Player Manager - A Sports Progression Fantasy

2.

Rushall's low block was pretty effective in slowing us down - for a while. We were leading, so we had no incentive to force the issue and were content to stretch the play left and right, probing, looking for gaps.

The problem was that we were weak down the wings. On the left we had Magnus Evergeen, who was a solid, dependable guy with low creativity, and D-Day, a flair player who was weak defensively and preferred dribbling to passing. In a normal team they'd have been a good combo, but not much about my Chester team was normal. Suffice to say that my famous Art of Slapping - combinations of passes that would put us in great goalscoring positions - didn't suit those players.

My style did suit those on the right. Calabash 'Bark' Barkley was a young talent I'd rescued from the grim north-east, getting him a transfer to the grim north-west. His current club, Tranmere Rovers, had loaned him to me for the rest of the season on condition that we helped his development. Behind him, Carl Carlile was a physically impressive defender with endless stamina. His on-the-ball skills and positioning had improved a lot since he had decided to commit - really commit - to playing football. In a year or two, this would be an absolutely dynamite partnership at this level, but right now Bark was so, so raw. He had a bravery attribute of 5, which meant he wouldn't jump into a 50-50 tackle. I was fine with that - he couldn't help the team if he was injured. But it seemed to also make him reluctant to take other kinds of risks. He was playing the game pretty safe. That was understandable - he was just a kid trying not to screw up, but no risk, no slap.

In the centre of midfield, I was buddied up with Youngster, an 18-year-old superstar in the making who made crazy numbers of interceptions. Again, not a creative type.

I had options on the bench - I could bring Aff on and play him at left back instead of Magnus and then our left-sided overlaps would be absolutely deadly. But it was important that we won games with our rotation players.

So much of the burden fell on my shoulders.

And what shoulders they were!

Youngster harries Gooch and knocks the ball away.

Evergreen is fastest to it. He knocks it to May.

May hits a long ball in the direction of Beaumont.

The striker wins the header and knocks it back to midfield.

Best looks up. He has two men approaching.

Best plays a one-two with Youngster and checks his options.

Lyons makes a run.

The ball is slid into his path. Lyons shoots!

But it's blocked. He was crowded out.

When the move was over, I paced towards Gerald May. "What the fuck was that?"

He looked shocked. "What?"

"You hit a long ball to Chris! Why? We don't do that."

"He was just - " said May, but the fury on my face made him shut up.

I swallowed my anger - partially, anyway, and turned my back on him. We played some more and Rushall cleared the ball into the middle of our half. Robbo jogged out of goal - he was little more than a spectator at this point - and launched it long to Chris. The ball sailed out of play for a Rushall goal kick. They would take their sweet time restarting the match, which today I was fine with. But I wasn't fine with Robbo. I stormed all the way to the penalty box and jabbed my captain for the day in the chest. "Do that again this'll be the last game you ever play for this club."

"Max!"

"Shut the fuck up. Play like we train or you're done." I walked off, seething, going through every swear word I knew.

Rushall had set up a block, and these morons were running straight into it, head first. The stupidity was excruciating.

The problem was English football DNA. Apart from kids who got into academies at a young age, we grew up surrounded by route one football. Route one is where you kick the ball as far as you can down the pitch. As you might imagine, if you're playing route one football it helps to have a big, strong lump to aim these long balls at. I'd put a big strong lump into our team and our less talented players had instantly regressed.

Why hadn't I known this was happening? I needed to have a word with Spectrum. He'd edited this shit out of the match footage he'd sent me.

It was infuriating, especially because I'd explicitly told WibRob that we were using Chris as some kind of aesthetic marvel. In fact, we were no better than Banbury. I walked over to the dugout. "Ben! Get warmed up." I narrowed my eyes. "And if you pull that shit, too, you're out, too."

"Then who's going in goal?" said Sandra.

"Me."

I went back to midfield and found I couldn't control the rage. White spots appeared in my vision, even when I closed my eyes. I'd worked so hard to get the team playing Max Best football, high-percentage football, winning football, but they would use any excuse to revert to caveman shit.

The ball came to me and I flicked it up and wellied it high into the sky. It went into fucking orbit, never to be seen again.

I turned around, clapping myself quite sarcastically, screaming, "Yeah! Yeah! Fucking brilliant, that! Get in!"

The more I fumed, the more everyone's morale dropped, but I couldn't get a grip. I was melting down. There was exactly one area of my life that I was supposed to be in complete control of and these stupid fucks were betraying me. Henri came over and put his hand on my shoulder. "Max. What troubles you?"

