Here’s a quick rundown of the last 10 league games, or, as I’ve taken to calling them, “the complete repudiation of all we are and stand for.”
- L at Udinese 0-1: We actually had more of the ball—a rare accomplishment this season—but only got one shot on target. Joep Mommers scored before halftime and, utterly Joeped, we never got back into the match.
- W vs Parma 2-0: Parma are really good this year, but we crushed them at the Silvio Piola, holding them to one shot and battering them from all angles. Still, our only goals came from a corner and a penalty, the latter in the 90th minute.
- W vs Fiorentina 4-1: After this match I thought we were back on track. Barone came back from a spell on the bench to score a majestic first-half hat trick, undoubtedly prompting the Italian papers to use whatever word they use in the situations where the English papers use “imperious.” We still only had 42% of the ball, though.
- L at Roma 2-4: Roma became the second team to score four on us this season with this game. I tried benching Aivar Kulik due to his poor performances, and Miguel José took the rare opportunity of a start to gift-wrap two goals for the opposition. Barone went off injured. Maybe we weren’t back on track after all.
- W vs Genoa 3-0: A huge win against one of the teams that challenged us for the final Champions League spot last season. The fact that all three of our goals were scored by centerbacks (one from a corner, two from indirect free kicks) was almost beside the point.
- L at Atalanta 0-2: A miserable loss against a mediocre team. Both goals came in the last 7 minutes, after I’d tried to push the players forward to try to steal a win. Our losing streak away from the Silvio Piola continued.
- L at Juventus 0-1: And continued again in our first match after the winter break. Juventus had a man sent off right after scoring in the 19th minute, and we had two-thirds of the possession, but they packed their entire team behind the ball and we could barely find a shot. By the end I was telling our players to take rushed long shots and not worry about the perfect pass. I left the game feeling about as bankrupt as I’ve felt at Pro Vercelli.
- L vs Inter 0-1: So much for our winning streak at the Silvio Piola. Our third straight loss hurt more because it came in the 1910 Derby in front of our home fans. It hurt more still because we actually had the better of the game and came close to scoring several times. It hurt most because it left me with no better sense of what I ought to be trying to turn things around.
- L at Lecce 2-3: For our fourth straight loss, why not add a nice helping of abject humiliation? Lecce are terrible, and yet came roaring back from from a 2-1 deficit to beat us. Ibrahimovic managed a 5.3 rating for the game and had to be taken off shortly after halftime. Did I mention that Ibrahimovic was recently named European Defender of the Year?
- W at Palermo 1-0: It looks like this game broke our losing streak, and technically it did, but a) Palermo’s best player was injured before halftime, b) Palermo still managed three times as many shots as we did, and c) the game was decided by a fifth-minute own goal. Not exactly the stuff of legends. It was almost like the first game of our losing streak emeritus.
The Champions League played out a little more encouragingly. After losing two games to Barcelona by a combined score of 4-6, we had to beat Lyon at home and Partizan away—and hope that Lyon would lose to Barça—to have a chance of advancing out of our group. We lived up to our end of this with a great 4-2 win over Lyon and a 3-1 win over Partizan. But Lyon held Barça to a draw in the last game, so our comeback didn’t really mean much:
And now we’re stuck in fifth in Serie A and fluttering down to the first knockout round of the Europa League.
What’s alarming about all this is that I can’t see any obvious cause for our struggles; there must be some correctable factor or factors, but when I watch the team, I don’t see what they are. We have noticeably better players than we did last year, they all seem to be doing okay, and yet we’re on pace to score fewer goals and concede more goals than we did last season. I can’t point to a lot of blatant tactical errors I’ve made, and yet we’re losing games late and failing to come back after we give up a lead. Maybe it’s time to go back to the drawing board with our tactics, but if I’m going to do that, I’d like to have a clear sense of what I’m trying to accomplish beyond “win more games,” and at the moment, I just don’t have it.
