Glory Of The Football Manager System

Chapter 81: The Underdog’s Gambit I

The betrayal of Mark Crossley was a body blow, a cynical and calculated act of sabotage that had left us reeling. We had lost our best defender, our leader, our rock. The hole in our team, and in our collective spirit, was immense.

All seemed lost. The dream, which had been so close, so tangible, so beautifully real, was now a distant and fading mirage. The bookmakers, the experts, the entire and deeply cynical world of lower-league football, had written us off. We were dead and buried.

I spent the next 24 hours in a state of deep and profound despair. I locked myself in my flat, I turned off my phone, and I descended into a dark and lonely spiral of self-pity and recrimination.

I had failed. I had let my players down. I had let my chairman down. I had let the entire and long-suffering community of Moss Side down. The weight of the world was on my shoulders, and it was crushing me.

But then, as the initial wave of despair started to recede, it was replaced by something else. Something new. Something surprising.

A tiny, fragile, and slightly insane flicker of defiance.

A voice in my head, a voice that sounded a lot like Emma, a voice that sounded a lot like Frankie Morrison, a voice that sounded a lot like my own long-forgotten and deeply stubborn inner-Mourinho, whispered a single and powerful word:’Fight’.

I was not beaten yet. I was not broken yet. I was a manager. I was a leader. I was a man who had been to hell and back, a man who had faced crisis, who had faced conflict, who had faced betrayal.

let Marcus Chen, with his money, with his cynicism, with his dirty and despicable tricks, have the final say.

the system. My beautiful and brilliant partner. My secret weapon. My last and only hope. The new and upgraded interface flickered into life, a holographic and deeply beautiful sea of

not be filled by any of the players in my squad. My other centre-back was a decent and honest journeyman, but he was slow, and he was

the youth team who had never played a single senior game in his life. It was an impossible situation. A situation that required not just

night poring over the system, my mind a frantic and desperate blur of tactical diagrams, of player profiles,

Anything.

A loophole.

A glitch.

could give us a glimmer of hope. I was a man

starting to rise, just as I was about to give

insane, that I had never even considered it before. A tactical setup that was buried deep in the system’s database, in a sub-menu of a sub-menu of a sub-menu, under the heading:’Experimental & High-Risk

I had never seen before in the lower leagues, a formation that defied all the conventional wisdom of the game. It was a 3-4-3 Diamond, a fluid and complex system that required a unique and highly specific set

the centre of the pitch, to dominate possession, to press high, to

that had one very specific and very unusual player role at its heart. A role

player who was expected to be a brilliant ball-playing defender and a deep-lying

tactical intelligence, of technical ability, of physical prowess. A role that was so demanding, so complex, so utterly specialized, that almost