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'Lessons in Calcio' - Crouchy, Facci Sognare!


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'If he wins he is a combination of Einstein, Leonardo, Saint Francis, Plato and Dante. If he loses he is a sewer rat' - Gian Paolo Ormezzano.

Welcome to 'Lessons in Calcio'!

I have been threatening to get an FM12 career going for some time now and I think I'm finally going to get around to it at last! Thanks in particular to Iacovone and SnakeXe for taking the time to offer some advice in terms of setting up this save.

Some of you will remember some of my past endevours on older versions of FM. My last major career thread was my long-term St. Albans City game on FM10. I pretty much skipped FM11 despite owning it and continued to play my Saints save instead of starting the new game. Therefore, I have been away from the series and I think this is why I have found it difficult to pick up the new game and plunge straight in.

Many of you will know that I am a creature of habit and that I usually play a long-term save with St. Albans City (otherwise known as the 'mighty' Saints). However, there will be no 'Crouchy's Mighty Saints Save' this time around. The FM10 save is still too fresh and it wouldn't be much fun to start exactly the same save again on FM12. Plus, I still have the intention to one day revisit my St. Albans City side and to get a stadium named after me plus continue the latter part of the legendary Michel Vermeer's career!

After recently getting a new computer, I decided that a journeyman career game would be my next adventure in FM but this journeyman career save will have a twist. Many of you will know that I have a fascination with Italy and with Italian football. I've had a number of good saves in Italy over the years and I decided that I simply had to make Italy the centre and focus of my new career.

The title of this thread pretty much gives away the intentions I have in starting my career. I have decided that I will begin my 'apprenticeship' in football management in the world of Calcio! The bottom division of the Italian leagues will be my starting point and it is here that I will learn my trade. Hopefully, these 'Lessons in Calcio' will stand me in good stead for a future career in which I intend, eventually, to broaden my horizons and to head abroad to try out some new experiences in different leagues.

So, to sum things up, I should let you know that my main intention with this save is to start at the bottom of Italian football and work my way up in the world of calcio. I have loaded leagues from a number of countries as I hope to move abroad once I've made some kind of name in Italy.

I've started off as an unproven (Sunday League reputation) English manager who is unemployed (so I'm basically playing as myself). I'm an Englishman who is going to serve his apprenticeship in the Italian lower leagues and I'll be taking whatever job comes up first at Serie C2 level. Each club I manage will become a new short-term 'project' for me and, once I feel that I have taken the club as far as I can, I will be looking for a new 'project' to take on. If/when I move abroad, the projects will become 'lessons in calcio applied to.....' as I seek to apply all that I have learnt in Italy in countries other than my adopted 'home' country.

So here it is: Crouchy's Lessons in Calcio thread! :cool:

This game is played on FM12 and started with patch 12.1 with no edits made to the database. Leagues loaded are: Mexico, US, England, France, Germany, Italy, Netherlands, Portugal, Spain, Sweden, Argentina and Uruguay. I am playing with a Medium database.

I forgot to add my Twitter details.

Twitter for FM - http://twitter.com/Crouchy_SACFC

Twitter primarily for St. Albans City, Non-League and general football tweets - http://twitter.com/Daedalus1882

Steam profile - http://steamcommunity.com/profiles/76561198046026468

YouTube - http://www.youtube.com/user/CrouchyLP

Some of my old FM Career Update threads:

When The Saints Go Marching In - Crouchy's Mighty Saints Save!

Fabio Crouchello - Taking England to South Africa 2010

Crouchy's Calcio Journeyman Save

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Returning to the world of Football Manager

Rumour has it that Crouchaldinho has recently been trapped in a strange parallel dimension in which everything is made of blocks and green monsters shaped like giant penises chase after you and explode. Unfortunately, there were some complications upon his return to this dimension. It is suggested that Crouchaldinho had to face an extremely dangerous process of transmogrification in order to return to the world we all know and love as the world of Football Manager. This process is briefly detailed below.

