As has become tradition, well, for the second year running, the blog squad bought each other random football shirts for Secret Santa.  I was lucky enough to receive this beauty from King of the Rook (Andrew Chapman), a Gateshead keepers jersey. 

Along with the gift, I now needed to create a blog.  Gateshead are non-league on CM9798, so I moved them into Division 3 to replace Macclesfield (I think) and begin my five-season adventure.  The rules and challenge are simple enough:

Challenge:

• How far can you get in five seasons, starting with a team full of grey players?

Rules:

• PSR, I can only spend 75% of the money I make through player sales and prize money.  I’ve made a handy little spreadsheet to ensure compliance.
• No using the loan trick to mitigate the big club release clause.

I load up the English, Spanish and Italian leagues and get going.

So here we are, this is my starting squad and an untouchable £100k in the bank, no loans here, PSR dictates than I will need to make money to spend money.

To begin with I can only sign free transfers due to my self-enforced PSR hurdle.  It doesn’t get off to the best of starts, local veteran Mick Gooding preferring a move to Belgium in exchange for the Colonel’s secret blend of 11 herbs and spices.

Bazza takes his luscious locks off to Grimsby and Richie will talk to anyone but us!  A real positive start to building a squad in time for the first game of the season.

Despite the challenges we manage to bring in 13 players before our first match, however Dalian decides this is unlucky and promptly injures himself and the right back Micky Bennett in training so that we had 11 real players for match day one and a bench full of greys.  Atkinson is out for 3 months!!  I have managed to draft in some old faithful’s, The Micker, G-Tom, and Patty B always go well, the rest are more of an unknown, however Tony Rees did score a load of goals in a previous safe I had, but his stats are very random.

I line up for our first league game, at home to Torquay in this formation, you will see I have five subs, I used CMX to change this so that all English competitions had five on the bench, I’m not sure why, I just felt like I should, so I did.

Fatigued from their long journey we manage to get a 2-1 victory to start this all off.  I then make a few more free transfer signings, including ex-England internationals Danny Wallace and Mark Chamberlain.

Things start of quite well, and despite losing to Charlton in the League Cup over two legs we are unbeaten in the League by the end of page one of the fixtures and results section.  See the handy colour coded picture below, it’s six wins and six draws giving us a total of 24 points out of a possible 36, not bad for a squad assembled in roughly three and a bit weeks.

Some notable matches in this period were:

Our 5-0 thumping away at Swansea, thanks to a Micker hat-trick.

Beating League One Charlton at home in the 2^nd leg of the League Cup

Throwing away a 3-1 half time lead at home to Scarborough.

Beginning our Auto Windscreen adventure with an away victory at Spotland, home of Super Ted’s best mate Spotty Man.

And the 5-0 thumping of Colchester, where their centre back got MOM!

By mid-October I’m starting to realise I may have assembled the most ill-disciplined bunch free transfers available.  Leading the way, The Micker, who is going trying to match every goal scored with at least one disciplinary point.

Despite the ill-discipline and enforced squad rotation fixtures and results page two shows no red dots and when you look back at results page one you can see in the first 30 games we have played, we have only lost one!

For some reason I failed to take many screenshots of these specific matches, but as can be seen we have made it through to the third round of the FA Cup after scraping past Blackpool on the second attempt and then demolishing Lincoln at home.  We are also in the third round of the Auto Windscreen Shield after a mad game against Wigan, which I did screenshot.  After Atkinson equalising the 89^th minute it ended up in a shoot-out, despite Atkinson and Rees doing their best to sabotage the match it goes into sudden death at 3-3.  Then the AI decides that Patty Bonner should take penalty six, he scores and then saves the next one and we are somehow and quite unexpectedly through!

As we reach the halfway point in the League season we are unexpectedly flying, closely followed by Chester, with Swansea and Hull a little way further back.

Despite being un-beaten I make a formational shift to the tried and tested 2-3-1-2-2 for the second half of the season.

Here are the stats so far.  The Micker leading the way in goals and assists, Tomlinson not yet attracting attention despite the solid stats, but Billy Woods’ assists and Micky Bennett’s consistency are attracting scouts from the leagues above.  Andy May and Richard Walker have been immense and fortunately neither has a release clause.

