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!

Being Liverpool continued!

All right!  It's time to continue my Liverpool video game career!  For full discloser here, I'm going to admit to putting the game difficulty on "Amateur".  I tried playing on the "Semi-pro" level and it just wasn't working for me.  I was having problems keeping a hold of the ball, passing, and could barely even get shots off at the goal, let alone score anything!  So I moved down to amateur.  And believe it or not, the game is still a challenge!  Maybe because I'm an American, maybe because I'm not used to the controls, I don't know.  But even on Amateur the computer still comes after you when you play!

So now I've pretty much got my squad all set up.  Or at least I think I do.  *chuckle*  That's one of the fun things about these new video games, just when you think you have all the great players you need, they start to get hurt and things go all to hell!

Before I get into what happened, let me say a few words about Liverpool's real life new manager.  I like the guy!  I like him a lot!  But from what I've been told, a lot of Liverpool fans don't care for him as manager because he wants to focus on bringing up and developing young talent.  (Kind of like what I'm trying to do in the game?  *chuckle*)  The fans want wins and good players now, not developed players later.  Oh well.  On to my season.

So I started out playing a team called West Brom.  It should be easy, right?  I'm playing on amateur level.  Oh no, West Brom comes right after me!  I ended up winning the match, but the score was 2 - 1!  That's all I could pull off, 2 goals.  Wow...I'd better work on my game, or maybe change something.  The way West Brom scored their goal was pretty disturbing, too!  One of my back fielders (Is that correct?) sprained his knee!  His name is Daniel Agger.  So Agger sprains his knee, the announcers start talking about it and the man he's guarding runs away free towards my goal.  The ball gets passed to him and I'm thinking "Oh no!"  I'm sure the goal keeper had some profanity going through his mind as well as this guy scores on him!  DAMN!  And on amateur, too!  But at least I won the match. On the down side, Agger is now injured.  So I end up replacing him with Mbaye in the starting line up.

Before my next match, I was watching the tv show Being Liverpool again.  And I see them talking about how this really good player has just arrived named Oussama Assaidi.  I have him!  I've been using him to warm my bench, though.  I decide I should maybe put him in, and he's been doing pretty damn good!  I play him at LF and we beat Arsenal 3 - 0!  Very good!  My 17 year old named Sterling is scoring a few goals now, too!  I'm doing well.  I also notice something:

When I play at Anfield, my home stadium, my players play better.  On the road things are tougher.  Very interesting!

Anyway, I move on and see I have a tournament match for the "Champions Cup" coming up next.  This should be interesting.  I'll be playing a French team called LOSC Lille.  This should be easy, right?

No problem!  It's raining, but that won't matter...will it?  I start the game and score my first goal.  And then these guys CAME AFTER ME!  It was all I could do to keep them away from my goal!  Even on amateur level, these guys played HARD!  I score a second goal, and so do they!  DAMN IT!  I don't want to lose in the first game of this tournament!  Luckily, near the end of the game Sterling puts one home and now it's 3-2.  I actually manage one final goal just at the end of regular time and make it 4-2, but this match was ROUGH!  Now I'm wondering how tough some of the later brackets in this tournament might be!  Damn!

Only one other notable thing to report.  This game allows you to maybe be picked to also manage one of the international teams.  I received and email saying two teams might make me an offer to manage them soon, Romania and...wait for it...the UNITED STATES!  The US probably isn't going to have the strongest players, but then being a first year manager I'm not going to get offers from any of the larger teams.  Romania actually sounds fun, though.  But if offered, I will go for managing the US team.

Ok, back to being a boring writer and video game player for a bit.  Bye bye til next time!

Being Liverpool

Let's start off with saying I'm American.  That being said, I grew up not really knowing much about soccer.  I grew up in the 70's and 80's and soccer just wasn't prevalent in my life.  It wasn't on tv, I never saw any scores, and was never really taught anything at all about it.  And that's too bad because right now I'm really finding a love for the game!  

The newest soccer (football?) game came out today called Fifa 13.  I've played the demo version and love the game!  And since it has a manager mode, I want to start out managing my own team.  But who should I pick?  Well, I found a show on tv that really sparked an interest in me.

The show is called Being Liverpool and is a sort of look at the Liverpool football club in England.  I guess they've been around for something like 120 years and have a long history.  After watching the first episode of the show, I decided I wanted to Be Liverpool!  And so starts my quest as an English football club manager!