*Iacovone & SnakeXe drag Crouchaldinho into their lab and hook him up to a strange and futuristic looking machine*

'It's for your own good Crouchy,' says SnakeXe, as he starts tapping away at a keyboard, seemingly pressing keys at random.

The computer whirs into action.

*Processing physical form*

av-532404.png?_time=1325771894

*Minecraft profile detected - illogical - this physical form does not compute*

Flamers enters the room. 'Don't worry Crouchy, I have over 105 games just on Steam. I've had to go through this process hundreds of times. It's never done me any harm'. Suddenly Flamers pulls a grotesque face and begins to twitch unnaturally. Flamers starts talking nonsense, 'Hihi-hidi-hidi-whurdidjid. Two and one-half badgers, please! Hi-yi-yi-yi-yi! Whap! An-dingling! Wha-hoo-hoo! An-da-an-shoo-an-shoo. Maybe now I can WIN SELF-DETERMINATION FOR THE SOUTH MOLDAVIAN PEOPLE! Nick-noo-nick-noo-nick-ank'.

Iacovone tuts and says, 'get him out of here', pressing a large red button on the control panel. An enormous security guard wearing a Sunderland shirt enters. 'Acidburn, take this man away,' says SnakeXe and the guard struggles but finally manages to drag away the wildly gesticulating Flamers.

'Thanks AB. We're nearly there Crouchy,' says Iacovone. The computer whirs even louder and a high pitch noise is emitted from the control panel.

*Transmogrification sequence initiated*

Crouchaldinho speaks for the first time in tones of bewilderment. 'Transmogrifi- what!' he stutters.

*Physical form accepted and cloned. Please key in new physical structure.*

Both SnakeXe and Iacovone begin wildly tapping at the keyboards.

*New physical form and structure accepted. Metamorphosis in ten seconds and counting...*

*The COMPUTER starts to mark off the countdown in steady, impassive beeps.*

*Beep*

*Beep*

*Beep*

*Beep*

*Beep*

*Metamorphosis complete.*

*New physical form displayed below*

paulfinal.jpg

Crouchy sits up. SnakeXe hands him a well thumbed copy of John Foot's Calcio and a Hellas Verona scarf.

'I'm back!' he says, staring wildly into the distance. 'I'm finally back!'

Just a bit of silly fun. If you recognise any of the text as being a bit familiar then you are very cool. Details of my first appointment in Italy to follow!

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Objectives:

Stealing from Iacovone, I'd like to make myself a modest list of objectives for this career.

- To stick this out, at least until FM2013

- To gradually learn the new game and to learn the new features

- To be a success in Italy first and foremost

- To manage my favourite Italian club, Hellas Verona, at some point

- Eventually to travel a little and to try out some different countries and leagues along the way

- To be fairly informal and casual with my updates (you may have noticed that I have a tendency to type and type and type so I really want to do a bit more playing and a bit less updating this time around without impacting on the quality of the thread, of course)

- To gradually build things up as I go along on FM, which I guess sounds kind of strange, but I have a tendency to make the game a bit dull for myself by focusing heavily on details like tactics and training all at once instead of playing and adjusting as I go along and this tends to have an effect on my enjoyment of the game at times

- Be patient with FM12 and be open-minded - give it a real chance!

- Play in a realistic manner and with no cheats/exploits (should go without saying) and always think carefully about career decisions I make in order to keep things as fair and as realistic as I can

- Most importantly, to ENJOY FM12!

Some might say that I have been fairly modest with the leagues that I have loaded and I think I probably could have loaded more. But I feel that I have a good starting basis here and some countries that I really want to try managing in. Once I get a feel of how my computer runs with this setup, and a better idea of what it can handle, I may well add some more leagues. I guess the beauty of this year's game is that we can add and remove leagues so I intend to take advantage of that in the future.

