Accrington Stanley

FIFA 15 at its best!

I didn’t grow up with soccer.  As an American I grew up watching baseball and American football and really never knew much about soccer. I never really learned much about the sport until I was up in the later years of my life.  But now that I’ve learned quite a bit, I love it!  I’m actually a bit sad that I can’t watch some of the lower league matches on tv!

What I can do though is play them out in a video game.  When I was a kid video game soccer looked like this:

Now what can I really learn from this?  Not much.  But that was years ago.  In the past couple of years I’ve been learning more and more about English football, transfers, player loans, and things like that.  Now I’m by no means an expert, but I think I could run a team with a reasonable amount of success.  I’m sure every sports fan thinks that though, don’t they?  Walk into any pub in England and I’m sure you can find a group of people who will tell you exactly why their favorite team isn’t run correctly.

And so we come to the video game FIFA 15. This game gives you a chance to play with not only English football teams, but teams in leagues all over the world!  But of course I wanted to try playing in the English leagues.  My first choice for a team was Port Vale.  They earned promotion not long ago and moved up into “League 1” from “League 2”.  They have a bit of money, and it was fun trying to manage them for a few games, but I was curious about more.  I tried managing teams like the Tottingham Spurs and Manchester City.  Both have a lot of really good players (Both are also top teams in the Barkely’s Premiere Leage or BPL.  That’s the top English football league.) and money to spend on transferring in any players you might like to add to your squad, but this seemed a bit easy.

I wondered who was the bottom of the English leagues.  Who was the one team that was just struggling to survive.  I went into league two and found a small team called Accrington Stanley.  Feel free to click on the name and check out the real life team.  I figured I can take control of them in FIFA 15 and move them right to the top of the English leagues no problem at all.  I looked them up on YouTube and found a few really nice videos about them.  Their motto is “The team that wouldn’t die.”  I like that!  And so I started my career as Accrington Stanley manager.

First off, they don’t have much money.  And even if they did have a lot of money, they’re part of League 2 which means that even if I could afford to buy some big time players, they won’t want to play for a small time team like this.  Ouch. So I’ll have to start out with some young players.  No problem though, I figured I could find a few 17 or 18 year olds and pick them up cheaply.  Then you just develop these guys and end up with a good team, right?  Right…?

Again, Accrington Stanley doesn’t have much money which means I can’t afford to buy any players with tons of potential.  Damn.  Maybe if I transfer a few of the older Accrington players I can get more money to buy the younger players?  That didn’t work out either because poor Accrington doesn’t have very many players.  I need everyone I have just to keep them playing!  I manage to transfer in two guys before I run short on money.  They are CB Stephen Best who is 17 and LM Fionn Reilly who is 18.  All these guys are real life soccer players too, which makes things interesting.

I do have a few other youngsters on the team and will have to make due.  So I divided my small team into two team sheets.  One with a lot of the younger players on it, and one with most of my older players.  I figured I could rotate them as I played matches and keep everyone fresh and rested.  Before my first “friendly” match one of my 18 year old players named Luke Greaves asks to play even though he’s not listed as a first team starter.  I do have him starting on the younger team sheet, so I’ll just play that team in the friendly.

We play a small club called Latina for our friendly.  Luke runs out happily onto the pitch ready for his big start!  The game begins and Luke Greaves ends up with a torn hip floxor within a few minutes of play.  He's now out for a few weeks.  That's not good.  I was a bit short handed to begin with and now I have to wait for this player to heal!  This isn't a very good start.

If you’re interested, here’s a look at some real life Luke Greaves highlights!

The team must move on!  And so after two more friendly matches we moved into regular league play.  Now I’ll admit I’m playing this game on “Amateur” setting.  So it’s not horribly hard, but it’s not the easiest thing to score either.  I thought at first I would be able to just steamroll other teams with this setting and get my small team some instant success, but things didn’t work out that way exactly.  I won a couple matches and then ended up with a draw with another bad team called Portsmouth.  I didn’t like the look of a draw, but their goal keeper seemed like a wall!  None of my shots seemed able to make it past him!  We moved on to the J. Paint Trophy Cup.  I figured maybe I would try something new.  I had a 17 year old striker just sitting on the bench named Max Hazeldine.  Why not give Max his shot and see what he could do?  So I put him in for one of the J. Paint matches.  He scored the one and only goal and always seemed to have the ball!  I love Max now!  He moved right up to starter after that performance! (I now follow the real Max Hazeldine on Twitter.  I hope he has the same success in real life!)  My next J. Paint Trophy Cup match will be against Port Vale.  They are a league higher and I'll really have to work to score against them and move on!  Now we're finding a challenge!

