I’m going to be honest, I’ve not nearly gone into training in enough depth this year. The main reason is I’ve been exclusively in Lower Leagues with Part-Timers – as such I’ve been happy to go with a Balanced regimen, usually letting the Assistant Manager set the overall training.
However this time I’ve had a slightly closer look than normal, and was disturbed to find the (and lets be fair to him) abysmal Assistant Manager has set a ton of Defensive training weeks. As such I stepped in and replaced a lot of the extra weeks with Attack and Balanced – we’ve got a good defence already – I want our more attackingly-minded players to benefit from the short time we have training in any given week. (Also I think the Part Time Training needs a rework for FM20 – they wouldn’t have 2 training sessions a day for 2 days, they would maybe have 3-4 evenings training sessions a week as they’d either be working or at school/college).
The above are the upcoming training weeks – Week 4 was the 2nd Defence week in row (some months had 3 defences weeks in them). I’ve also modified the 2nd session of the last Tuesday in every month to be an alternate Community Outreach and Team Bonding (Helps with the Dynamics plus the Outreach helps getting a few more bodies to turn up for the games) and as Christmas Day 2018 was a Tuesday I have given them rest for both the sessions (Because I’m nice like that).
As we’re in a 15 team league plus just the 2 cups, one of which we should do well in (We’re the holders of the South Region Challenge Cup) and one where we’re only expected to win one game (The Scottish Cup itself) I think we are looking at about 35 competitive games at a max this season, so I’ve made sure to set the individual training levels (on the Rest Screen) to Automatic, and have set the levels as per the screen below:
Note the vast majority of Injury Risk above is Low – Double Intensity for > 90% Condition is the way to go to eke out as much training effect as you can from the 4 sessions.
I do set trait training where a position-vital attribute is high (Such as set the run past the opposition for guys with Pace >= 12) or low (Such as avoid long balls where Passing < 5). On the screen below you will see Jordan Garden – a previous triallist Poacher who I brought in before the close of the ‘Transfer Window’ – which for us is a Registration window as you are only allowed 25 registered players and they need to be registered before the end of day 1st September (There is a similar window in January). Note I’ve set him to ‘Knock Ball Past Opponent’ as he has 12 Pace and Acceleration and am having him work on the Final Third additional focus (Composure, Decisions, Vision), all of which are supplementary to his Poacher Role but need work on – all of which should help him get a yard’s space and finish his chances a bit better:
Jordan (21, 6″ 1′) started his career at Dundee Utd and played 9 games in League 2 last year just up the road at Cowdenbeath is currently ranked as our best non-loanee. He has 11 Finishing, Heading, Anticipation and Teamwork, 12 Acceleration, Pace and Jumping Reach and 14 Natural Fitness and will be our starting man up front, with James Hainey rotating in if necessary.
Lastly on training we have seen some attribute increases going on already. Big Kev Waugh has seen his Work Rate rise a whole point from 5.6 to 6.6, with lots of other 0.4 and 0.2 point rises in the last 2 months. He really looks like he doesn’t belong in our games, the way he cleans up at the back. I’ve only seen him make 1 bad header so far, but we will see regarding mistakes in the next post when I run the numbers as of the 1st September.
Josh Donaldson, our star loanee Keeper is also progressing a pace – His strength is up 0.6 points already, and he is showing improvements in all but 8 attributes (Some of the attributes such as Aggression are difficult to quantify from an improvement standpoint, and very much depends on how your team plays. If you hark back to the era of V. Jones, D. Wise and L. Sanchez then a nice high aggression is what you want, in most other styles you would want a balance.
The Dynamics are interesting at the moment. We are only 2 months into our tenure here at the Strollers so you wouldn’t expect too much too soon, but there are definite improvements going on.
“Hang on” I hear you shout in your droves, “Your Team Cohesion is Poor” – It was very poor until the last game so I hope that by the end of September it will get to Average. The Atmos in the dressing room is Average, though i really contest the ‘Many Contrasting Personalities’ remark as a complete load of Jacob Rees-Mogg – In the first team squad only 2 people are not Balanced!!! Managerial Support is Very Good, long may it continue.
When we look at the Hierarchy we see Ross Guthrie (Who will barely play this season) is our only Influential Player. I find it very difficult in Non-League to ever get Team Leaders, or anybody who can mentor and make anything more than Average influence. However Ross and 3 of my signings support me, and I have no opposition which is good.
Interestingly Ross Guthrie is the only player who sits aside from the 2 social groups at the club. I will post if there are any updates (I tend to look at all this on a monthly in-game basis).
Lastly I have a couple of mentoring groups at the moment – Murray McCulloch leading some young midfielders and Neil McVitie leading some more defensively minded players. The McVitie group seems to be flourishing (Josh Donaldson, Tom Kelly and Kev Waugh are all showing great attribute increases) even though they all have Light influences on the group – maybe as they are the best 3 players at the club their natural talent and work-ethic is showing through?
In the next post I’m going to do a run through of how I data mine, what I use to do so, how I do it and what we can do with the data from a statistical perspective (Considering I’ve only got 3 competitive games to go on not much at the moment).