At the moment, though, I feel I have a good mix of old favourites and new leagues that I would like to try. England, France, Germany, Spain and Italy are leagues that I have tried and enjoyed in the past. Sweden is a country that I have played in before for a short spell but I have never managed in the top leagues and I would like to try to do so. I've included the Netherlands due to Michel Vermeer and Portugal as I am intending to read a biography written about Jose Mourinho at some point soon. Argentina and Uruguay were added on a bit of whim and what's life without whimsy? Seriously, though, I enjoyed managing the Uruguay national team on FM10 and therefore decided to load it up! Finally, Mexico is a country that I have been wanting to try for ages and the USA represents a potential step outside my comfort zone and a managerial experience on FM that I have been putting off for a long time. All of these countries are definitely places that I would like to manage in.

I wanted also to load some countries from Africa and Asia but decided against doing so initally. Later in my career, I would like to add a few more to try, but I figured right now that I had enough to be starting with. I would quite like to get into international management at some point, should I be successful enough to do so, and therefore this may be my most likely route through to Asia or Africa later in the game. I think I have decided that I will allow myself club and country management at the same time, should I get to that point, but that I would have to manage a club in the country in which I am residing for my international management job. But I'm getting too far ahead of myself. My career begins in Italy at the bottom and there is a long journey before I need to think of such things!

This is the first version for a long time where I genuinely don't know if I will have success or not initially. In previous versions, I felt that I had a certain level of expertise in the game and I felt confident that I could apply my principles and be successful in most jobs. But I've been out of the game for a little while and FM11 and 12 have brought about changes that I don't know much about. So this could be quite a challenge for me. I know not whether failure or success awaits me. Regardless, my main hope is that it is both fun and interesting! And with that, it is time to introduce project 1 of 'Lessons in Calcio'!

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I hope so too, AB.

It definitely is the long-term plan, although I'm not going to rush towards it. Eventually, though, I would like to apply my lessons in calcio to some different places. As said above, the ones I have loaded are all countries that I really want to try out at some point down the line.

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I hope so too, AB.

It definitely is the long-term plan, although I'm not going to rush towards it. Eventually, though, I would like to apply my lessons in calcio to some different places. As said above, the ones I have loaded are all countries that I really want to try out at some point down the line.

I wish I had more patience to put more into the tactical area of the game every TC tactic I make turns out pretty poor. I always end up downloading a tactic and tweaking it.

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Project 1 - A.C. Giacomense

In December 2011, a pensive, dour-faced man stepped off the bus at Masi San Giacomo's bus terminus wearing the Greek fisherman’s cap made famous by John Lennon. It was, of course, a defining characteristic of Osvaldo Bagnoli and his managerial career in Italian football and it was the symbol to accompany the landmark Scudetto he would win with Hellas Verona in 1985. On Crouchaldinho's head, however, it just looked comic and quite frankly ridiculous!

I started as an unemployed manager with Sunday League reputation. I set only Italian teams as manageable and went on holiday mode, leaving it to the FM gods to find my team for me.

My first job offer came from A.C. Giacomense and I accepted immediately. They are located in Masi San Giacomo, a frazione of Masi Torello, Emilia-Romagna. It seems to me that Masi San Giacomo is equivalent to a village or small town in English terms. It is based in the comune of Masi Torello, which itself has a small population of 2,355. Attendances seem to be around 250-300 on average. I'm starting out at a very small club, clearly, who get attendances lower than many clubs at level 7 and 8 of the league pyramid in England!

This is the club badge:

ACD_Giacomense_logo.png

I think the club is probably having one of the better periods of its history right now as they were crowned as Serie D/D winners in 2007–08 and promoted to their current level.

The club nickname is, predictably, the Grigiorossi!

They were predicted to be lower mid-table this season but have had a disastrous start and they currently sit in the 'play-out' zone in Serie C2/A (I'm going to call it that even though the real name is Lega Pro Seconda Divisione Girone A!). I'm short of staff and don't even have an assistant manager so that will be the first priority. It looks as if we ship a lot of goals and that is the main issue to be resolved. We also have a threadbare squad and a large number of loans who don't even look like particularly good players. I'm going to have my work cut out in order to steady the ship and put things right.

I'm taking over just before the winter break, with 18 games gone. We are 19th out of 20 teams in the division with 15 points.

