FM12: Promotion from Blue Square Bet Premier (BSP)

Another season over, and a good one at that. After a rough patch near the end of the regular season, we managed to stay in 5th, enough to get us to the playoffs. Once we got there we eliminated Luton as I mentioned on the previous post, which led us to the final againstal Forest Green at Old Trafford.

The game wasn't as exciting as the Luton one, but we still managed to provide the fans with a bit of a spectacle, they were definitely pleased. We started the game playing a bit defensively, but managed a nice goal in the first 5 minutes from a counter attack. Aaron Brown was the scorer. Tiago Sala from Forest Green managed a comeback at 13min from a header. At 33min we scored again, with Darwin Perez and then once again just before half-time. The second half wasn't as eventful, but the opposition did manage to score a second goal with Erik Opsahl at 83min. That wasn't enough however to get them into the game again.

Overall, I'd say this was a good season. We even managed to get our finances back to a reasonable place. We finished it with 104,726 pounds on the green, which will definitely help next season when we will need to step up the quality of our game.

FM12: good playoff start in 2013

Well, well, well... The end of this season didn't go as smoothly as I predicted. For some reason we ended up losing a lot of easy games towards the last few fixtures, but we still managed 5th place, which was just enough to make it to the playoffs. Unfortunately, that led us to the top team, Luton, which has been a bit of a pain to deal with before, was our first challenged for the second promotion spot. Last season, if you remember, they were the ones that eliminated us.

Well this season was different. After a cagy first game draw 2x2, we went to play away with Luton for the final. We changed to a 4-5-1 for this game and after 90 minutes we were still tied 1x1. I thought we would have to hold and prey for a penalty shoot-out. Hatch had other plans, and he scored a very opportunistic goal in the first period of OT, which put us in a very comfortable position. We just had to hold on to the score after that point. It was a really great game, and we are now off to the final.

FM12: Playing Arsenal at home

This season has been alright for Darlington, however, I thought we would be doing a little bit better than we are. We had a shaky start but thinks got better as we played more games. On the league we are currently in 4th place, which is good for our goal of getting promoted this season. We just need to keep it up for a few more months. Aside from that we unfortunately ended up losing to Grimsby 0x2 on the 2nd round of the FA Trophy, which apparently pissed off the board. However, to make up for that we had some amazing results in the FA cup. We were not supposed to get past Scunthorpe in the 3rd round of the competition, but we ended up tying the first game and winning our home game. We did not expect this great of a result. This led us to a 4th round game against Arsenal, which was crazy. We had no illusions about getting kicked out of the competition by them, however such a big club brough a full house to our game, which luckily was at home. We had 25033 people watching our game, not even counting TV viewers. This brought us a total of 535608 pounds for just one game, which is such an amazing boost for our finances, we even managed to come out of the red. Currently we have 220K in balance, which might even be enough to keep us afloat to the end of the season. If we do well, we might even be able to spend some more money on salaries next season. What a great thing this Arsenal game was.

FM12: no you can't work in this country!

 After a very solid pre-season campaign, for some reason we didn't actually have a good start. On the positive side, at least our attendance has been improving from last season though. We have also made quite a few changes to the roster, with the addition of some great new loans as well as a few contracted players. Of which I would highlight Franco Miranda (WL/ML), who is quite well rounded and should bring something positive to the team. Loris Karius (GK), who was cut from Manchester City, and I had to snatch him. He's a young goalie with a lot of promise, I think he could easily become our new starting goalie in time. I didn't know who else to show here since I actually like most of our new players, so I picked the Brazillian forward with a lot of good physical attributes Edicarlos (ST).

I also learned that I can't just hire a lot of Brazillians if they don't have appropriate work permit, which made it so I couldn't pick up about half of the players I tried out during pre-season. The lesson there, make sure players are allowed to play for you before you invest yourself emotionally to them.