Bedese

San Giovanni are into the Champions League Group Stages!

Can we hold on in Switzerland?

How on earth did Steaua lose to them If we can beat Young Boys - which we almost definitely can't - we'll be in the Champions League groups.

Revenge for all the beatings they gave us early on Oh, wow! I was expecting Steaua Bucharest but the Icelanders upset them in the last round, and without wanting to get carried away, we should be favourites here...

TNS used to be the team we didn't want to draw... I feel like that might have changed a bit

We've got two new signings in for the first time in a while! Camilli probably won't play a game for us but looked like a good option as cover, but we're really weak at FB, so Benedettini is probably going to come in and start for us right away.

54th Should be easy enough.

Cheers! Sadly, not really We're up to about 165th in the world, but got just one point in our last Euro Qualifiers group. We lose nearly every game, with the exception of a handful of Nations League games (although we've never won our group) and a few sporadic draws/wins here and there. I'm tempted to have a crack at the job before too long.

They're expensive, but I think that's the last set of upgrades we need on them!

Season Review! Going so deep in Europe and wanting to keep our team fresh for those games, combined with having such a small squad and quite a few injuries meant that we had a few games where we had to play with four goalkeepers on the pitch - although we did win one of those 4-0 That gave us our first loss in a while, but all that matters is we won the final to keep our Champions League run going. Another double For almost the entire squad to have over a 7.00 average despite playing 18 European games this year is pretty impressive!

Thanks Kid! That's a good question! Here's our tactic for domestic games: For European games against better teams than us, we switch the mentality to Very Defensive. That sets us out to be stable at the back, and when we get the ball we move it incredibly slowly and with short passes so we don't waste possession. A lot of our European games have about 5 shots each, which is absolutely perfect for us. If we try and play an open, expansive game, we're going to get battered Normally I think possession just for possession sake is one of the biggest fallacies in football (see Spain against Russia in the World Cup), but my philosophy with this is that we have much weaker players than the opposition do, and so the longer we have the ball, the less time they have to create chances against us. Often what happens, too, is the big teams expect to be able to dominate us and so get fed up of us passing the ball around the back for 90 minutes, so start to play really high up - which is when we can ping one over the top for the 17 acceleration of Claudio Fabbri (YP32) to sprint onto and set us up on a dangerous counter attack Most of our goals - okay, maybe not most, but a large proportion of them - come from set pieces, too. Set Pieces is an area I'm incredibly passionate about in real life (you have to be as a Rotherham fan!) and I think it's a really underdeveloped source of goals - especially as a technically inferior team that has a physical advantage, like we often do. I've tweaked our corner routine a lot until I've found one that I'm happy with, I've come up with a long throw routine that tries to avoid the weird quirks in the match engine with long throws this year while still being effective, and we score quite a fair few from free kicks, too - the goal that Davide Toccaceli (YP19) scored to win us our Europa League group was a header from a free kick, and Claudio Fabbri (YP32) absolutely tonks in a few direct ones every year too. Oh, and if we're away, I'll usually turn timewasting up to 'whenever possible' too. It's not pretty - it explains why in 180 minutes of football with Zenit we drew 0-0 - but it's effective

So close!

Youth Intake Day! Just before the second leg, there's the small matter of our Youth Intake... It's not really a position we need, but he looks like a very good prospect.

No away goal, but I'll take that!

There were worse teams to draw, but this is almost definitely where our European journey ends.

Mattia Giovagnoli (YP36) with the last kick of the game!!!

That's our 3 best defenders all out

I just pray that missed penalty doesn't come back to ruin an incredible night in Portugal...

Not the kindest of draws, but we'll give it a shot!

I guess we were probably due some bad luck, but that might be our starting LB crocked, and we don't actually have another one

Captain Fantastic has only gone and won us the bloody group!

Here's the situation going into the final day... We play away at Kobenhavn on the final day. We probably can't expect anything from that game - it's the hardest one in the group - but if we can steal a draw, we'll go through regardless of the Plzen result. We beat and drew with them, so we've got the Head to Head Advantage. Actually, though, that might not be right. If Plzen win we'll all be on 9 points, and that might go down to Goal Difference rather than a 3 way Head to Head Round Robin? But we'll have the same GD as Kobenhavn, and we've scored more goals than them, so would we go through on Goals Scored? Hopefully it won't come down to that If Plzen fail to win, it doesn't matter what happens in our game anyway - we'll be through. You'd expect them to beat Legia at home, though, so we probably need something...

Here's hoping! It's looking okay after 3 games... If only Plzen hadn't stolen a win away at Kobenhavn, we'd be nearly home and dry already!

That's a really interesting group... I think it's four pretty evenly matched teams. Fingers crossed!

How on earth was that 3-2 to them