I feel that I have probably made this challenge a little harder on myself by choosing to be English. The media have commented on my lack of Italian language skills and I would have thought the team will take longer to gel as a result. I think it's going to be a tough couple of months as I settle and my team starts to gel and get better. My immediate feelings on taking over at the club are that this is going to be tough and that I am going to have to work hard during the winter break to sort this squad out so that I have a side who are capable of fighting for safety.

My managerial profile is below in case anyone was curious about the details I have picked.

CrouchaldinhoOverview_Profile.jpg

CrouchaldinhoOverview_Information.jpg

As you can see, rather than putting down St. Albans City (my IRL favourite club) as my favourite club as I usually do, I have selected Hellas Verona, who are the team I have very fond memories of managing in previous versions of FM and possibly even an earlier CM. After reading the Tim Parks book on Verona, and also reading all about their 1985 miracle scudetto triumph, I have always had a fondness for Hellas Verona and therefore I have selected them as my favourite team. I would love to earn the right to manage them on this save.

Back to Giacomense! I have one game to play before the break. I will cobble together a side to play that but I don't expect much from the game. Then the priority will be to work hard on sorting things out at the club, especially in terms of playing personnel and staff. I will need to come up with a strategy in order to fight for survival. This is going to be a very interesting start to my 'Lessons in Calcio' save!

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One of my favourite (and also possibly my first) Italian career was with Cremonese on CM03/04. Cremonese started off in Serie C on that game and I took them over and eventually won Serie A with them, having Toledo and Milan Baros as my favoured forwards in a 4-3-1-2 formation! Can't remember who else I had now, I just remember those guys scoring for fun. I had a very good team by the end of that save but I never did win a Champions League. I kept getting knocked out by English clubs (especially Arsenal and Man Utd). It was a very fun save though and one that I have fond memories of!

As A.C. Giacomense play in the same red and grey stripes as Cremonese, I decided this was a good omen, and this played a part in my acceptance of the job!

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I loved the beginning as well.
Good luck Crouchy :cool:.
I enjoyed reading your FM10 thread, looking forward to this!

Thanks guys!

I wish I had more patience to put more into the tactical area of the game every TC tactic I make turns out pretty poor. I always end up downloading a tactic and tweaking it.

Tactics is one of my favourite things. That's the area of the game I like the most really!

You'll get plenty of tactical talk on my thread, that's for sure! And I'll mostly use the TC but I will occasionally make changes 'under the hood' using the advanced options.

The one thing I am kind of dreading with this new FM is the team talks. I've never really liked them and I'm worried that the new tones/moods will make an already ambiguous system worse. I haven't played around with it enough, or indeed played enough FM12 full stop, to judge just yet, so I'll go into it with an open mind.

If I was going to talk about my major weakness in the game, it would be the team talks and motivation probably. That's the area in which I would like to improve during this career.

My strengths, I would like to think, are tactics, finding the right kinds of players for my tactics and also building a good team spirit by focusing on bringing in the 'right' kinds of personalities in my teams.

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Team talks are quite easy but can be annoying I just aggressively or assertively tell my team they are rubbish if we are losing and 9 times out of 10 it gets a positive reaction. End of the match if we lost I get angry, if we win I passionately tell them they did well. Trouble I have is at the start of a match, since the new patch team talks have become a bit harder and so has keeping top morale.

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I mostly follow what my assistant recommends for team talks, unless he's clearly talking rubbish. Which he does maybe once every four games, so it's not that bad. What I've really noticed through following my assistant's advice for team talks is that their different personalities actually matter. My current assistant is quite harsh and aggressive whilst the assistant I had when I joined Werder Bremen was quite mellow and would coax the players along.

Regarding the "Lessons in Calcio" theme, I've been having a similar sort of thought for how my thread could go after I'm finished with Arsenal. As a bit of a Bielsista in real life I was thinking I could head to South America as a sort of pilgrimage and hone an approach using his principles (always one more defender than the opposition have attackers, constantly looking to attack at a high tempo, un enganche y tres puntas (one playmaker and three runners essentially), using midfielders at centreback, etc), then come back to Europe and try to apply this approach there.