And so here we are.  I may keep writing in my blog about what happens with this Accrington Stanley progress.  I'm having a lot of fun seeing what I can do with this team.  I may end up back at Tottenham or one of the other big teams eventually, but for now I like the little guys.  And I may have to keep an eye on the real life Accrington Stanley team.  Win or lose, they've found a new supporter!

World Cup Football Without Rules

No Rules Football

I’ve been watching a bit of the FIFA World Cup this year and to be honest, it really hasn’t lived up to what I thought it would be.  Firstly, I thought England would do a whole lot better than they did.  There were quite a few of their players who didn’t much seem to care.  They ran around and kicked the ball, but it looked like it was just another paycheck to them.  Win, lose, they didn’t seem to care.  With how important football is in England, they should be ashamed to go back home after the performance they put on!

One of today’s matches had England playing Costa Rica.  The match ended in a 0-0 tie and England didn’t even field most of their “starters” if you can call them that.  I guess they needed rest before the English football season which starts in August by the way.  They needed to rest up to collect the millions of pounds they’ll be paid to play back in England.  If you are a captain of your country’s international squad, you should be out there on the pitch leading your team for EVERY SINGLE MATCH!  If you have the attitude that since your team won’t be advancing in the tournament you don’t need to play anymore, then you don’t deserve the title of captain.  Steven Gerrard lost a lot of the respect I had for him when I saw him sitting on the bench looking like he didn’t care at all.  

But let’s move beyond England for now.  A while ago I wrote a blog about a scumbag named Luis Suarez.  Suarez thinks he’s some kind of wild animal and likes to bite other players.  Here’s the link to the first blog post I wrote about him in case you missed it the first time:

Biting the Brits

This idiot is from Uruguay and is playing in the FIFA World Cup for the Uruguayan national team.  While playing in the English Premier League he has bitten a player on PSV and a player on Chelsea.  And I’m sure you’re going to know what’s coming now, yes he bit a player on the Italian National Team during the World Cup.  He sank his teeth in deep and from the teeth marks it looks like he tried to take a good sized chunk out of Italian player Giorgio Chiellini.  The match referee didn’t even bother to call that a foul!  What’s worse, biting another player, or being a referee and thinking that’s a legal thing to do?  Chiellini even pulled his shirt down trying to show the teeth marks to the referee, but the ref didn’t care.  Maybe Chiellini should have bit the referee?  If it was legal for Suarez, then it should have been legal for Chiellini, too!

It wasn’t enough for Suarez to bite Chiellini, Suarez then began to pretended that his mouth had been fouled by Chiellini’s shoulder.  He held his teeth and played the wounded player begging for a free kick.

Oh no, did that hurt poor Suarez’s teeth?  FIFA says they are going to “investigate” the matter.  I guess the teeth marks in Chiellini’s shoulder weren’t enough proof.  A two game suspension sounds insane to me.  So what does it take to get thrown out of professional football in England or the World Cup for that matter?  How many people does this rotten idiot need to bite?  He is so lucky that the Italian players showed a lot of restraint.

Now is Suarez really the kind of player you want representing your country?  In two years will people remember how far Uruguay got in this year’s World Cup?  No, they’ll remember that Suarez bit another player.

Here’s a picture of Mario Balotelli:

Mario is playing for the Italian National team in this year’s World Cup.  Mario is known as a rough and brutal player.  He’ll head butt you, kick you, push you and really rough you up, but he DOESN’T BITE PEOPLE!   He may be even considered a dirty player occasionally and supposedly has a troubled off field life, but he DOESN’T BITE PEOPLE!  Hell, last season Balotelli got a yellow card AFTER A MATCH WAS OVER and as it was his second card of the match, he was suspended for three games because of “intimidating and insulting remarks addressed to the referee”.  This guy can be such a problem that he gets penalties for his behavior even off the pitch!  Take a look at the article:

Mario Balotelli Suspended for Three Matches after Sending Off

My point is why is Suarez getting off for the third time biting another player?  No yellow card, no red card, nothing.  Nothing would make my day better than to see another player punch Suarez in the mouth several times during a match.  And personally, I think it should be a team’s captain who does that.  If you’re the captain you need to stand up for your teammates!

