I finished my first season with FC United and overall it was a solid start to FM18. We finished in second place, 4 points behind Kidderminster, we overachieved but the season also ended in real disappointment. Kidderminster, for a large portion of the season were ahead by 10 points and we managed to get within 3 points of them with only an few matches to go but a draw and a loss meant we lost ground again and going into the second last match we were 4 points behind and that is how it stayed. Below are the fixtures that I had to play after the first blog post and how they finished up.
The next disappointment was against Harrogate. Towards the end of the season we beat them 4-0 and then we met again in a promotional play-off match in which we made a terrible start. We missed sitters and they got 3 goals unanswered. Normally when a competition is described as "not a fair reflection" it tends to mean that one team was better than the score shows. The opposite was true for this match because we had no right being as close to the opposition as we were on the scoreboard. We pulled one back after the break immediately answered by another goal for Harrogate. At 4-1 I set them to an attacking mentality, told them to play wide, exploiting the flanks and pump the ball into the box in the hopes that we could stretch them and possibly drop the ball in behind the backs. It worked, sort of, we got 2 more goals and with the score 4-3 we were the better team, we were creating chances but we lacked the finishing of earlier fixtures. The last 15 minutes saw Harrogate score their fifth goal effectively killing the game off before we score a consolation goal in the dying seconds for a 5-4 finish. As I said we were lucky to be in it at 90 minutes as 2 of our goals came from huge mistakes by the Harrogate defenders, although if our strikers had taken advantage of the opportunities presented to them we may have been out of sight in the early stages of this match.
Kidderminster won the league with us in second and York, who we also beat by sizable margin went on to earn promotion through the playoffs.
There were plenty of positives on individual levels though. Kanye Diedrick-Roberts was the league's top scorer with 26 goals (34 across all competitions), player of the season was Tom Walker with an average rating of 7.61 and I was awarded Manager of the Season with a win rate of 58% across 43 matches. We bagged the most goals too, scoring 86 in the league. We had 8 more from the two cup competitions.
Top Goalscorer - Kanye Diedrick-Roberts
Player of the Season - Tom Walker
Manager of the Season - Me
Tom Walker has left leaving a gap to fill on the left wing, so I'll be searching for a replacement or as close as I can get to one. I'll also be looking for a few defenders and striker and as Allinson is out of sorts in goal that will be another position that needs addressing. That's the end of my first season, I'll be blogging about my second season in charge of FC United in the next few days. Hope you enjoy the read.
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