Good luck turning things around with the Grigiorossi :thup:

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Team talks are quite easy but can be annoying I just aggressively or assertively tell my team they are rubbish if we are losing and 9 times out of 10 it gets a positive reaction. End of the match if we lost I get angry, if we win I passionately tell them they did well. Trouble I have is at the start of a match, since the new patch team talks have become a bit harder and so has keeping top morale.

Hopefully I enjoy them more than in the past.

I did okay with them on FM10 and had some big successes with them and not too many failures. But I think it was down to the fact that I had developed a system and found a pattern that worked more than anything.

Fantastic opening,good luck at A.C. Giacomense :thup:

Thanks!

I mostly follow what my assistant recommends for team talks, unless he's clearly talking rubbish. Which he does maybe once every four games, so it's not that bad. What I've really noticed through following my assistant's advice for team talks is that their different personalities actually matter. My current assistant is quite harsh and aggressive whilst the assistant I had when I joined Werder Bremen was quite mellow and would coax the players along.

Regarding the "Lessons in Calcio" theme, I've been having a similar sort of thought for how my thread could go after I'm finished with Arsenal. As a bit of a Bielsista in real life I was thinking I could head to South America as a sort of pilgrimage and hone an approach using his principles (always one more defender than the opposition have attackers, constantly looking to attack at a high tempo, un enganche y tres puntas (one playmaker and three runners essentially), using midfielders at centreback, etc), then come back to Europe and try to apply this approach there.

Good luck turning things around with the Grigiorossi :thup:

Definitely do that SnakeXe! That would be a fascinating twist to your career. I love that idea! :)

Interesting and also pleasing to know that your assistant's personality makes a difference. I'll be sure to work hard to find the right kind of assistant then!

I'm due to have a big catch up with your thread SnakeXe. In fact, I'm due to catch up with a number of threads really. When you aren't playing a lot of FM, you don't have the same motivation to read about it, although I have still enjoyed looking in occasionally and I always enjoy reading the careers forum even during periods where I don't play. But now I'm playing more, I will definitely catch up on my FMCU reading. :D

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Love the opening posts. Good luck! :)

SnakeXe - I'm also a fan of "El Loco" and was thinking of implementing his philosophy into my save, but I think I will leave it for a separate career. It would be interesting to see if his ideas can work in FM.

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SnakeXe - I'm also a fan of "El Loco" and was thinking of implementing his philosophy into my save, but I think I will leave it for a separate career. It would be interesting to see if his ideas can work in FM.

There's no reason why they shouldn't work, every decent tactic I've ever made on FM has been based on a real-life system. If I can't get it 100% perhaps I'll have to do a watered down version, because ultimately even Bielsa himself can compromise his philosophy (as he is doing at Athletic Bilbao), but I'm pretty confident of getting close.

Anyway, I'll stop thread-jacking!

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Awesome stuff! This looks like an epic thread in the making :)

Cheers!

Love the opening posts. Good luck! :)

Thanks Roganp!

There's no reason why they shouldn't work, every decent tactic I've ever made on FM has been based on a real-life system. If I can't get it 100% perhaps I'll have to do a watered down version, because ultimately even Bielsa himself can compromise his philosophy (as he is doing at Athletic Bilbao), but I'm pretty confident of getting close.

Anyway, I'll stop thread-jacking!

You can always thread-jack so long as it's interesting stuff! My career threads usually get quite off topic at times anyway. :p

BTW, it has thrown me that the tactics creator is suggesting automatic roles for one of my midfielders every time. How long has it been like that? :confused: Not sure I agree with that change particularly either.

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I think the Automatic MC thing has been there since 2011. I always just change it to support, only ever use Auto for full/wingbacks.

Agreed. I'm going to do the same.

It definitely wasn't in FM10 anyway.

It seems like a strange choice to me but there we go!

Other than that, I'm quickly finding my way around the new FM. Not as much as I thought has actually changed with most stuff.