"Life, man," I said, defeated. My energy was spent. Gone.

"Yes. Life. You know, I was shopping for decorations for my bedroom and I came across a wonderful quote painted onto a piece of wood. It simply said: Live, Laugh, Love. Those are words to live by."

He kept a straight face for at least five seconds, but then I detected a twitch around the sides of the eyes. I tried to smile. "How do I stop these twats going route one? We've trained it endlessly."

Rushall kicked off, but Henri and I stood still a little while longer. "You can't. They are English. It's what they do. You didn't correct them in January. I assumed you were okay with it."

"Drop into midfield a minute."

I swapped our roles on the tactics screen. While Henri scampered off to join our midfield line, I walked towards Chris Beaumont and put one hand on his lower back and one on his elbow. "Chris, I'm sorry."

"What for?"

"I didn't know they were doing that."

"Doing what?"

"Using you as a target man."

"I am a target man."

"You're not. You're a perfectly-engineered cog in a sumptuously elegant mechanism designed by a floating megabrain."

"Is that you?"

"Yes."

"What are you doing?"

I was trying to push him and he was letting me but even then, his enormous bulk was too much. "Change of plan. You're going to start our moves from here."

"What?" He tensed and I couldn't move him, but then he decided he trusted me, relaxed, and walked on his own. He glanced behind us, where a football match was happening. Rushall had taken the opportunity to move up the pitch. "Here? I'm offside."

"Bit more." We kept walking, past a bewildered goalkeeper, right up to the goalpost. "About here, I reckon."

"Tempted to say the O word again, in case you forgot the laws of the game."

"Instead of starting at the half-way line and running this way, you'll start here and move backwards. Not too far. You only need to be onside when the last pass comes. Right?"

He shook his head. "This is to stop them playing long balls to me?"

"Mate, if I see one more, careers are going to be ended. I am livid. I know it's not nice but they need to fucking recalibrate. All right?"

"You're the boss."

I left him there chatting to the other team's goalie while loads of the home fans shouted jokes at him. When I got to midfield I swapped places with Henri. I played a few one-touch passes to help me return to some semblance of mental equilibrium and Rushall retreated bit by bit until they were back in the low block and we were surrounding them. We hit a lot of safe, sideways passes, left and right, right and left, wearing the oppo down.

Finally, I saw the opening. Bark was on the right with Carl starting an overlap. I sprinted in the direction of the corner flag and used the tactics screen to swap places with Bark. He touched the ball to Carl, who passed it into my feet. I stopped it with my right and helped it sideways with my left. Bark was moving that way. He rolled it back to me.

"Go!" I shouted.

Carl overlapped me and I shaped to hit the pass on the outside, towards the touchline, where Carl would have the chance to hit a cross that would probably be blocked by the defender. Instead, I hit it to the left of the defender, what we call the 'inside', and Carl burst past the guy.

The defender made a decent attempt at sliding to the ball but Carl just about got there first, shook off the foul, righted himself, and hit a solid cross to the back post.

Chris had waited until the move was almost fully ripe before jogging onside, and he had a simple job to power the ball into the bottom left. Two-nil! The home fans weren't laughing, now, and Chris loped away, hugging Henri and the others on his way to the corner flag to do some inane celebration.

I fell straight back into a grump. "Fucking bunch of useless pricks," I mumbled as I walked back down the line. "Gonna fucking savage them." I remembered I'd swapped places with Bark and undid that change. "Rip them a fucking new one. Load of bullshit."

I fell to my haunches and stayed staring straight ahead, unblinking, not responding to anything or anyone until the match was back on. The action flowed around me, avoiding me, and when I got the ball I played it to Youngster. I wanted him to step up. Take responsibility. They couldn't rely on me all the time - I'd smacked a football into a journalist's face and I would get a ban. If I knew the Football Association, the ban would cover our most difficult and important games. We couldn't play like this against anyone good. We had to break the habit.

To his credit, Youngster realised what I was doing and with me anchoring the midfield, he got more progressive. He tried his idiosyncratic dribble past one opponent and tried to link up with the guys on the left. Then he did it on the right. He hung around being the corner of various triangles.

It was all very ragged - against a low block we needed more cunning, more smarts, more deception - but we were starting to get somewhere when one of D-Day's dribbles ended with a foul in a dangerous position on the left of the pitch, not far from being in line with the penalty box. The Free Hit option came up. It slightly increased my team's chance of scoring from a set piece. The angle was good and there were plenty of ways we could score, so I smashed the button.

