Some teams in POR1A are reinforcing their squad so that they can fight against the well-established teams in the league, and yet there is some team where the Manager is thinking on retiring.
On the 1st season that the Belgium manager took over the team, he led his man to 3rd place on the standing league. He came from Setemares where he was the Assistant manager for 1 season and half. FC Estuera never got better than 11th position before Phil Weston took the helm of the team and on the 1st season as the main leader man of the team he gets 3rd, on the next season he improves the mark and makes History on Estuera to become Vice Champions.
From here the pressure starts to build on the team and on the manager, even thou on the 3rd season as main manager of FC Estuera made him get the 3rd place again things starts to crumble. It was season 8 of the Portuguese league and 4th season for the manager and the team drops to 6th on the standing league, everyone believed that it was a fluke and things would be better but on season 9 of POR1A the team gets the same position on the standing league. The points conquered by the team were also dropping drastically as on season 8 they got 39 points and on season 9 only got 33 points.
In this current season things continues to fall as after 13 rounds they only have 18 points and the Belgium manager from Bruges starts to think of retirement. Centro Despotivo went to talk with the manager to see what’s in his head and what can it be done for Estuera to be on top again.
Centro Desportivo - There's a Rumor that you’re thinking on retiring. Is it true?
Phil Weston - It is true. Or maybe i should say it was true. I have thought about retiring at the beginning of the season when everything went wrong that could go wrong with Estuera. I lost the joy of being a manager of this team which I love so much, and I had to think all over again. In the end I decided it wouldn’t be a good idea to make decisions based on the outcome of the ME, because that was the thing that bothered me the most; we were short done by the ME multiple times in the beginning of the season and we dropped a lot of points because of it. For now I'm calmed down again and not thinking about retirement anymore; unless the players vote me out of course ;)
Centro Desportivo - Your team is not doing well this season. What is failing?
PW - What can I say? There have been a lot of reasons who all together caused this. We had our best defender go inactive; he was our captain and line caller and was if I’m not mistaken in the MoM top 5 for a few seasons in a row. I mean, losing someone like that isn't easy to overcome just like that either. At times we still miss him, but we had to move on, had some difficulties but all is sorted now, and you can see it in our results too. Apart from that, the ME, but well, that’s just some really unlucky list of bad throws from the dice. I've had concerns in midfield too, our SM position has been weakened, and we still sometimes miss that big stated striker in front. We always play with a very young CF out there and it is hard, very hard to get our shots on goal. What Lawrie Sanchez of Portus Cale said a few days ago is totally our problem too. We have had a great defense in the last couple of seasons, but we have always missed 2 well stated strikers up front. Portus Cale has this problem too now, and see where it has brought them... If I look at my team there isnt any of the strikers which I would be able to kick out. A good manager has to be heartless some times and bring in some top stated players, but I love all of those players who are there. They might not have the best stats but they are experienced and all fit in well in our team, I can't kick them out. I have never done that before and I hope I will never have to either.
Centro Desportivo - In season 6 your team got 53 points and on the next two seasons you dropped to 39 points. Last season you kept falling and did 33 points and this season you only have 18 fo far.... Is it hard to manage Estuera?
PW - Season 6 was different. Our team was great back then, we didn’t have problems and newly promoted I guess we just had a big rush who took us to that amount of points. The main difference is the number of great opponents. Back then we were sure to win some teams in advance. These days you will have to fight for every point you can get. Easy matches don't exist for my team. I know we are capable of beating the best team in the league, but we are capable of losing against the worst team too. At least we know this, and we try to give our best every match. It’s all we can do at the moment.
Is it hard to manage Estuera? It is hard to manage every team that plays in a competitive league. Every time you think you are where you want your team be, something changes and you can start all over again.
CD - You have great users on the Team, do they play as a Team?