I do have one more suggestion before I end this.  Let’s have Suarez play some hockey with the 1974 Philadelphia Flyers.  They were a hockey team that was known for violent fights in just about every game they played.  Suarez can try to bite any one of them he likes, but he may not leave the ice rink with any teeth left.

Why Fy? Why Not Fy?

Why FY?  Why Not Fy?

Yes, I hid my wifi signal.  I was taught how to do it in my PC Repair college class.  What fun, making my signal invisible so people can’t see it!  You can’t see it anyway, but now computerized things can’t see it unless they know its actual name.  And no, I’m not telling you my wifi’s nickname!  (It’s Fuscubible!)  See next paragraph:

Did you try to find the Fuscubible wifi signal?  If so, then STOP IT!  I wouldn’t go to the trouble of hiding my signal and then tell people what its name is!  That’s not its real name!  That would be like registering for a college class and then never showing up for the class!  That’s something that amazes me.  College is not cheap, people!  So why the hell do people pay for a class and then not show up?  Is it so they can tell other people that they’re taking a college level class?  Is that it, the prestige?  Now I’m really curious if this kind of thing happens at universities like Harvard, or Yale.

     Does it happen at Stanford Law School?  People want to be a lawyer, but don’t want to do any actual studying?  They just want to stand in a court room and yell “I OBJECT” at a judge without even knowing why they’re objecting.  Waaaaaaay back when I was still in the Air Force I made a stop in Connecticut just before I was sent overseas to Italy.  I wanted to see what the Yale University campus was like.  I walked around amazed at how beautiful and…educational it looked.  And then I found this neat little student shop!  I went in and some preppie kid who worked there came up and asked if he could “help” me.  Maybe I looked like I was a poor, homeless, military kid?  I dunno, but I told him I wanted to buy a Yale football jersey.  He directed me to some nice jerseys and I bought one.

Now I bet you’re wondering what the hell buying a football jersey at a Yale student store has to do with going to class?  (Or what it has to do with hiding a wifi signal?)  Well, after I was sent overseas I would wear my Yale jersey all the time and people would ask “Did you go to Yale?”  And I would always answer “Yes!”  I did eventually explain that I had never attended school there, but I did go there to buy the jersey from the preppie kid at the student store.  So using correct English, yes I went to Yale.  Too bad I couldn’t attend class while I was there.

I think I’d like some jerseys from other places now.  I’m older and hopefully wiser now and I think I should have some school jerseys.  I should probably start with a baseball jersey from The College of Southern Nevada because I’m ACTUALLY TAKING CLASSES THERE!  Although at the moment I’m out of work while I take the classes and so can’t afford to buy a baseball jersey.  (No football, they don’t have a football team…yet.)  I can accept donations, though! 

So what should I ask for?  Let’s start overseas!  Does anyone live near Oxford University in the United Kingdom?  How about an Oxford English Football Kit?  (If I’m going to beg for clothing, I may as well know the correct terminology for it.  *chuckle*)  Oh, better yet, I know what I want!  I know a lot of friends I have would love to have large libraries filled with books, I think I want a room with this in it:

I want an English Football Kit room!  I want little teams, though!  An Oxford kit would look nice in there, but I’d also like teams from places I’ve never heard of, like Cheltenham Town, and Dagenham!  And maybe a few kits from countries other than the United Kingdom?  YES, I now want it to be a EUROPEAN FOOTBALL KIT ROOM!  OR BETTER YET, A WORLD FOOTBALL KIT ROOM!  THAT SOUNDS SO COOL!  I need kits from teams like Daegu (South Korean team) or maybe Makhachkala from the Russian league?  (I should probably get off this subject now because I know absolutely nothing about these teams and had to look them up using one of my video games.)

What was I originally writing about?  Oh yeah, I hid my wifi signal.  I’m not sure how that led to writing about English European World football soccer kit jerseys, but it did.  So if you have a few extra bucks and would like to help me get my Football soccer kit jersey room started, please send me a kit from where ever you can find one, and then maybe I’ll unhide my wifi signal…at least for the new room.

