Nightmare Firenze
Our first meeting with Fiorentina this season was, unfortunately, considerably less entertaining than the previous one.
Alex’s side thoroughly deserved the victory. We were second best in almost every department. Three goals, an xG of 3.53 to our rather apologetic 0.81 and a performance that suggested my players had confused the fixture list with a pre-season testimonial.
At 3-0 down I began preparing the sort of tactical reshuffle that every Football Manager player convinces themselves will somehow rescue the situation. Seventy minutes is, after all, the point at which hope reaches its maximum irrationality.
Then my connection disappeared.
Again.
The game continued.
My assistant manager took charge.
This is rather like discovering that the captain of your aircraft has been replaced mid-flight by the gentleman who normally hands out the complimentary peanuts.
Nothing particularly disastrous happened during the remaining twenty minutes. Nothing particularly encouraging happened either. My assistant, displaying the sort of quiet competence that is deeply irritating, simply accepted the defeat with considerably more dignity than I was prepared to.
Now, I am not suggesting there is any connection between these increasingly convenient technical interruptions and fixtures involving Alex.
That would be absurd.
It would also be impossible to prove.
I merely note that, for reasons nobody has yet satisfactorily explained, Italian football continues to produce an extraordinary number of highly specific coincidences.
The Battery Affair.
The Goalkeeper Incident.
The Florence Disconnect.
Individually they mean very little.
Collectively…
…they have at least earned their own folder.
The Osimhen Problem
Victor Osimhen’s arrival generated considerable excitement. Which is hardly surprising. He is one of the finest strikers in Europe and cost approximately the same amount of money as several small Italian villages.
The problem is that Taty Castellanos appears to have interpreted the signing as a personal insult.
Rather than surrendering his place gracefully, he has responded by scoring goals with the determination of a man attempting to make the transfer committee look foolish.
Fifteen league matches into the season and Taty leads the club with ten goals. Osimhen has seven, which is by any reasonable measure a perfectly respectable return.
Unfortunately, Football Manager is not a reasonable game.
Every match follows a familiar pattern. Osimhen spends eighty-five minutes looking every inch the world-class striker I thought I was buying. Then, at some point, he is presented with a chance so simple that the crowd begins celebrating before he has even struck the ball.
This is where things become interesting.
Sometimes he shoots directly at the goalkeeper. Sometimes he misses the target altogether. On one memorable occasion I’m fairly certain he was aiming for the Vatican.
He usually scores later in the game.
Which somehow makes the earlier miss even more irritating.
I have developed a theory that somebody quietly edited his attributes after he arrived in Rome. Not the obvious ones. His pace remains exceptional. His movement is superb. His finishing still says eighteen.
They have simply introduced a hidden attribute labelled “Ability to Miss One Absolute Sitter Per Match.”
As far as I can tell, it has been set to twenty.