Hello and welcome to my latest CM9798 craze. Craze? Possibly not. But let’s get to the point. In CM9798, a lot of the lesser-known nations can be made playable. In this case my designated task is to take over the ‘golden generation’ of Georgian football. Arveladze, Kinkladze, Kavelashvili and co.

Here are the best 25 of the 28 Georgian players in the database. Schkeidze is very handy. His ability is almost as good as Kinkladze. We’ll have to keep Lob-j-nidze and Kiknadze apart, it could get a bit beyond the watershed, more like watery eyes.

The immediate task in hand is to learn about the players and stay in a job, as we cannot progress to France ’98.

We’ve got Italy, Moldova and Poland to play. We need a favour from a terrible Moldova to move up one place. Not. Gonna. Happen. Immediately, one of the worst things that can happen does.

We’re kicking the hoardings in disbelief. And given Kinkladze plays at Man City, we’ll not see him play much due to the dreaded ‘Clu’ curse. First stop France, and its an unmitigated fucking disaster. We held our own for 11 minutes then Schkeidze handballs outside the box. That we managed to score 2 with 10-men is arguably decent here.

Kavelashvili immediately picks up an injury in training for his current club, ‘Free Transfer’…Making the job to deal with Italy needlessly harder.

It went so well; the FA are unhappy.

What a kick in the nadze. It’s not really, he’s shit.

We produce an outcome similar to what England manage against the same opposition; promising.

Kav is the man. He is also our only out and out forward. The rest are FC or FRL. We should have had double figures.

Next up Poland who we can’t now finish above. We win, and Shota gets an injury. But we’re proving we can handle mid-level sides with relative ease.68,000 Georgians go home with a smile on their face.

Our World Cup story finishes as anticipated. A 66%-win ratio from our performances so far. I’ll take that.

If we can pull an okay draw for the Euro’s I’ll be happy. We move on to more exploring what the team can deliver against decent opposition.

We face a derby against Russia without our two key midfield players.

We throw in the unknowns. As The Beatles said, ‘get back’ and as they didn’t say ‘fucking get innnnnn’. Given Russia have made it to the World Cup finals, this is a superb result. Jamarauli celebrates by poncing around in a massive hat.

So, the 1997 preparation has been successful in my eyes. We know our best players; we know who the good and bad backups are. And we know this man is carrying us.

We also know that we’ll maintain this shape until we hit another roadblock. But onwards to 1998 and the start of Euro 2000 qualification. See you next time!