Biting the Brits

English Football Rules

 

I'm currently interested in English football.  I've even started a short weekly show on Youtube called English Football Chat with Robert.  Most of the time I have no idea what I'm really talking about because I CAN'T WATCH MOST OF THE DAMNED MATCHES!  I used to have a soccer channel with the satellite TV company I use, but the channel was removed last week.  How the hell do you just remove a sports channel?  Thanks a lot Directv!

Anyway, I'm not as familiar with the rules of professional English football as I'd like to be, but I'm pretty sure there is a rule against biting other players.  You would think you wouldn't have to make up a rule like that for a game where the object is to kick a ball into your opponent's net, but apparently you do!  Why would you even consider biting another player?  Who runs around biting other people, let alone other athletes?  Time to not only check for performance enhancing drugs, now players may need to be checked for rabies.

I'm sure I sound like I'm rambling on here.  So let's go back a bit and I'll explain all of this...if I can.  There is a player on the Liverpool team named Luis Suarez.  And Suarez decided that it would be a good idea to bite a player on a the Chelsea team during a match.  I didn't get to see any footage of this incident, but I guess it's not unusual for this guy to do things like that.  AND THIS APPARENTLY ISN'T THE FIRST TIME HE'S BIT A GUY!  I guess he's bit another player on team PSV, too!  What the hell?  Aaaaaaaaaand, roll the crazy footage!

Didn't see Suarez bite the Chelsea player in the video?  Neither did I.  So let's find a picture of what happened!

Nice, huh?  It's great to see that it's not just American athletes that are crazy sometimes!  That's Branislav Ivanovic in the blue.  I wonder what was going through Branislav's mind right at that moment?  Maybe Get the hell off me you piece of s##t?

I did get to watch Liverpool play Manchester United the other day.  It was on some American NBC channel.  And I really enjoyed the match.  Liverpool did fine without Suarez.  He can't play because he's serving an 8 match ban for biting Branislav.  I've read that he's actually upset about the suspension.  I guess he feels it's appropriate to bit people while kicking a soccer ball.  Anyway, while I was watching the match between Liverpool and Manchester United they showed Suarez sitting up in some luxury box next to a blonde.  I guess she's his wife?  I immediately began yelling at the TV screen "GET AWAY FROM HIM, HE BITES!"  (You know, kind of how you yell at characters in a horror movie sometimes?  Don't pretend you don't know, everyone does it!)

It figures, the crazy guy gets the blonde.  I wonder if he leaned over and bit her after this picture was taken?  He's from Uruguay.  The likelihood of my ever actually going to that country was pretty small, but after seeing how nuts Suarez is, I surely won't go there now!  All the rest of the Uruguayans might be like him!  You get off a plane and some idiot bites you to say hello!  Ok, that's probably not true and I shouldn't judge Uruguay just because some moron is from there.

My advice to Liverpool:  Ditch Suarez.  Send him off to some other club willing to throw you a lot of money.  He may be a good player, but in my opinion he's not worth the crazy.  Liverpool beat Manchester United without him and no one was bitten, (At least no one on the pitch.) so who needs him?  Just be rid of him and as for Chelsea, can someone please get Branislav some ice?





Sable's Boys getting hot! Transfer time!

Transfer time

Welcome back to my little log about "Sable's Boys"!  As we continue our little romp through the English football league, I finally decided to pick up a couple real life players for the team.  I was a bit inspired by the real life version of one of my virtual players, Steve Morris.  Steve is a huge Port Vale fan and always sends me info on how the a match is going from time to time.  I really appreciate that and since Steve has told me a bit about some players who have recently transferred to Port Vale, I decided that maybe I wanted to see them play on my West London team with all of the made up players I have!  And so here are the guys I ended up transferring to our team:

Chris Birchall - He seems a lot better than the stats they have given him!  And since in real life he's said he would play for Port Vale for free for a bit if needed, I had to have him!  I love that kind of loyalty!

Gabriel - I'm not sure who this guy is, but I got him on loan for the season after realizing I only had two goal keepers!  And it's a good thing, too!  I'll get to that in a bit, though.  

Tom Pope - How could I not want Pope after following Port Vale for a bit?  *chuckle*  FEED THE POPE!  And after his transfer, he even scored a goal in his first game with us!  His stats in the video game don't reflect it, but he's a fantastic player!  I'm thrilled to have him with us now!