Fixtures and results page three is overwhelmingly positive despite suffering our first loss in the league away to Exeter on boxing day. 

Matty Bound too busy dreaming about his plate of Christmas leftovers gets sent off, conceding a penalty in the 24^th minute as we lead 2-0.  By half time it is 2-2 and we can’t hold out with 10 men in the 2^nd half.

We also make our first meaningful sale as Micky Bennett departs for Premier League West Ham!? for £1.2 million.

We beat Reading 3-1 in the FA Cup third round, which I again fail to document, which sets up a 4^th round tie away to Sunderland.  Despite our best efforts we concede a goal in the final 10 minutes of the match and lose 2-3.

The Auto Windscreen shield however is where we really shine.  After our penalty shootout victory against Wigan we draw other local rivals Hartlepool in the Area Quarter Finals.  Danny Wallace scores the only goal of the game in the 37^th minute as we edge through to the Area Semis.

Rotherham in the semi-finals are brushed aside easily, setting up a two-legged Area Final against Oldham.  Two matches from Wembley and three games away from a potential season one trophy.

Here are the rest of the results from page three, our loss against Exeter and the draw with Shrewsbury are only dropped points in the league mean we are on course for promotion to Division two.

As the transfer window draws to a close some of the big-club release clauses finally get activated, assist king Billy Woods, disappointing Dalian, ever consistent Lee Norfolk and the big GT all make +£1,000,000 moves meaning we have some money to spend.

I make three purchases with this newfound wealth, 16 year old Martin is one of Partick Thistle’s exceedingly good younger players and cost £375k.  Neil Woods was playing well, can operate as an AMC or an FC and was only £95k. Graeme Jones was scoring goals for fun and so half a million seemed reasonable.  Finally Tony Warner was brought in to replace the aging Paddy B and some guy called Brian Linighan who after research is Andy’s brother. Anyway sub two million for five players after making over six million seemed like good business. Unfortunately…..

Sub two million for four players doesn’t seem as good a deal. With Atkinson’s replacement Jones breaking his pelvis after one match! What are we doing in training that is putting someone’s pelvis at risk?

Tony Rees and Neil Woods will need to step up their games. Unfortunately we fail to fully galvanize under this newfound responsibility we lose 300 % more league games in the final 13 league matches than in the first 33.  However, it’s not all doom and gloom, we only draw 2 and therefore win the other eight bringing in 26 points from a possible 39, enough to see us crowned league champions with 106 points and 128 goals scored.

But what of the Auto Windscreen you ask, well before Tomlison left for Aberdeen towards the end of March him and the Micker helped us to breeze past Oldham, two beautifully scripted goals from Wordsworth their only positives over the two legs.

This means we are off to Wembley in season 1 to face League Two champions Fulham in the final.  It couldn’t have started any better, Mark Chamberlain scoring in the first minute and Paul Bracewell being sent off for Fulham in the 19^th minute.  However, just before half time new keeper Tony Warner concedes a penalty and gets send off for the privilege, so it’s 1-1 and 10 vs 10 at half time.  Danny Wallace scores in the 58^th minute to make in 2-1 before Fulham equalise again in the 70^th minute and we head to a tense extra-time. 

Actually, not that tense, Danny Wallace scores his second in the 92 minute and apparently in was sudden death extra time, didn’t know about that.  Division three champions and Auto Windscreen shield winners in season one!

Here are the rest of the results from the season.

Here are the season stats, in the end The Micker scores three more goals than disciplinary points, however we are clearly a pretty mean bunch!

A quick look at the top three average ratings, CB Richie Walker, CB come MC Andy May and of course The Micker.

A look at the PSR sheet, documenting all player purchases, sales and prize money, free transfers not included.  Demis Ohandjanian was brought in just before the season updated to 98/99.  Going into season two we have a healthy £4.5 million at our disposal.

Finally, the season awards sheet unsurprisingly we don’t win the FA Fair Play award.  We do however have the Division 2 and 3 top scorers on our books despite Graeme only playing one game for us and missing the rest of the season due to his pulverised pelvis.  Most shocking of all is Vialli getting the manager of the year award rather than being sacked a month or two into the season.

Join next week for season two.