PW - I can’t say it more than enough, but I think this team is wonderful user-wise. So much experience and people who all mean it well, no egos, just a big team. We had some new users coming in this season again, one was an old player of us and came back, and the others were people who either I or a lot of the players in the team already knew. All of them have not really disappointed me yet, apart from a few games where we didn’t have our defense on auto pilot yet all went pretty well. At the moment this is the best TEAM we ever had at Estuera, we are playing well too now, but sometimes stat differences really hurt us. It has been my vision to always work with experience instead of big stats. It has and will cost us points in the short term, but in the long term I believe this team is will be ready to compete for the championship.
CD - What are the immediate changes that need to be done to make Estuera a Big team?
PW - You know I am a pretty stubborn manager, but I don’t think we need changes at the moment. What we need is the opposite. Stability. We've been stable during the last 2 months now and look where it has taken us. We moved from last place to 6th. I believe all is still possible. I believe in a good result for us this season, we will have a good return round, we owe this to ourselves.
The biggest change has already been made, and it’s the AI controls that came in for managers. This will be in our advantage, since we lost lots of points due to have people playing OOP and getting beaten because of this. I’m not planning on playing inactive chars or just the best stated chars, but if we are forced to play OOP we can now avoid it by controlling the AI player instead. In the last 2 weeks we have kicked out some inactive who always have taken down our Team Chemistry. We have lost 80 million in TV and are about to lose another 50 M soon. TTV-wise we will go down, but the Team Chemistry went up and that’s something we definitely needed in order to get that extra bit of luck on the ME.
CD - What are your impressions on MO standing on the League?
PW - M.O. surprised me yes. In 2A they were just way too strong for the competition, even though we drew them with Carregado last season if I’m not mistaken. Back then you could see they were building on something huge, too huge for 2A, but their gameplay wasn’t all that. That’s also the reason why they went down to Second Division in the first place, even though at that time they also had the players to still make it. They didn’t.... Now they have clearly been working on their gameplay and this season its showing. Good gameplay and the big ass striker in front teams like Portus Cale and Estuera miss. They easily make goals and that’s making them different from most of the other teams in the competition. If they can keep that high spot in the rankings is another question.
I shall not make a prediction about their place at the end of the season now, because this game can change in the blink of an eye. Every team manager knows this, every player knows this. That’s what sometimes makes it so frustrating, but other times make it so beautiful also.
After talking with the manager we went to the training session of the team to see if we could talk with some players and we got some declarations of of some player of the team.
“Well our form (in Estuera) is getting better and better. We are steadily making progress to get tougher and tougher to beat. There have been loads of changes in the team. We changed our defensive system and it’s now showing results. We are not giving easy goals anymore like in the early season. Estuera still struggles to get forward. Our current setup there isn't all that pleasing but we are trying to make it work.” Said the Finish Side Midfielder Aatos Peräkuikka
We also got the point of view of the Estonian Central Defender of the team, Johnny Bravo “he (the manager) is a great person and coach and is always committed to Estuera. It is probably one of the most fun and entertaining teams to play for, as lads always joking around and we got some good laugh, but at the same time, we never forget to focus for the game. This season we haven`t played up to our expectations obviously, not sure what’s the reason actually. We do have many new players and suffering chem penalty, but we haven`t scored so much, so think we should be more direct at times.”
We still kept looking for more players and with a little luck we found Balthazar Barkinpumpkin the Defensive Central Midfielder of the team and he said “Well, thanks to Phil recruitment, we're playing better and better, even if we were a bit unlucky on several games. I'm confident on Phil to drive us to the top 4 of Por 1A.”
And the moment we were getting out we bumped with Juan Team in Wales and we took the opportunity to gather his comment “we started slow this season but mostly due to chem and bad luck, we were robbed in a couple of games but now we're really starting to move forward and gain some momentum. I'm really happy with the team and think we will be a real force in the league next season”.
very good article
ReplyDeletevery nice article mate :)
ReplyDeleteGood to know Phil is not retiring.
ReplyDelete