David Beckham - Yes, I transferred Beckham!  *chuckle*  I figured we could use a bit of English leadership for our first year.  I haven't played with him yet, but am looking forward to it!  He's being paid 30,000 Sterling a week, if anyone cares.  

Now as I moved along in the season playing a few matches, I find out that a few of my players are going to be sent off to play for their international teams!  My virtual self will be playing for the USA, one of our young goal keepers named Pennyworth will be playing for England, our other goal keeper Caballero will play for Spain, and a couple other are heading out, too.  (Sorry Steve, you weren't selected for England.  I don't have a clue why!)  While my goal keeper Caballero was off playing with his mates in Spain they broke his tail bone!  So he comes back to the club and I get a message saying he'll be out with injury for about 5 months now.  5 MONTHS!  What the hell?  And I only had two goal keepers!  Thank goodness I got Gabriel on loan, whoever he is!  (I think he came from Milan.)  So now I still only have two goal keepers!  I'll have to hope one or both of them don't get injured during the season!  DAMN!

Playing Derby County, we beat them 3 to 1.  Next, we played Bristol City and also beat them with a score of 2 to 0.  Finally a clean sheet game!  And then we played a Capital One Cup match.  We were up against Plymouth Argyle.  Whoever they are, they weren't very good and we pounded them!  We took the match 6 to 0!  I didn't have my game capture software running, but realized I could boot it up for the highlights!  So here are the highlights from that game.  Keep an eye out and you'll see both Tom Pope and Chris Birchall!  Birchall even scores a goal!

And so onward we go with the season still hoping for promotion!  Things are looking good as we haven't lost a match yet.  Stay tuned to see how the team continues to fare!

Making English Football

Making English Football

A couple of my last blog posts were about working my way through a season of video game English football with a team from Liverpool, England.  I guess people were interested in my little career!  *chuckle*  Well making a few transfer moves and working my way through the season was fun, even though I don't think I even really made it half way through the season.  But now I've decided that instead of using Liverpool, I would create my own English football team and see how I could do with them.  Now to do this, I had to create everything from the ground up!  I found the stadium type I wanted the team to play in, created the uniforms and all the players for the team, and then even put them into a league to start the season.  I did have to remove a real team to insert my created team, but to be honest I can't even remember what team I replaced!  Shows how much I really know about soccer.  *chuckle*  But I'm learning fast!

Now...English football teams aren't like American sports teams.  Sponsors put their names and sometimes logos or designs on the English football team uniforms.  Seeing this, and realizing I could have my own sponsor, I decided to ask a friend who is a very successful romance author if I could use her as a sponsor.  She didn't have to do anything but give me her permission.  After she said yes, I put part of a book by author Sable Hunter on my team's uniforms!  And personally, I think they look great! I decided to have the team play out of "West London" because it's an English Football team, and the video game recognizes (Sorry, "recognizes" for my English friends!) the city name of London and will use it during some of the commentary.

I hadn't played the game for a while, but have returned to it and want to see at least one season through!  I started the team out in the NPower league and my goal for the season is to gain promotion to the next league!  Now keep in mind, I didn't design a bunch of super powered players for this team.  These are average players.  There are some pretty good guys, but they aren't "top of the league" type players.  Just working class guys!  I did manage to buy myself some game capture equipment and can actually now post a few of my highlights from matches on Youtube or Facebook!  This does take not only playing the game, but a lot of editing work, too!  *chuckle*  Now before you watch some highlights from the first game, let me tell you about two of the players:

My two favorite strikers are Robert Wacaster (ME!) and another friend, author Steve Morris.  Neither player looks anything at all like the real us.  *chuckle*  (And I'm actually a bit older than 19, the age of the player who shares my name!)  So when you see Steve scoring a couple goals, keep in mind he's a real writer and has some spectacular books out for purchase! Ok then, here are the highlights from our first match!

Yes, we're the boys in purple!  And so I'm going to continue playing through the season with Sable's boys!  I've played through a couple other matches so far, but haven't captured any of the highlights from them.  I'll get to doing that again soon, though!  So keep a watch and help support Sable's boys!  Oh, and go and buy a copy of books by Sable Hunter (Fantastic romance books), Steve Morris (Incredible short stories, and a really well written book about what happens when all the electronic stuff fails, Playing Havoc!), or Robert Wacaster (Romance stories, humorous Las Vegas casino stories, and even a dark book or two!) from Amazon.com, or where ever you can find them!