I found that skin when I was reading through some of the 'Current Game' threads, I believe it's called noche.
Well, I have finished my first season with Derby, I'll have to do a mass post of screenshots now as I wasn't able to regularly update with the board being down.
After a dodgy start to the season a change of tactics saw the team performing a lot better and by December 1st I found myself in 12th place in the league and in fairly good form:
This wasn't to last however, as December brought a run of tough fixtures against Arsenal, Aston Villa, Liverpool and Chelsea resulting in a run of 4 straight defeats. To add to my misery, as we got back to winning ways against Bolton I lost 2 of my best performers, Oakley and Hamalainen, to injury for 1 and 2 months respectively. Despite this setback we managed to get our season back on track, well sort of, we were very inconsistent.
During this time we had 3 relatively easy games in the FA cup taking us to the 6th round and raising my hopes that we could go fair into the competition. These hopes were soon dealt a blow when we were drawn against Man Utd in the next round and I felt for certain we'd be knocked out.
However to my surprise we managed to pull off a massive shock, beating them 2-1 (see what I mean about inconsistent?!):
The joy of this win was shortlived however, when we were drawn against Chelsea in the semi.
Here's an update of how the league was shaping up at the beginning of March, along with the transfers as of the end of Jan and my results for the past few months:
The last couple of months saw a continuation of our inconsistent league form and a fairly poor run in that included defeats once again to the hands of Liverpool and Aston Villa.
In amongst the last few league games was an FA Cup Semi-final against Chelsea at Wembley. Once again I felt certain we would lose, beating Utd was surely a fluke, there was no way we could have the same luck against Chelsea.. was there?
Well, we did it! I don't know how we managed to hold on for the draw, but we did and finished them off on penalties booking a date with Man City in the final, who had beat Arsenal in the other game (also on pens).
Here's the results for the rest of the season along with the final league table:
I was slightly disappointed with our final league position as I believe my team are capable of better than that, but considering injuries to key players, players struggling for fitness at the beginning of the season and on return from injury, aswell as the team taking a few months to completely gel.. I think we did pretty well!
As for the FA Cup final, well, why don't you see for yourselves:
Needless to say, I was delighted with that! The mighty Derby is going to Europe next season!
So... In summary, I can only be happy with how the season has gone overall, despite believing we could've done better in the league. My best signing was easily Aaritalo, but seeing as I already knew what I was getting with him, I think the signing I was most inpressed with has to be Hamalainen. He was incredibly cheap and in great form before his injury, winning young player of the month 2 months in a row. Danny Haynes was also impressive when given a run in the side, scoring 16 goals in total (8 in 7 cup games).
The biggest surprise to me was the quality of David Jones, I'd never heard of him before but he was fantastic. I was also pleasantly surprised by Lewis Price, who got MoM no less than 10 times.
I was planning for this to be a break from my main Liverpool game and didn't think I'd get into it much, but I've really enjoyed this season and am now planning on continuing with it for a while. I'm currently in the summer transfer window and have been given £24mil to spend after promising to a midtable finish next time round. I've got a number of transfer targets but it's just a case of hoping Derby can attract them and also hoping they'll get work permits, fingers crossed! Maybe I'll keep you all updated..
(Sorry it's such an essay, like I said.. couldn't update earlier with the board being down.)
TOTW/F/M Award(s): 1
Bleeding hell! You done well good.
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