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I honestly don't know exactly what it does because in my nine or ten years playing the game I've never signed a goalkeeper with high Eccentricity - because, if anything, it just means they'll be a massive liability.īasically, it's all a bit odd. I can go on but best of all, I have a weirdly high rating for Eccentricity, the keeper-only stat which governs how likely one is to do something really bizarre, like dribble the ball up the pitch, or start juggling, or something. My actual birthday is in May, not October.
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I'm 5'11, in the real world (really just a shade under but nevermind that), and in FM10 I'm listed as a whopping 6'2 (in fact it's 190cm, so just a shade over, and I'll take every extra millimetre thanks). They didn't fire me though because I won the Champions League (and because I didn't play myself in the final).Īs I've got older - not so much growing up as sliding, gracefully, towards my final form of podgy, bitter football dad - I've become less fixated on how brilliant it was to be a player in one of my favourite ever games, and more curious about just how weird my stats were. The board really loved that: a club massively in debt wasting time and money on a terrible player, with the legendary Edwin van der Sar on the bench. I even signed myself for Manchester United. You can picture it: me, one arm in a sling, the other clicking away at my spreadsheet video game, a big, stupid grin on my face. And also you could play it with one arm, which helped.Īnyway, when my face (empty silhouette) turned up in FM10 I was absolutely chuffed. I'd love to tell you there's a complicated psychological thing behind that but it's not really very complicated is it? I couldn't play football so I played a video game about simulating football. It's embarrassing when you say it out loud, but at sixteen years old, suddenly staring straight at a pile of sagging grades and drifting friends, I think it's probably what I needed to hear.Įither way, around about that time I was also playing a lot of Football Manager. And then I'd win the lottery and go to the moon. Maybe I tell myself I could have saved it in a blaze of glory because it made me feel better at the time - "if only I hadn't got injured, I'd have won us the game and got signed by the club I've supported all my life". I could have saved the shot - and ahead of the next round there'd absolutely have been a United scout to see it. I'd just partially dislocated my shoulder for what was the fifth time in my life (and not the last), and was waiting for a scan. I watched that game against Hull from the stands. That Hull City then narrowly lost the next round to Manchester United. Lewes U18s won the top division by a good way, and got knocked out of the FA Youth Cup, in the third round, by the Premier League's Hull City. I think I can say that it was a very good team. From Portsmouth, for a chap they flew in from Argentina, from Charlton Athletic for a lad from the USA, Fulham for the England U16s goalkeeper and from Brighton - twice - for a boy who, to be fair to him, was about twice my height and really very good. For those fours years I'd been consistently rejected.
#Football manager 2008 corners professional#
For four years I road-tripped around half the professional academies in the bottom-right corner of the country three days a week my poor mum picking me up from school and, instead of heading home, handing me a sandwich, a protein bar and a sports drink and driving me two hours down the coast, or up to London, or sometimes just down the road. Some, like yours truly, came from non-league clubs, having never quite edged their way in on the ground floor. Most of them came from professional academies like Brighton, Bournemouth and Southampton, some released at the big jump from Under 16s to Under 18s, others who had the chance to carry on but turned it down (and if you're wondering why they might reject something as fabled as an U18's contract - known as a "scholarship" - at a top club by the way, it's probably because that contract entitles you to the sum total of about £60 a week, mandatory residence in "digs" and a BTEC in Sports Bullshit that you have to take instead of college). The club was in ascendancy: newly promoted to the Conference, we had a new stand at the stadium (later paid for by selling our best players, but that's another story), a new Under 18s coach, brought in from the Brighton and Hove Albion academy just down the road, and a new intake of what was, genuinely, the best squad of non-academy players in the south of England.