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Good luck with this :thup:

I hope you can finally learn to love FM again. Things have moved on a bit since FM10, but once you've got used to the new stuff (not all of it is for the better though IMO!), it really is the same frustratingly addictive game deep down. It seems like you've got a decent enough plan laid out to keep your interest anyway, but FM12 is definitely worthy of a Crouchy save :)

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I forgot to add my Twitter details.

Twitter for FM - http://twitter.com/Crouchy_SACFC

Twitter primarily for St. Albans City, Non-League and general football tweets - http://twitter.com/Daedalus1882

Steam profile - http://steamcommunity.com/profiles/76561198046026468

I'm unsure if I will use YouTube yet. I have an account but I'm not sure if I will get around to posting anything so I'll leave it for now and let you know in the future if I do upload something.

I'll add this to the OP.

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Crouchy's 'Lessons in Calcio' Journeyman Save - Project 1: A.C. Giacomense (Season One at Benito Villani 2011/12)

ACD_Giacomense_logo.png

Right, time for my first end of season report and it's not a good one from my point of view! I share my failures as well as my successes in my career threads and I'm afraid this career begins with failure.

As I mentioned before, I started as an unemployed Sunday League reputation manager and I took over at A.C. Giacomense in December with pretty much half of the season already gone. The team was on awful form in the league with extremely low morale and a threadbare squad. The club were in big trouble with 18 games gone. We were 19th out of 20 teams in the division with a pathetic 15 points on the board.

This was going to be an extremely major challenge but I felt that if I applied my usual principles, I would be successful and keep the club in the league. The main concern that I had was time. I felt that was going to be my major obstacle. It would take time for my vision to come to fruition and I would have to be patient. If there proved to be enough time, I felt that we would stay up.

Broadly speaking, these are my steps when in a relegation dogfight:

- Focus on bringing in experienced players with the right kind of mentality as a priority. In short, I'm looking for leaders on and off the pitch. I'd rather have a professional and experienced 35-year-old in decline than an 18-year-old star in the making who has the potential but not the experience and the consistency.

- Tighten things up at the back and concentrate on being hard to beat. Don't take any unnecessary risks. It may be boring but points are all that matters.

- Pack the midfield with hard working players.

- Never panic and always remain composed and calm, no matter what you might want to say to the players. A defeat isn't the end of the world but not quickly recovering from a poor performance certainly can be!

- Use the media and team talks carefully to take pressure off the players where possible.

- Keep the faith, keep things consistent and don't go changing too much at once.

Unfortunately, that last point is always an issue with me, as I like to immediately stamp my personality on any club that I take over. This can be quite stubborn and usually results in a poor opening period when I join a club, especially if I feel that I have to change a lot all at once, as I did here at Giacomense. It's a risk I like to take though.

Below, I'm posting up an image of the results we recorded after I took over at the club. I'll talk you through the results and my thoughts as we fought this relegation battle.

Season11-12.jpg

I had a game to play immediately on the day of my arrival at the club. I relied heavily on my coach (I had no assistant on arriving at the club) and tried to keep things simple tactically. I saw just how much we would have to do in order to improve as we were hammered at home to Bellaria.

During the transfer window in January, I was able to strengthen the team with about 10 signings. I'll detail more about them later on in this post. In terms of signings, it is enough to say here that I focused on improving an absolute shambles of a defence and in strengthening the midfield. It was also important to try to find a goalscorer as we were also lacking on that front. I then adopted a fairly rigid 4-1-3-2 formation with the emphasis on defence to try to get my side through the season. This seemed to be the best plan considering my lack of language skills, the extremely low morale, and the low gelling at the club. I built the tactic around creative striker, Luigi Scotto, who was my main hope in terms of the attack.

It was extremely slow going at first but the draw away to San Marino showed considerable promise straight away. This was the first clean sheet the club had kept for 12 matches. We followed this up with some good performances in which we had absolutely woeful luck in terms of getting the result. Late goals in all three games denied us at least 5 points. Indeed, we were 2-0 up against Alessandria and definitely should have beaten Rimini but luck wasn't with us. I was, however, not panicking just yet!