Needless to say, European football is a lot more complicated than American sports are when you take into consideration selling and buying players, salary negotiations, loans, and things like that!  But I learned all I could before I started the game.  We'll see how I do.  I figured I would keep track of how things are going here in my blog!  Hooray for Liverpool and Robert as their new "Gaffer!"

The game let me download the current roster to start with so I already have all the changes and things that the current skipper has done.  I don't like that, though!  It isn't his team anymore, it's mine!  So of course I have to try and muck things up!  *chuckle*  Ok, let's look at sending a few guys off on loan, putting some guys up on the transfer block, and picking up some new talent!

As a side note, I don't know who most of the 15,000 plus players in the game are.  *chuckle*  So I'm mostly going on stats, things I read on the internet, and trades I watched on Youtube.

To start with, I put a guy named Joe Cole on the transfer block.  I'm sure in real life experience counts, but in the video game this guy is 30 years old, sitting on the bench, and eating up a lot of my money.  I can't have that!  Some of the old guys have to go!  So out he went.  I sent a kid named Jack Robinson out for loan for the season.  So he can play for another club and build up his skills before coming back stronger and better.  I had wanted to try and sign a guy named Antonio Valencia, but he plays for Manchester United who are a big, rich club and after an inquiry they told me they weren't interested in letting me have him.  I probably could have persuaded them to send him my way for a huge pile of money, but...I don't have a huge pile of money to spend at the moment.  So I forgot about him.  I am still trying to negotiate for a kid named Fellaini.  We'll see how that turns out.

* * * *

Things aren't going well trying to get Fellaini.  I offered whoever the hell he plays for 9,500,000 pounds for him, but they want 12,500,000.  Geez, WAY too many zeros!  I upped the offer to 11,500,000 pounds.  We'll see what happens.  This guy is draining a ton of my money, though.

* * * *

Ok, after simulating a few days, someone decided they want to pick up Joe Cole.  It's a team called Galatasaray SK.  No, I don't know who they are either.  But they officered me 3,700,000 Pounds for him.  (Sorry, I don't know where the pound symbol is on my keyboard.)  I could probably send them a counter offer and ask for 4,000,000, but I'm trying to get rid of him anyway and can use the money.  I send him on his way!  BYE JOE!

* * * *

Ok, the cheap asses have rejected my offer of 11,500,000 pounds for Fellaini!  Do I really need this afro guy on my team?  I'll try one more offer of 12,500,000 pounds.  That's the number they're telling me they want.  If they don't take that, screw him!

* * * *

Ok, forgetting Fellaini for the moment, here's an interesting happening:  Chelsea wants to buy my CF Luis Suarez.  Suarez is rated as a pretty good player and one of my starting team!  I'm not going to sell him to them!  Geez, they think they can just throw money at me and I'll give them one of my best players?  Screw that!  Offer rejected!  (They offered me 22,500,000 pounds for him, by the way.)

Maybe I should try to borrow a kid for a season and see how he does?  I found a kid named Deulofeu and decided to try and borrow him for a season.  18 years old and probably still wet behind the ears, but we'll see what we can do with him.  Another kid who's only 17 I figured I'd try and buy.  His name is...are you ready?  Ibrahima Mbaye.  We'll see how things go.  I haven't even played my first friendly match yet!

* * * *

Now the damned Italians want to buy my goalkeeper!  Hell no!  Go away Italians!  I reject the offer and they come back and offer me more money!  I don't want more money, I want a good goalkeeper!

I ended up getting both the kids I was shooting for.  Deulofeu is loaned to me for this season and Mbaye was sold to me, and will hopefully develop into a great player.

* * * *

FINALLY, I did get Fellaini!  And then it looks like people in the press were unhappy that I'd spent that much money to transfer him to Liverpool.  Well screw them!  *chuckle*  

Ok, time for the first friendly, and you know what?  I think I'm going to start the game with a bunch of the young kids just to see what happens!  Here we go!

* * * *

For my first friendly match I played Atletico Madrid.  Some team from Spain, I guess?  *chuckle*  I played on "semi-pro" level and still barely beat the computer!  The score ended up 2 to 1 Liverpool!  My winning goal came with only a short time left on the clock, too!  Very nice!  Ok, well I'll update the blog after I've played a bit more.

Oh and by the way...the first goal of the season for me was scored by Fellaini who the press said I had spent too much money on!  *chuckle*