Home Series Stop! Hoffenheim // Season 1 // Part 2

Stop! Hoffenheim // Season 1 // Part 2

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FM19 Hoffenheim
Mc Hammer at his peak

Blimey, you are still with me.

After this post, you probably won’t be.

You know when I humble-bragged about how good I was at getting teams out of the lower divisions?

FM19 Hoffenheim
Looks great, eh?

We didn’t win a poxy match until the sixth attempt!

After five games, I started to wonder if there was going to be any point writing the next piece as I might not be at the club that long. That fear kicked in. The fear of the sack. The fear of starting a blog series without any pieces already in the can and then getting booted out of the door.

Brescia came flooding back.

I still carry the scars of Brescia and it is fair to say I was a little worried when we kicked off against Balingen who were in fifth place at the time.

As you can probably tell by looking at the league table, we won that one (finally). 3-1 and maybe, just maybe, the season is finally underway.

Did I change anything? No, not really.

I am committed to an insanely attacking 4-3-3 that comes from my love of Zemenlandia. If nothing else, the football we are playing is edge of the seat kind of stuff and that is what I want to see when I am wasting hour after hour playing a sodding computer game.

So, why were we not winning before that?

Two main reasons really;

#1 Our ability to give the ball away in the final third and, having pushed up into a very high line, watch the ball get punted in behind and see a fella leg it on to it and slot it away.

#2 Defending from set-pieces that is absolutely unexplainably bad.

#3 Otto is more Ricky Otto than I imagined

The thing with the high line problem; I want us to play a high line so that it easier to play our crazy little pressing game and win the ball back high. That said, when we were 2-1 up against Balingen, I bottled it slightly after their striker chased down another long ball and shot narrowly wide. I dropped us back from very high to normal and, unsurprisingly, they didn’t get to do that too many times more.

But, on the other side of the same coin, I felt we weren’t as potent in winning the ball back as we were more spaced out. Equally, a lot of our problems have come from legging it around trying to win the ball back after a sloppy pass and seeing a long ball being our downfall. Tactics, I hate them.

Defending set-pieces; I’ve put this down to individual errors so I dropped one of the central defenders who I felt had been playing especially poorly (despite scoring a couple of goals for us from our own set-pieces). I also had to make a change in goal as the Nagelsmann called our ‘keeper up into the first-team squad. Strange decision, considering I’d promoted him from the U19 and was thinking about sending him back.

David Otto? I’d earmarked him as the team star and he is so bad even Barry Fry would have shipped him out by now and brought Ken Charlery in to replace him.

But, we shall persist.

So far I’ve only had one player loaned out without me knowing much about it and one player moved up to the first team, as I mentioned. I did get a 34-year-old ‘keeper back in return but I didn’t pick him as I don’t know if he is sticking around. If he does, I’ll pick him.

From here, I’d really hope we do push on a little bit. I didn’t come here to be 15th and if we stay in 15th I probably won’t be here very long!

comeontheoviedo
Old-school FM/CM player, author of 'Johnny Cooper: Championship Manager' and someone who now very much starts a save and quits halfway through...

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