I was eventually rewarded for my faith with two consecutive 2-0 wins against Renate (home) and Valenzana (away). From this point onwards, we continued to improve and I thought that we had reached a real turning point when we recorded two more victories against Borgo a Buggiano (home) and Savona (away). These were two massive results and I felt that we would continue our climb to safety and attain the goal that I had set out with on joining the club.

A home defeat against Sambonifacese was probably where things went all wrong. We put in an extremely poor performance. But I also think a major factor in this turn in our fortunes was the loss of veteran striker Dani Calvo to injury. He would miss the last couple of months of the season and we didn't perform as well without him spearheading the attack alongside our main talent in Luigi Scotto. Scotto continued to play well but didn't have the partner that he needed and we suffered as a result.

Victory against Mantova along with creditable draws against some of the bigger sides in Pro Patria and Lecco were encouraging but, unfortunately, not enough to save us. Our fate was sealed with defeat against Virtus Entella.

My record with the club wasn't particularly terrible. In 19 games, we won 5 and drew 7. Had we kept up my average points tally over the course of the whole season, we would have finished in safety outside of the relegation play-out places. I did, however, fail in my objective and I'm disappointed that we dropped points on several occasions where a win could have made a massive difference.

Screenshots:

League Table

League Positions Graph

As you can see from above, I took over at the lowest point but didn't manage to steer us enough places back up the table to get to safety.

Italian Cup - did not enter.

Serie C Cup - knocked out before I took over.

Transfers

As you can see from above, I quickly moved to strengthen the team and bring in some quality to help the push for safety. The best signings were Max Tonetto (an experienced fullback who I picked as my new captain), Ludovic Clemente (a talented midfielder who became our most talented man in the middle of the park) and Dani Calvo (a veteran striker who scored a few big goals for us).

Not going to include the full squad details this time as there isn't really much to talk about in terms of taking the squad forward as I'm out of a job!

Key players:

Max Tonno - An experienced fullback with a model professional personality who became my choice for captain. We were unfortunate that he only managed 13 out of the remaining matches due to injury.

Ludovic Clemente - Another signing made by me. He was our best midfield player.

Luigi Scotto - By far the best player at the club both before and after I made new signings. Scored some vital goals but lacked the striker partner that I wanted for him for some of the second half of the season.

Dani Calvo - Experienced striker with an ambitious and professional attitude. Shame he only managed 12 games as he made a different when he did play. Got injured and missed the end of the season. We missed him when it really counted.

Career Overview:

Season    Team			League                   Position    Achievements/outcomes
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
2010/11   A.C. Giacomense	Serie C2/A	         18th         (Took over after 18 games) Relegated

Next Season: Find a new job and learn Italian!

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Aww, sucks Crouchy :(

At least, you didn't beat Santarcangelo ;)

Indeed! They did quite well.

Do you know what, it actually doesn't suck at all. I had tons of fun despite the outcome!

It does represent my first relegation in a career thread so I will grieve the loss of my excellent record on FMCU! :D It's also my first relegation on FM since FM08 (which also occurred in Italy's bottom division actually)!

But I really enjoyed the battle despite the disappointment of the ending. The Italian lower leagues are great for a relegation battle with the play-out zone and it being so easy to get trapped down there and so hard to find your way out!

I enjoyed the battle more than a title challenge. I was troubled by the fact that I never did get to apply all of my principles and I didn't make the signings I wanted to in order to build up one of my preferred tactical strategies. I paid the price for my own stubborn nature in trying to change everything at once (totally new staff, a number of new signings, new tactics etc.) but that's the way I usually play it. I do think that had I taken over a month earlier, we would have stayed up, but oh well!

Looking forward to the next challenge. My reputation has taken a slight battering and I'm getting rejected left, right and centre for jobs. I have a feeling that one of the newly promoted sides from Serie D will take me on though! That will represent another new and tough challenge in this difficult start to Lessons in Calcio!

