It’s been a little while since I’ve done anything remotely normal in CM9798. I had an idea a long time ago (idea no. 19 of 34 I have on the boil) when re-reading about the late 70’s and Keegan’s export to the Bundesliga and then the recent wave of UK based footballers exploring German football again. So, The Keegan-Burger; what is it?
We will look to bring a young talented Englishman over to Hamburg and build a team of largely German talent around this player who will be our star and leading light.
Merry Monday. Andrew is trying to keep some children in the football league and it’s not going well. Can it take an upturn or will it be detention all round?
Welcome back. You may not have to suffer for much longer through our brutal experiment. You can catch up on last week here.
It’s Monday and Andrew is trying to keep children in the football league. Let’s go!
Welcome back to our little, if not completely crazy, experiment. Can a bunch of teenagers be successful in the CM9798 world? So far, the answer appears to be a resounding ‘no’. You can catch-up on the last episode here. The table doesn’t lie, we’re struggling.
Hello! Monday is traditionally a rough day so what better way to ease you into the week than King Of The Rooks messing about in the editor. I’ll let him explain…
It’s been a while since I’ve had the time to pull one of the many CM9798 ideas together. So, what is the plan here? Who are ‘The Scholars’? Teachers of the game…no. Our plan for this save is quite simple and also quite ridiculous.
Rules:
We can only sign players in the ‘Player Search’ with their club marked as ‘Schoolboy’
We cannot extend any contracts; once the contract ends, the player ‘graduates’ and we must return to the pool of ‘Schoolboy’ players for recruits
Daft? Yes. Will we get very far? The prognosis from the blog squad is doubtful. Given we’ll have teenage goalkeepers, its likely to be something of a Michael Owen meets Neville Southall’s coaching school.
Philip is out of action for a few weeks – get well soon my friend. We’ll be back with Lierse to see the finale later in the year but we have a treat of an Andrew experiment in his absence. What’s the best tactic in CM9798? An impossible question you may think but Andrew has been editing…
Following the Blog Squad’s Champions League Manager escapades and the frequent CM Cup the question always lingers…which non-AI formation is the best? Well, here we’ve taken the 10 most popular formations (and some guests) and pitted them against each other in the Scottish Premier League. Feels the best template given they’ll face off with each other more frequently due to the size of the league. So which formations have we chosen?
Philip is having a well deserved week off so we’ve let Andrew loose for this one off special…is the game against you?
You’re probably wondering what on earth this is all about, well…last year we ran a test on ability vs. stats (you can re-read it here) and that’s all well and good but…what impact does luck have on a save? Have you ever had the perfect squad, but things just go against you (like getting beaten by a terrible side)? Annoying, isn’t it? To test this theory that the random winds of change are stacked against you at times we’ve gone wild…
Hello and welcome back to this year’s ‘Summer Specials’ or in this case singular special. Now, after all last summer’s madness, how could I possibly begin to top it all again? Well…have you ever tried to play a season without a signing? Have you ever tried to never replace a player? Have you ever…played an entire season with ‘grey’ players…
The mission is simple; survive in Division Three without a single real player. And Graham Taylor thought he had an impossible job!
It will be a revolving door squad, never guaranteed the same players match to match – and we should be prepared to deal with this all year:
We set up the best way possible for the lower division and 4-4-2 as opposition:
Wayne Haydon on both wings at the same time should hopefully confuse the opposition a bit. Pre-season gives us positive vibes:
If we can retain the same ‘keeper, we should be in with half a chance:
The opening day comes, and Hartlepool do us 2-1. We’re in for a tough season. Having won in the League Cup 1st round against Division Two opposition, we go out on away-goals thanks to a limp third second leg. We size up an opportunity for a win…the chip men:
Disallowed goals and our ‘keeper sent off. That might be a game changer. Torquay visit and we hold out for 75 minutes until it ends in a haze of static and tears. The tears continue, until we switch to this:
And get a 0-0 draw with 22nd and then:
WE’RE OFF THE MARK!!! We needed that win.