I thought about shooting, but not for long. If I scored too many goals myself, I risked attracting the attention of a hellish entity known as The Sentinel who would be mad at me for using powers I should never have been given. In this case, it wasn't much of a restriction; I had Chris, Henri, and Steve Alton as targets, with Gerald May as a good decoy. How about a left-footed cross? I was still mostly sticking to using my right foot so that opponents would be surprised when I broke out my equally-strong left.

I placed the ball down and maximised the Masterpiece Theatre section of my vision. This was something like a mini map with my teammates marked as blue circles. I wasn't totally sure of the rules, but I was able to move some of them around to various amounts. Rushall didn't have anyone poised for a counter attack, so I tried to throw everyone forward. Youngster and Bark wouldn't budge from the halfway line, but I was able to move everyone else to the far post.

An idea came to me - blockers. A lot of teams had very complicated set piece moves where certain players would run to spots with no intention of trying to head the ball. Their job was to stop defenders from challenging the intended target of the cross. Could I approximate that now?

I sent Henri to the near post - closest to me. A defender followed him. With everyone else on the far post, it seemed pretty obvious where I would aim. I mean, it was always obvious - Chris Beaumont. He was so massive that if the cross was on target the defence could do virtually nothing about it. The ref blew his whistle and I swapped the circles.

Chris and the tall defenders ran to the front post, Henri to the back. The defenders followed in confusion, trying to stick to the players they were marking but getting in each other's way. Blocking each other!

The concept didn't work perfectly, but it was good enough.

The goalie took two steps towards the near post, towards Chris, and I hit a hard, fast cross into the space in front of Henri. He bullied his solo defender, rose, and scored.

Three crosses, three headers, three-nil, and I turned my thoughts to the absolute half time bollocking I was going to give these twa - Argh! They were all running in my direction. Even Henri. Masterpiece theatre was still open, and I tried sliding the player icons away from me. Away! Shoo! I'm mad at you!

"Max! Yeah!"

"Whoo!"

"Chester!"

"Get in!"

I was wedged in the arms of Chris Beaumont and Henri and couldn't escape - a prisoner of joy. Henri was doing the manic nodding thing he did when he'd scored a goal that fit the concept I'd laid out. "What now, Max? More?"

"No. Efficiency. The game's dead. Kill it."

"Illogical, but yes. Understood."

"Can I stop humping the goal post, please boss?"

I laughed and rubbed my forehead. "Sure. Come on. Energy saving mode on, lads."

***

Shortly after the ref blew for half time, I was wondering how tonto to get in the dressing room when I spotted a familiar foe standing behind the goal we had been attacking. It was pretty easy to pick out individual faces - there were only about five hundred in the whole crowd. I had a sudden burst of inspiration. I waved at Bulldog to make his way to the front so I could talk to him. Then I looked around, shielding my eyes from the floodlights until I picked out Andy Roberts. I waved him over, too.

"Andy, this is Bulldog. His son's on our bench today. Going to make his debut. Bulldog and I have had a few scraps in the past. Bulldog, this is Andy. I'm trying to sign his son. He's the same age as Tyson. Would you do me a solid and tell him what it's really like being the father of a young player at Chester?"

Bulldog's eyebrows rose. "Are you sure that's a good idea, Max?"

"Sure. You can be honest."

"If he's here, he's probably close to signing. You shouldn't sell past the close."

"Do you know what that means?" I asked Andy. He didn't. "What's that mean?"

Bulldog explained. "If you've got a deal, don't keep talking. You can only blow it."

I nodded. "Yeah, that makes sense. But it's his son. He deserves to know. Anyway, you'll be watching your kids play together a lot. You could help Andy get to know Chester. The city, I mean. Give him some tips. Best pubs. Where to park. All that."

Stolen story; please report.

"Happy to, yeah!"

"I'm gonna go scream at these idiots, now."

"Max, hang on." Bulldog put his hands on the simple black fence that separated us. "You're winning three-nil. It's one-sided. I'm not telling you your business but as a manager you have to be careful not to ask too much."

I gave him a confused smile. "I don't want perfection. I just want them to do what I want. It's dead easy." I blinked as Rushall's tactics screen changed from 4-4-2 to 5-4-1. Huh. But then it switched again, to 4-5-1. So their manager was spitballing some ideas. I shook it off; there was nothing he could do to turn this round. "Er... Tyson will get five minutes at the end. It's just for a bit of match day experience," I said to Andy, but he was looking at Bulldog, who was tearing up, holding onto the railing even harder.