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Indeed! They did quite well.

Do you know what, it actually doesn't suck at all. I had tons of fun despite the outcome!

It does represent my first relegation in a career thread so I will grieve the loss of my excellent record on FMCU! :D It's also my first relegation on FM since FM08 (which also occurred in Italy's bottom division actually)!

But I really enjoyed the battle despite the disappointment of the ending. The Italian lower leagues are great for a relegation battle with the play-out zone and it being so easy to get trapped down there and so hard to find your way out!

I enjoyed the battle more than a title challenge. I was troubled by the fact that I never did get to apply all of my principles and I didn't make the signings I wanted to in order to build up one of my preferred tactical strategies. I paid the price for my own stubborn nature in trying to change everything at once (totally new staff, a number of new signings, new tactics etc.) but that's the way I usually play it. I do think that had I taken over a month earlier, we would have stayed up, but oh well!

Looking forward to the next challenge. My reputation has taken a slight battering and I'm getting rejected left, right and centre for jobs. I have a feeling that one of the newly promoted sides from Serie D will take me on though! That will represent another new and tough challenge in this difficult start to Lessons in Calcio!

Certainly, what I found, was that your starting team rep has a LOT to do with what players you can attract, my team rep didn't rise properly until Serie B, so a lot of the good castoffs from A&B rejected me early on. Next club you have, pump ALL your efforts into increasing your junior coaching. It's what saved my arse for years!

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Project 2 - A.C. Mezzocorona

I jump straight back into management with the first club that'll have me! A.C. Mezzocorona will be my second project and let's hope it is more successful that the first. I will have a whole season here to prove myself and that, I hope, should make all of the difference.

A. C. Mazzocorona is located in Mezzocorona, Trentino, but they apparently play in Trento since the capacity of the stadium in Mezzocorona is less than the minimum required. Their colours are yellow and green.

Mazzocorona is located in northern Italy and has a population of 4,938. We play in the city of Trento, which has a population 115,243. I don't know what attendances to be expect but we have around 200 season ticket holders, so probably not that high! I'm starting out at another small club, clearly, so this will be another challenge to compete with the bigger sides to stay in the division.

This is the club badge:

AC_Mezzocorona.jpg

I think the club is probably having one of the better periods of its history right now as they were crowned as winners at Serie D level in 2007. They were relegated from Serie C2 level in 2010/11 and have bounced straight back. My immediate job is clearly to survive and attempt to consolidate. Let's see how I get on this time!

The club nickname is Rotaliani. Does anyone know what this means in English?

They are predicted to finish in the relegation zone so I will have my work cut out again! But I'm looking forward to the challenge! Once again, I'm short of staff - in fact, I don't have any - so that will be the first priority. It looks as if we ship a lot of goals and that is the main issue to be resolved. We don't have much of a squad and so I'm going to have to do a lot of building to get a decent side together.

I still speak no Italian, apparently, so this challenge will remain a little harder until I develop some Italian language skills! The media have once again commented on my lack of Italian language skills and I would have thought the team will take longer to gel as a result. I think it's going to be a tough couple of months but it should be a good challenge and I feel more confident with a whole season ahead of me.

This time, I will post an initial pre-season update to give an indication of what I have done to prepare the team for a potentially long and arduous season!

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Good luck with Mezzocorona Crouchy, hopefully you'll do better with them than with Giacomense. I agree with SnakeXe that having a full season with a club can make a big difference to you chances.

The club nickname is Rotaliani. Does anyone know what this means in English?

It refers to the region they're based in.

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Good luck with this :thup:

I hope you can finally learn to love FM again. Things have moved on a bit since FM10, but once you've got used to the new stuff (not all of it is for the better though IMO!), it really is the same frustratingly addictive game deep down. It seems like you've got a decent enough plan laid out to keep your interest anyway, but FM12 is definitely worthy of a Crouchy save :)

Thanks AK22. Hopefully I will find the love again. I'm enjoying it so far!

A new Crouchy thread!!!!! :D I'll be subscribing.

Cheers Jaycar. :)

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