St. Louis Maroon Knights FC -- Week 2

This is a continuation of the football season started in the previous post.

Fresh off of our 2-1 victory in Kiev, the Maroon Knights headed back home to prepare for week two. The team looked good on the pitch, but the front office discussion was glum. The signing of Park Lee had drained the bank account, and since there would be no income from the away match, we had to start by laying off the team's assistant manager.

Equally important, the medical staff reported that Welsh midfielder Cecil Bowen's knee was hurt in the first match. Since the team only has five middies on the roster (and no one from the youth squad seems ready to make the leap), manager Angus Collins couldn't play the 4-5-1 formation in the second match versus Bucharest. Instead, striker Jory Cornish got the call, and the team went with a 4-4-2 formation.

A total of 13,500 fans showed up for the home match against Bucharest. Cornish had two solid chances in the first half, but couldn't convert. Instead Bucharest went up 1-0 in the 42nd minute and then made it 2-0 in the 63rd. Guyaese wingback Samuel Buxton sliced the deficit in half with a tally in the 68th minute, but Bucharest responded two minutes later with another goal, making it 3-1. Park Lee made it a one goal game in the 81st minute, but the Maroon Knights couldn't notch the equalizer. The game ended 3-2.

The inury to the 32-year-old Bowen might have been the difference, as it forced the Knights to play out of their prefered formation. And, while Bowen appears ready to come back for next week's game against Istanbul, the medical staff reports that American midfielder Owen Jessup is llikely to be out of action. Collins will need to decide whether to stick with Cornish as a striker or to play someone out of position.

After two weeks, the league table is as follows:

Club	W	D	L	GS	GC	Pts
Bordeux	2	0	0	9	3	6
Paris	1	0	1	6	4	3
St. Louis	1	0	1	4	4	3
Kiev	1	0	1	3	3	3
Bucharest	1	0	1	5	7	3
Athens	0	2	0	3	3	2
Marseille	0	1	1	2	5	1
Istanbul	0	1	1	3	6	1

St. Louis Maroon Knights, FC

One of the amazing things about BoardGameGeek is the number of self-published board games available. It's not surprising (to me) that many serious boardgamers are wanna-be boardgame designers. It's the same as every teenager with a guitar wanting to be a rock star, every English major wanting to write the next great novel and every movie nut believing he's a director.

BoardGameGeek makes it fairly easy for amatuer designers to post their game materials and solicit feedback. I've tried out a few of them. For the most part, these games are fairly rough, but, I suppose you get what you pay for. (One exception that I discovered last year was the very-fun Delve: The Dice Game.)

A couple of weeks ago, Luke Morris (Geek handle Hamster of Fury) emailed those of us who requested it a preliminary version of his game Footy Manager. The game allows one or more players to manage the front office of a soccer (football) club. Unlike other soccer games, such as APBA Soccer or All Time Championship Soccer (another self-published game), the game doesn't focus on the play-by-play of the matches. Players spend about half their time managing the team's roster and about half playing the games. The player's team starts as the lowest-ranked team in the fourth division of a fictional soccer league. Working with a paltry amount of money (and a roster of fictional players), the player tries to win enough games to work his way into promotion. The games themselves are OK, but the real fun is the "role playing" aspect of following your fictional players through their season/careers. It reminds me of following my fictional bomber crew in the 1981 Avalon Hill game B-17: Queen of the Skies or my fictional squad in the 1983 Victory Games game Ambush.

I started a game a couple of weeks ago, but Luke made some (much-needed) changes to the injury charts (and a few other tweaks). So I started anew this afternoon. Here is a short summary of the first few weeks for the St. Louis Maroon Knights FC. (Note that Luke uses British pounds as the game's currency, but I'm using $s instead.)

The marketing deparment was able to land a $2 million sponsorship deal with Barclay's, which gave me enough seed capital to expand our stadium's capacity to 18,000. It's a long way from a Premier League stadium, as only 5,000 of the capacity is seated -- the rest is standing room.

I also hired some staff. Having learned my lesson the first time through, I hired a full medical staff to help with injuries and a youth team coach to help feed new players into the roster for next season. (This is a lot cheaper than trying to buy players off of the transfer list.) I also hired assistant managers and coaches to help with training. This left me with only $1.6 million in the bank.

Speaking of the transfer list, most of the players were far too expensive. Henrik Jacobson, a 32-year-old keeper was available for $5 million from second-divsion club Turin, and first-division club Lyon wanted $3 million for Swiss wingback Thomas Hurlimann. Then I saw that 27-year-old Korean striker Park Lee was available from third-division club Bremen for $1.5 million. Lee was much better than my top strikers, so I drained the bank account to sign him -- putting my 30-year-old striker Jimmy Swales on the transfer list cheap. (I was able to move him to fellow fourth-division club Paris for $75,000.) That left $175,000 in the bank as I headed to Kiev for the first match.

Kiev is ranked 4th (of 8) in the fourth division, so the manager decided to play a 4-5-1 formation and hope for a tie. Attacking middie Johnny Shanks put the Knights up 1-0 in the 68th minute, and Park Lee made it 2-0 in the 81st minute. Kiev scored one in injury time to make it 2-1, but it was too little too late.

The first home match will be next week against Bucharest. In the meantime, I'll need to check the injury report to see who's unavailable. Hopefully a big crowd will show up, because we need the money.