FM12: Half a season with the Quackers

I've played a good half a season with this new game and I'm enjoying it despite the transition period. Darlington is a lower league team (BSP) which I picked because I figured it would be a nice challenging game. Because of their large stadium I thought the room for growth was already there, making this a good candidate for me. On the negative side, this team is pretty lacking on funds, and our facilities are nothing to brag about.

We started off the season with no debt, which at this level I think is actually quite nice. I wasn't given much for buying players, but I don't think this would have been different anywhere else in BSP. Salary wise, I am allowed £14821 but my team was almost maxed out when I got it. I didn't really play smart and ended up keeping the majority of my players (by that I mean everyone), which isn't great for my financial situation. I guess season 1 I'm hoping to just make it to the playoff, and get better for season 2, when I should be able to have more money and ideally better players to get ready for a promotion.

Darlington Arena, as I mentioned is quite big, seating 25k people. The corporate facilities are "good", training facilities are "fairly basic" and I have a "basic youth facility". To compliment that, I have "adequate junior coaching" and "fairly basic youth recruitment". As I said, not great, but I'm hoping this will get better with time.

Tactics wise, I had to play around a bit initially to get a good thing going. I'm embarrassed to say, this too much longer than I'd like but now my formation is the one from the top picture. A simple 4-4-2 with "rigid" philosophy and "attacking" strategy. A few modifications I made to the default 4-4-2 is the Limited Defender I employ at the back, and the use of "defensive" full backs a lot of the time. I'm wondering if this is a wise idea though. In the center nothing unusual, just your average wide midfielders and central mids (one on D and one on Auto). Up front I have a Target man set for support, where usually I keep my favorite striker, Liam Hatch. The other forward is usually a poacher set to attack, in general I try to put less versatile strikers here. I haven't been scoring as much as I would like, so I am still tweaking my attack. My biggest strategic issue for the first few months is the fact I had my team passing more on the short side, and turns out poor sides do better with longer passing options.