Squeaky bum time

In miller its so tight at the top its unreal. There's 5 goals keeping me in first place with 4 games to go. The team in second has an easier run in with games against 17th and 18th who've won two games between them followed by 12th and 10th. I've only lost twice all season so my philosophy will be to ignore him and try and win my games. In reality I'm probably going to need him to slip up somewhere though as his games against the bottom two will probably get rid of the goal difference. Squeaky bum time indeed to quote Sir Alex!

Why am I so bothered you ask? After all there's only 30k difference in prize money between first and second but I've NEVER won a proper league in FML and I've played the game since beta so the silverware would be more important to me than the money. Plus to use another quote, this time from Ricky Bobby "If you ain't first, you're last. You know, you know what I'm talking about?".

As a side note over in Lemerre looks like a top 5 finish with me currently sitting 3rd with two matches to go. Anything that keeps me on track for top tier footie I'm happy with. For some reason I can't let my finances go in the green though and I currently have a bid in for a new defender from the free agents list. In relation to this I can definitely see a difference in finances between Lemerre and Ramos. There's far more players getting unlocked that aren't getting snapped up straight away and that goes for players that are under 29 too. Also the wages are far more reasonable. To me this gets a big thumbs up and although its early to say so, the decision to spread prize money rises over 6 instead of 4 seasons looks to be paying off.

However its not all straightforward. There's a lot of decent players coming through youth academies and because there on 200 quid a day people are flogging them for LOTS of money. I think it goes to show that no matter what steps SI take to make the playing field as level as possible there will always be a way to get ahead of the game, even if it is only temporary until the wages on your team catch up with you. We can only wait and see how Lemerre pans out but at the minute I think my team will be hanging onto the coattails of top tier footie once everything settles down after the first three seasons.

You’ve Come a Long Way, Baby

Through the hard times and the good..

In live things have definitely settled down a lot since my change of formation. I recently won 4 games in a row to take me up to the heady heights of 3rd. However this morning I came down to ragequit reality with a bump after a 1-0 loss at home to 15th. I knew I was destined to fail when I hit the post for the 3rd time and sure enough his AMC popped up in the 83rd minute to smash one past my keeper and send me into a rage not seen in my lifetime before(or at least since the last time I lost).

A typical footie result or an inbuilt conspiracy by SI to keep subscribers interested? You decide! Of course when the result just happened I'm adamant it was the latter and I guess there's still an element of something that's not quite right that SI have conceded and are looking to fix. However when I calm down and think things through i know that just like in actual footie games, its just one of those things, we all lose at some point even if we don't think we should.

Unfortunately I also think that is one of the major flaws of FML. A lot of people are used to playing ordinary Football Manager and either playing as a major team and winning everything in front of them or taking a team like York City and winning everything in front of them. There's not that many lower league managers out there ready to plug away without getting lots of success. However in FML a lot of us are LLM's(although not through choice) and I think this is where a lot of ragequit or just plain and simple quit comes from. After all we can't ALL win everything ALL of the time in FML.

It does seem to get tough though the better you are, I know in beta I'm currently more than happy being one of the lower teams. I just stick to playing the competitions at my level and I just keep winning and winning. However I realise as i move up things are going to get harder and harder and ragequit will strike, just like it does in live. Would I change it though? I don't think I would, its part of FML whether we like it or not. After all if there's one thing that makes up for a random run of poor form its a random run of good form!

Now here's a question for you, does anyone else type obscenities and rants into the match chat in AI games when things go wrong or is it just me? It's a good job the offline manager can't look back what was typed when they view highlights otherwise I'd be shipped out of FML quicker than you can say RAGEQUIT!