Mid Season Blips

First of all, I'd like to have a little brag! I've played the CM/FM series and for the first time EVER I've played more than one season. Was in my fourth season in fact, before my laptop decided to overheat. Now I can't bring myself to go back to the game, despite having led Leicester to the Premiership and having a bloody good team!

Despite my success, I had reached those dizzy heights through the playoffs and failed to win a cup (I really wanted to win the LDV but crashed out to dismal Cheltenham). I seem to enjoy wonderful runs of form early in the season, but in the middle and end of the season my team look woeful and my strikers short of ideas. I do have a preseason with the standard 5/6 friendlies and I do adapt my training to have intensive fitness work - am I doing something wrong? I occasionally give the players a break from training etc. although perhaps only a couple of days off a season. Is this enough? How can I keep my team winning, or are mid season blips just a fact of life?

I'm about to start a new game - Port Vale - and am determined to get as far! I lost 5 days of real time.... devastating! Time to buy a new laptop me thinks...

You need to adjust your tactics. The AI changes it's evaluation of you in an ongoing process, a bit at a time. Usually, by mid-November or so, those changes (assuming you've been doing well) have probably reached a degree that they are approaching you differently, so what worked for you at the beginning of the season will no longer work. It'll happen again around March or so .....