I’ve been trying to keep from overreacting, especially since there’s a chance the team just needs more time to gel. I didn’t bring in any new senior players in January, and I didn’t sell anyone or make wholesale changes to the team sheet. That, actually, could be part of the problem, because I turned down huge bids for some of our best players, and a few of them—namely Sammarco, Contini, and Ibrahimovic—are now unhappy at not being allowed to move to a bigger club. I don’t usually worry when one player is unhappy, but three, particularly when one of them is the captain, could mean a serious drag on our motivation.
Well, Ibrahimovic can sulk all he wants; there’s nothing I can do about it till the end of the season. At this point, the only way forward is to hold on and hope that over the next four months the team will get its nerve back and reclaim its place in the top four. We have the head-to-head tiebreaker secured over Palermo, which could be huge. If we wind up not qualifying for the Champions League next year, that rumble of discontent from players wanting to leave for bigger clubs is likely to turn into a roar.
Could it be that the team significantly over performed last year, and is now inevitably regressing to the mean? And how on earth did you manage to drop 18 of 30 points and still be in 5th?
Because of the tiebreakers. In the Premier League, we’d have fallen to seventh because of goal differential. And if Parma weren’t in the mix, we’d be sixth behind Udinese. But because there are three teams tied on 32 points, Serie A sorts us by creating a classifica avulca, a mini-table that includes only the results between the tied teams. We come away with 3 points and a +1 goal differential, Udinese with 3 points and a 0 goal differential, and Parma with 3 points and -1 goal differential.
In other words, we’re hanging by a thread.
You just gave me a headache Brian…
Good luck in pulling it around.
I think you just have a collective dip in form, but dont overreact and blow things up or change your tactics – maybe a handful of young players could get some 15 minute stints at the end of the games to put pressure on slightly underperforming veterans, but Winter is the time to blow beautiful things up, not Spring
I’d say fitness could be a major issue. How are your fitness coaches / training regimes? If you really are losing a lot of games in the last 15-20 minutes, it could definitely be the reason.
That’s a good thought. It’s possible we’re overtraining a bit. I’m in the middle of revamping our training completely based on some hot new theories. I’ll look into this while I’m at it.
Keep in mind the opponent AI adjusts strategy and mentality up to a higher level if your team seems more formidable than in previous seasons. That’s why most people are advised to start with a less than top of the table team.
I think this entire tack is the death of this blog. Its like listening to someone at the bar drone on endlessly about their fantasy team.
Well, here’s the thing. I play the game for fun. Posts about it are easy to write, and I enjoy the fiction/reality effect, so I’ve been putting up a lot of them because, at least based on the traffic numbers and comments, a lot of people seem to enjoy following them. I don’t write fewer non-Pro Vercelli posts because of this; those largely depend on what’s exciting to me and how utterly burned out I am on thinking about Liverpool on a given Wednesday morning. So you’re basically getting either the blog you have now or the exact same blog minus Pro Vercelli posts.
So I’m tempted to say “Just don’t read the Pro Vercelli posts if you don’t like them,” but I realize that in some weird way that’s too much to ask of a dissatisfied blog reader (I would be the same way on other blogs). So just in case Mr. Profundity represents a massive silent core of anti-Pro Vercelli sentiment, can I ask if anyone agrees with him? It wouldn’t be hard to, for instance, move the Pro Vercelli coverage to a separate blog so the reality-only crowd wouldn’t have to follow it. I’d rather not do that, since honestly this stuff all feels like part of the same inquiry to me, but I’m also not in this to frustrate people.
Make your feelings known.
I think the Mr. Profundities of the world, unlike real profundities, are a dime a dozen. Ignore the haters, these posts are great.
Brian, i have been wondering about your locker room dramas. All those unhappy players with their insane expectations…
I have been having the same problem at my Fulham game. Even though i have been to 2 Champions league finals in succession (losing both to Man. City), and winning the Uefa Cup and losing another UEFA Cup final (all of this in 4 years), players still want to move on.
