A tale of cigarettes, grappa, time travel and hopefully goals
Season 2 – 1998/99
We finished season one with Dario Jnr having helped Venezia secure promotion to the top flight of Italian football, meaning the little Bisonte will be playing in Serie A 13 years earlier than D Snr, or depending on how you try and explain time travel, a season later. I can’t figure out if we are ahead of schedule or behind. Does the future that the Old Tatanka lived even exist anymore? Let’s not worry about it.
Venezia made a fair bit of money last year selling players and they know they will need to strengthen their squad if they are to compete. Fortunately, there are some quality bargains in the transfer market.
A tale of cigarettes, grappa, time travel and hopefully goals
Season 1 – 1997/98
The idea behind this save is a simple one, Dario Hubner has travelled back in time to see if his professional career would have been different if he had been, well, a bit more professional. The man lovingly nicknamed Tatanka or Bisonte didn’t sign a professional contact until he was 22 years old, and he didn’t play in Serie A until he was 30.
What he did manage, in the 2001/02 season, despite his fondness for smoking cigarettes and drinking grappa, was to become, at the age of 35, the joint top scorer in Serie A, scoring 24 goals for Piacenza. He missed out on the opportunity to play for Italy in the 2002 World Cup, despite the Italian public being keen to see him in an Azzurri shirt, Trapattoni didn’t select him. He also went on a tour of the USA in the summer of 2002 with Milan, however Ancelotti was put off by his smoking. Who would have thought?
As I understand it Dario is quite happy with his career and doesn’t regret anything. Fortunately for CM9798 blog readers I’m not of the same option, after all I’ve witnessed him score 16 goals in 9 games for Real Madrid as part of a side of uncapped superstars.
We join the story at the start of the 1997/98 season, Dario Snr has travelled back in time (it’s not really important how this was possible) and convinced 16 year old Dario Jnr to travel to Venice in the year 1997 to begin his career a new, at Venezia. Why Venezia, why not? After all they have a pretty groovy orange and green home kit in the game.
Its Friday! Rob’s experiment reaches the end of the first season
We begin the final part of this epic trilogy with a tale of retribution, at the beginning of this adventure we travelled to Valencia and were beaten 5-1 in the most even of games. It is fair to say that thanks to Lards and Mori, Spain’s perpetual substitutes we atone for that most unfair result.
Bonjour! French Friday is not a thing, especially as Rob is in Spain with the UnCapticos. It’s a superb concept but are the results equally as good?
We return to the Bernabeu for the second instalment of Lorenzo Sanz’s experiment. The basic gist being, if you want to play for Real Madrid you can’t play for your country. At the end of part one we lost D Hubbs, after scoring 16 goals in 9 games, he decided to captain Italy to a 5-2 defeat. Japhet N’D is so upset at the loss of the Bison he goes out on a massive bender in Madrid and tares a calf muscle while dancing on a table. He is out for three months, not helpful Japhet, not helpful at all, his 9 goal and 9 assists in 13 games will be missed.
Another bit of bad news, Iuliano and Di Biagio get called up to the Italy squad for the World Cup qualifying playoff match so we will have a nervous wait to see if we will be saying goodbye to another two players. We put that out of our minds for now, it’s a Champions League night and Partizan Belgrade are in town. The match doesn’t pose too many problems and despite D Hubbs departure we continue to fire in the goals, although Partizan are probably not the most challenging of opponents.
Well what do we have here. Rob’s back! Remember Rob? What’s he up to?
July 1st 1997, Real Madrid have won La Liga with a side full of international talent, however it hasn’t all been plain sailing. Manager Fabio Capello and Club President Lorenzo Sanz had multiple fallings out during the season and Cappello has left after just a year in charge. Lorenzo has decided enough is enough, Los Blancos need to change direction. The Galacticos are becoming the Un-capt-icos, but what does mean? Lorenzo tells the other board members.
They can’t play here if they have played or go on to play for their country. No exceptions. If they have a cap we can’t sign them and if they get a cap they’re gone.
There are murmurs of disbelief in the board room, some even go so far as to say this idea will never work, these players are bound to get called up to play for their country and what then? Simple says Lorenzo, we sell those putas and buy more f**king players this Real “bloody” Madrid who wouldn’t want to come here!
With that the matter is closed, well for a season at least, or maybe less. Lorenzo appoints an unknown manager of unknown origins who spends the summer trawling through his excel spread sheet assembling a squad of players who fulfil this one golden rule and to be fair to Mr Nobody he doesn’t do a bad job, because, thanks to limited researching and/or time the CM9798 database contains some absolute gems who don’t seem to have ever played for their country.
The Un-capt-icos are born.
**Full disclaimer, Canizares does have some caps, Mr Nobody messed up before he even began, but don’t worry he never gets a game and is heading straight to the B Squad**
Good day to you. It’s been a wild 15 weeks as Rob has taken us around the world with Sao Paulo. All good things come to an end though so please enjoy the final days of Rob in Brazil…
Welcome to the final installment of what has been, in my opinion, quite an entertaining adventure. The goal this season was the treble, League, FA Cup and Champions League and we are still in with a chance of achieving said goal. The action starts straight away with our Champions League Quarter final, as you can see we face Juventus.
Happy Monday! Happy Rob day! The CM World Leagues reach part 14 and things are going so well, 300,000 people want to watch them…
Welcome back to the penultimate episode of this little Brazilian adventure, we are still in contention for all four domestic trophies, despite my best attempts to get knocked out of the League Cup.
First up, our Champions League campaign continues in Minsk. Thanks to Fowler and Pirlo’s early goals we get another three points.
Merry Monday to you! Rob is here with the start of season 5 for Sao Paulo in the World League. Will they feel the pressure of being defending champions?
Welcome to Season five, this will be the last season of our Sao Paulo adventure, we are the reigning English International Champions. The mission in this final season is clear, defend the league title and FA Cup and win the Champions League, a small ask. The squad is pretty stable and since I don’t need to invest for the future I only make three purchases, Bodo Illgner is in as backup keeper and hopefully these two will add a little extra spark.
Good morning! It might be a bank holiday but Rob is still here with the latest from Sao Paulo and the CM World League
It’s the final run in of season four, we are in a position to win both the Premier League and FA Cup. Winning both would mean that we will have won every domestic trophy possible in four seasons. It seems a long time since we won the Auto Windscreen Shield and Division 3 in season one. There is a long way to go before that though.
Our first game is at home to Sporting Lisbon, the stats for this game are ridiculous and I really hope it is not a sign of things to come. By the looks of it they barely touched the ball in our defensive third but we only hit the target 33% of the time so only have ourselves to blame for this 0-0 draw.
Happy Monday! Here’s Rob with more from Brazil, as Sao Paulo try to cement themselves as title challengers in the CM World League
In part 10 we had slowly started to find our feet and thanks to nine wins out of thirteen games we had climbed to the top of the table, however with only seven points between 1st and 12th things are still very close.
Our next opponents are Borussia Dortmund, they have a centre back pairing of Jurgen Kohler and Michael Duberry, Nicolas Anelka is up front and a young John Oster is on the wing. Unfortunately for them Christer gets an got in the first minute, Pirri gets another in the second half and Christer rounds off an MOM performance with a second three minutes from the end. That game ended up being a lot easier than I thought.
