Oliveira do Bairro Sport Clube - Hugo De Luca
2019/20
Between a couple of seasons of mediocrity, and my policy of developing young players with promise - my squad's average age is just 21 - starting to bear fruit (and therefore starting to require higher wages!) the financial situation was getting pretty dire at Estádio Municipal de Oliveira do Bairro. At the start of this season I made the decision that if we don't earn promotion this season I was going to slash the squad back to save money and try to rebuild. Despite the tight purse, I still elected to shell out 40k on bringing János Nagy into the side after he spent a successful loan season with us last year. Joining him in midfield would be Peterson, who came to be my highest paid player after he received glowing recommendations from my scouts. Strauß was brought in on loan to take the place of Arnaldo Rato, whom I judged to have wage demands beyond his ability at the end of last season, but unfortunately an injury in the new year meant he would miss the remainder of the season and he was allowed to return home. My only acquisition in January was Anthony Garric who was brought in as a first choice player while I was having a little difficulty with injuries. {|Transfer Summary|}
The League Cup first phase saw me just about scrape through my group with 2 wins and 2 losses, before drawing me against parent club Olhanense in the second round. The first leg was a game we possibly should have won, but if I'd been told before the match I'd have walked away at 1-1 I'd have been pretty happy with that. After conceding in the 42nd minute of the return leg it looked pretty bad for us, until we won and converted a 76th minute penalty before knocking in 2 more in the final 5 minutes to make it look like we were never in any danger at all. The second group phase saw us go completely unbeaten in a group containing Belenenses, P. Ferreira and Sporting. That sounds great, but we also failed to win any games. The highlight was most definitely the 3-3 draw with Sporting, which saw us 2 up inside 5 minutes and turned into a really entertaining end-to-end game. Possibly my favourite game ever that I've not won.
The Taça de Portugal was another write off for us, losing in the second round to National Championship side Gondomar SC. While a cup run would have been nice, the League Cup kept our schedule pretty crowded as it was and I'm glad to have not had to worry about the Taça as well.
That just leaves the important one: The Second League. We started reasonably, but then had a really bad November which we only mostly recovered from in December. Luckily for us, teams were trading wins all over the place at this point and despite bottoming out as low as 10th I'm pretty sure we were never more than 4 or 5 points short of 2nd place (and promotion). We lost our opening 2 games of 2020 before going on a tremendous run to put us well and truly in contention for promotion. With one game to play we sat top by a point, with the team in 3rd being 3 points back. League sorting in Portugal goes on results between teams first, and I was relatively confident that we would finish above Oliveirense, but I wasn't certain enough of this fact to start celebrating yet. My final game of the season was against Aves who, after leading the league for the majority of the season, had been on a bad run. This made me very wary, because the Aves players could well be desperate to redeem their season and finish on a high note. The first half was pretty cagey, with neither team really committing to getting men forward. After the restart it was more of the same, but after 5 minutes Aves managed to put the ball into the back of the net after a ludicrous long ball beat the offside trap and then was squared across the box for a tap-in. This galvanised the Oliveira Bairro players and shots started raining in from everywhere. In the first half we managed just 4 shots total, whereas we hit 12 in the second half. It all looked to be over with 5 still to play, but then a desperate cross across the 6-yard box was turned home by Nagy to guarantee the promotion. Even better for us, Belenenses lost their game, meaning we won us some silverware as well! {|Past Positions|}
Key players not mentioned above:
Joaquim Andrade
Daniel Soares (YP1) - Also won Second League 'keeper of the year
Boubacar Traoré - Burkinabe international, although yet to score
My plans for next season are pretty simple: survive, and make a profit. I'd like to end the season with the bank balance reading positive, and honestly I think this needs to be slightly more of a priority for me than survival. To that end, my intention is to primarily keep the same core of the team and use youngsters - either newly brought in or already at the club - to fill the holes when we need to rotate the squad. It's a risky plan, but hopefully it means we'll be in a much better financial position at the end of the year and even if we go down we'll have a strong platform to easily bounce back up from (assuming I don't get sacked!).