That, I thought, as I pottered back to the dressing room, couldn't have gone any better.

***

As I entered the dressing room, I decided not to go all guns blazing. It had struck me that the players who'd reverted to long ball had two things in common. One, their CA was low. Two, their contracts hadn't been extended. If their low CA made them more likely to panic and go long, it was unfair of me to ask them to play any different. No, it was fair to ask, but unfair to go nuts if they simply couldn't help it.

And the Machiavellian side of my brain had lit up. If I used this as a reason WHY they wouldn't get a new contract, it would scare the shit out of everyone at the club. They'd know the consequences of defying me on issues that mattered.

Hmm. Seemed a bit explosive, that. A softer version, perhaps, where I simply said they didn't fit my style of play. That would be enough. The rumour mill would quickly fill in the details.

"Max?" It was Sandra Lane, by some metrics the most successful woman in the history of football. I found myself with my arm resting on top of the tactics board. "You okay?"

"Did they spend the whole of January lumping the ball forward?" I whispered.

"Not often. Not everyone."

I nodded, and still in a low voice, added, "I've had my tantrum. They'll think about it. We'll talk it over before the next game. Something like that?"

"Yeah, perfect."

"The women are off the pace, too. Complacent."

"Give them a kick up the backside. Surprise them in training tomorrow."

Yeah. Good call. In a more normal voice, I said, "Any thoughts?"

"If we're still changing to 3-5-2 it's just a question of who comes off. Carl or Magnus?"

"What do you think?"

She sighed. "I think you were right. They don't really have the weapons to hurt us. We can rest Carl."

"What's up?"

"I should have listened to you. This would be perfect minutes for Andrew H. We don't need such a strong bench."

"Come on. Maybe we're winning because we've got such a strong bench. Who knows?"

"We're winning because there's no way to block you."

"Block us," I said.

"You."

Vimsy eased his way into the area. "Erm... boss. Bosses. Just checking if there's going to be any shouting you need help with?"

"Not angry shouting, no. I'll get the lads in my office tomorrow and talk to them. But," I said, to cheer him up. "We're doing 3-5-2 defensive, second half. It's all about spacing and discipline and we'll have two kids out there. You can stand on the touchline and yell instructions at them, if you want."

He grinned, rubbed his hands together, and fished in his pocket for a throat lozenge.

***

The second half kicked off and, as I'd thought, Bulldog was nowhere to be seen. Off buying beers with his new mate.

I pottered around the centre circle, barely involved in the match apart from a few crisp passes. Then, yes! The clans had collided and formed a new supertribe made up of Bulldogs and Robertses. Half were carrying pints. I gestured at Sandra, and shortly after, Tyson came to the touchline, stretching his hamstrings, touching his toes.

"Substitution for Chester. Replacing number 2, Carl Carlile, number 29, Tyson."

Another player from the formerly-neglected Chester youth system was making his first team debut. From one point of view, it was a couple of years ahead of schedule. From another, it was thirty-five minutes ahead of what had been promised. I'd lied to his dad so that this moment would be even more rewarding. For me.

While I used my hotkeys to rearrange us into a defensive, energy-saving 3-5-2 (no forward runs, no through balls, no dribbles, Tyson the right-most CM, me right-mid so I could look after him), Bulldog burst into tears.

Andy was first to hug him, while Anne very clearly mouthed the word 'aww'. William looked at Tyson - lining up next to the great Max Best - with envy.

I had absolutely nailed it. Absolutely smashed every obstacle out of their path. What objections could they possibly have left? Truly, I was history's greatest mastermind.

***

A ridiculously youthful midfield of Bark, Youngster, and Tyson struggled to compete with their far more experienced opponents, but anytime they looked like cracking I whizzed across to help out. With surprisingly diligent support from D-Day on the left, Henri dropping from the front, and knowing we had a solid defence, a three-goal lead and top players on the bench just in case, there was little jeopardy.

Vimsy shouted instructions like we were losing four-nil and down to seven men. That was good. That was right.

Tyson left the pitch all smiles, with forty minutes of professional football to his name. We can skip past his four out of ten match rating. That was almost completely irrelevant.

This match was one of our rescheduled ones, and our three closest rivals hadn't played. That put us six points clear at the top with four very winnable matches coming up before the big one against Kidderminster.