FM ABE - Comments

That is what the team tends to look like.

Douglas, who the game tells me is my key player, really hasn't impressed during preseason. Thus, Ost... has taken his place at Left Back.

In terms of the midfield, I'm not too sure what it will look like by the end of the season. Walace has played well but he seems to have an anger management problem (he got himself a red card vs. the under-19's). Jung should be playing reguarly as he has potential, however, he has really strugged for me so far (Essien has easily outperformed him).

Lasogga decided to do his best impression of Messi during pre-season, however, in matches against big teams he has really dropped off the radar.

The entire team have been quite frustating this pre-season to be honest, though that could be partly down to my mediocre team talks (I tried the tact of telling them it was only pre-season and the performance was more important than the result, a tactic which led to intent listening but no motivation).



Bayern were playing a skeleton crew mainly. Ribery injured his leg and Ancelotti refused to sit him, which led to a 2 month (?) injury for a calf strain.

Valencia's goal was down to an error from our backup goalkeeper. Our keeper came charging out like it was a game of FIFA and Nani headed the ball over his head and into the goal. Our backup goalkeeper hasn't seen a game since.

Man City played a full-strength squad and dominated us in the shots department (I think it was 33 shots to 10 or something silly - they were playing Raheem Sterling though so about 20 of those shots were off target.) I wasn't expecting them to play a full-strength side so I had a mixture of first-teamers and rotational players in (I think quite a few players were still on holiday at this point as well), however, I still think we should have played better.

The game against Hull was frustrating. Hull beat us a few weeks earlier to the signature of Berbatov (they offered him just under 50k a week) but the Bulgarian failed to get onto the score sheet. We should have won, but Mbokani decided to become Jesus for the last twenty minutes of the game.

I scheduled a friendly against Las Palmas as I wanted to see Halilovic in action (we have him signed and on loan at Las Palmas, however, Barcelona have a buy-back clause which is a bit of a bummer.) He played poorly and we lost. We equalised really late but they came right back and scored the winner, I was fuming.

In order to take my mind off of our so-so pre-season I got Sigmund to attend the DFL-Supercup between Bayern and Dortmund. Bayern should have won but their finishing was awful. Dortmund ended up beating them through penalties.



I was going to write this up straight after watching the Supercup, but I decided to play our first round cup fixture against Regensburg.



We almost bottled it, but Lasogga got tired of impersonating a sea sponge and decided to impersonate Messi again and scored a clutch goal.

The victory really cheered up the squad and to my surprise, the fans were pleased with the result (I guess their expectations aren't too high considering what they have had to watch in the last few seasons).

Just to finish off this Installment, here is my set-up for the save...

Sigmund Kurzmann has been hired as the new HSV manager.



The club are in a fairly good financial position after a frugal preseason spend...



However, the club is lacking when it comes to liquid capital.



During the pre-season period, three players were brought in.



And one of those players has already picked up a long term injury. (Karel)



But at least the rest of the squad (apart from Lewis Holtby), have remained injury free



Ashton Gotz was loaned out to Dresden a few days (in-game) after this screen shot was taken. We do have the option of recalling him from his loan should disaster strike, but hopefully it won't come to that.

I told the board we would finish in the top half of the table. It might be a struggle, but the increased expectations came with an increase in the transfer and wage budgets. As you can see from my transfers, the boost wasn't much, but it allowed me to bring in some depth. I used the majority of the money to promise the players a high win bonus for the Bundesliga, a promise which seems to have really buoyed morale.



There are some good prospects in the Under-19 squad and the HSV-II squad...





However, most of them are nowhere near ready to feature in the first team.

2003.

Let's try to win something with Hamburg.

Thanks

Finished preseason yesterday, so I'll post an update this evening. A bit of an infuriating preseason - win against Valencia (their first team) then lose to Las Palmas!

You have to start the game up once first for the folder to be created.

Edit - only just noticed how old this thread is, sorry

Style: SS
Name: FM ABE
Number: 17
Club: Hull City
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What year of kits: 16/17