My biggest problem is that there is no way for me to try and be proactive about them. I can critic them but i can’t say that they are my foundations for the club…
It is all very frustrating when you have a captain that is hell bent on running away from the club and is one of the best players on your team. Especially if, as in my case, it happens to have been a youth ranks player….
It can be perplexing, I agree. This is somewhat speculative, because I obviously can’t see the back end of the game, but from what I understand:
* Every player has a hidden “ambition” rating.
* Every club has a “reputation” rating that rises or falls slowly based on success or failure over time.
* Every player also has a “reputation” rating.
* The more ambitious the player, the more desperate he’ll be to play at the highest-reputation club he can possibly sign for (which is in turn partly determined by the player’s reputation score).
So where we’re thinking that Pro Vercelli, Fulham, etc. are triumphantly on the rise and that any player would be lucky to sign with us, the game sees an ambitious player as thinking “I am famous across the continent and yet I am stuck playing for a club that’s barely known outside Italy. I should be warming the bench for Real Madrid, as is my birthright.” Frustrating, but not exactly unrealistic.
It’s a bit more complex than that, because the reputation of the league and the quality of European competition on offer also seem to come into play. But that roughly seems to describe the dynamic, because ambitious players do become much less fidgety once you start winning major silverware and your club’s reputation catches up to your accomplishments.
I think the Pro Vercelli posts are phenomenal, more captivating than most real teams. The only downside for me is that I often have to read them with a thesaurus/dictionary/Maker’s Mark double to comprehend their brilliance. I think that’s sufficiently sycophantic. I fully champion your right to say “Just don’t read the Pro Vercelli posts if you don’t like them.” You don’t have to read the posts. This isn’t Russia. Is this Russia? This isn’t Russia.
To be honest Brian, and I hope you don’t take offense to this, I prefer the Pro Vercelli posts to the other posts on this blog. That’s not to say those are unsatisfactory in anyway, but if your Pro Vercelli posts and your other posts were simultaneously falling off a cliff, and I only had time to save one of them, I would choose the Lions in an instant. Everything on this blog is great, but something about this alternate reality your creating, the way you mix game fact with personal narrative and fictionalized interpretation, has me checking my RSS daily for new Pro Vercelli posts. I suppose its a bit depressing that I prefer virtual soccer exploits to real soccer exploits definitely says something about the saga you have woven.
Adding my voice to the chorus to say that the serialized novel that is the Pro Vercelli posts has become one of my favorite features on this blog.
Count me among the people trying to find a Pro Vercelli banner to hang outside my house on random days of the week. Hell, I don’t even play FM anymore, but I enjoy the running narrative.
Are you seeing a shutdown in midfield, or is it just simply a lack of finishing?
Yeah, I would also like to state that I wouldn’t have even found your site if it wasn’t for the Pro Vercelli posts, or at least stopped reading quickly.
There is a type of interactive fiction you are painting with this simple game. It’s humble origins are almost immaterial to the human struggle depicted. One not only of sulking Ibanezii and wandering Colombos, but of your mind and passions, a case study in philosophy and the beautiful game. History, passion, heartbreak, glory, tragedy, all the things that make the real game so beautiful is distilled.
On another level, it’s also seems kind of odd for the other commentator to say it’s like some drunk muttering about his fantasy team. There’s no real players, no collecting of star power wherein you suspect the poor bugger is more into how they can shape a squad into what Man City dreams they could buy tomorrow with just enough capital. There is no controlling of those one will never touch, this is a creation like Tolkein’s Middle Earth. Entirely one’s own.
But yeah…that’s just my take on it.
Profundity is defined as intellectual depth. I can’t help but feel that his statement represents the exact opposite…quick to judge with a reluctance to accept the brilliance of Vercelli. Granted, everyone is entitled to their own opinion, but I would believe he is in the minority. Perhaps, this is the workings of of Colombo himself, disregarding the boundaries of his virtual life and channeling his frustrations to this unsuspecting soul…YOU SHOULD’VE USED THE 1-7-3, BRIAN!!! WE COULD’VE BEEN GREAT TOGETHER!!!