Happiness is a warm gun (bang bang, shoot shoot, score!).
Play well, keep it tight, get sent off, crumble. Repeat. This is traumatic. It’s taken 10/11 games, but we’ve finally sunk to the bottom. We lose to 19th Rotherham. We need to be beating or at least drawing with those around us. We come close to a result but just not enough:
Never before have things been this bad:
Yet still we survive the sack. DESMOND!!!
We should have won. We follow up by losing, Scarborough draw and the gap is back to 2 points.
If we could keep it tighter at the back, we could draw our way out of trouble. It’s the cup, its Barrow…we WIN!
Cambridge destroy us 6-2 in the league but we’re still flying so high. So high…
Scarborough win too so it means nothing. Peterborough are 5th, so this is quite the scalp. We follow it up in style:
How many reds now? I’ve lost count. We throw a 2-0 lead away to draw with Darlington and then at 4th placed Hartlepool…
We survive yet ANOTHER red to scrape a victory. We’re still not off the bottom, however.
It ain’t over until its…oh.
Tears for heroes dressed in grey…Scarborough appoint Aldridge and they turn it round. I think that’s the end.
We get the sack…
But immediately reinstate ourselves. We might as well see out the season. This is the s**** we’re up against, can’t even come back against 10-men!
Following defeats to Shrewsbury and Doncaster (whom we beat 2-0 at the beginning of the season) we have an absolute Danny Baker VHS of a game. Own goals and gaffs indeed.
We can’t finish except in our own net. We get red cards every other game. The run of luck is never ours (excluding that 10-game period where we won and drew a few mid-season). One player was suspended for ‘one match’ for three consecutive games. It’s brutal. If we are going to survive now, we need to more than double our points with 15 games to go. And they say the England job is impossible! Leyton Orient say no as they diddle us with the best McVeigh I’ve ever seen:
We get lashed 6-1 at Scunthorpe as I half forget to set my formation (we were moving to 2-2-2-2-2), we proceed to tighten up and only lose 3-0 at 5th Hull then…
We even had 2 disallowed. We follow up with a loss to Chester (4-1), but the follow-up gives me real faith we can nick 12 points from 4 games…
Scarborough, however, win 3-2 to send us down to non-league and myself to the second (and now unrecoverable) sacking of the season:
So close. If only we’d moved to 2-2-2-2-2 earlier.
A success? Far from it. That said we didn’t do too much worse than Scarborough but without any players. There are no vitals as none of the stats stick. And the proof we didn’t cheat:
Just as they drop into non-league, all of a sudden, the squad has twice the volume of players, who are, stats wise, a million miles better. That awful run from December to April without a point killed our hopes off. I think the game engine is stacked against this in 97-98. And so, I hope you’ve enjoyed the one and only sad and lonely Summer Special of 2021 – I think this one might get a re-run with 2-2-2-2-2 all season long. We’ll see. Thanks for reading – see you again at some point for another dose of complete madness.
Well, hello there! Something for the weekend? … or in this case for your midweek excitment!
It’s been in the making, but finally, having made playable versions of the Norwegian and Swedish leagues in CM9798, I’ve finally got around to doing the same for the Danish leagues.
Well hello there! You may know I’ve taken a break from a regular slot at www.cm9798.co.uk and that’s because I’ve been working up some mad ideas again. Speaking of which, ever wanted to really interrogate the player database before starting/during a save in an easy manner? Well thanks to the help of Dave and his Twitter contacts, we managed to get v2.93 players.db1 file into CSV format which allowed me to import into Excel and create the CM2 Player Comparison Tool. So, what does it entail?
Wear we are! Back again marras. If you missed last weeks miracle, you can catch up here. We had a fantastic run last time out, we’re on a long unbeaten run in the league, much the opposite of real-life Sunderland. Having been in the relegation zone, we’re back up to 4th.
