it. But the referee gave the penalty anyway. Fair enough, I suppose. You can't just go round kicking people.

My striker put the ball on the penalty spot. I slammed the free hit button harder than anyone has ever slapped an invisible button that only they can see.

The guy stepped forward…

And the fucker hit the post.

The fucker only went and hit the post.

With the free hit, that was a 90% chance of a goal.

What are the odds of failing a 90% shot? It's like, one in a million, right?

I just stood there, quietly fuming, staring at the centre spot so that I'd keep getting XP while I stewed. It wasn't the striker's fault. He was a CA 1 amateur. Nobody had ever taught him how to take a penalty. Maybe he'd never taken one in his life before.

It was ridiculous to be mad at him. But at full time, when I saw him having a laugh with the other team's goalkeeper, I could have smacked his face all the way off his face.

He wasn’t serious. He wasn’t committed. If football showed character, then this guy was half-assing life.

It pissed me off.

I thanked John, who I knew was relieved that his team had lost, and wandered off, wondering why I was so upset.