i found an IRL parallel to this shot, coincidentally
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I like the text summary!
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VIJAY PART 6: PLAYING SOME PROPER CRICKET
middlesex at leics… going to play a proper innings this time… but leics are put into bat first so it’ll have to wait until we finish bowling
part 6
msx captain (and Irish international) Tim Murtagh is learning how to use Vijay… Vijay gets to bowl the new ball in the eight over. wickets don’t come right away, so I start wobbling the aftertouch back and forth… if I don’t know what length I’m bowling, neither can the batsman!
Hollman takes out both the openers, but the cricket gods are about to smile on Vijay in the second spell, the 34th over. it starts off with a regulation nick to the slips… the classic swing bowler’s dismissal to take out Steel for the first wicket. but two balls later…
lands right in the diving keeper’s glove! Mulder out for a duck! and the very next ball…
is taken by the keeper as well! that’s a golden duck, and a triple wicket maiden over! vijay takes out batters #3,5, and 6 in just 4 balls
3 wickets aren’t enough as vijay continues to go on a rampage…
https://i.imgur.com/Y6Xmcvt.mp4
(and that’s out as can be)
https://i.imgur.com/En44fMH.mp4
… and with that nick to slip, Vijay has gone an unearthly 6-28 in the 1st innings, and Leics are all out 142 in the 53rd over
finally… it’s time to bat.
going in with the following gameplan:
- leave everything outside off stump
- defend anything on off
- score off of anything going middle and leg
almost set a goal for myself to get my strike rate below 40. and for a while it was hovering around the 50 mark… the game becomes so much easier once you realize the only balls you have to swing at are the ones that are going on to hit the stumps. anything else, you can leave alone and wait for a better ball to hit.
with this gameplan, vijay’s play suddenly starts to look a lot more traditional. notice that very traditional wagon wheel: straight drives, leg glances and flicks, and the occasional loft over the infielders for a boundary. and even with the focus on leaving the deliveries you can’t hit well, the strike rate still stays around 100 because of the boundaries he does hit.
https://i.imgur.com/svUZk0T.mp4
https://i.imgur.com/SjtaKJf.mp4
https://i.imgur.com/tu9kncn.mp4
…and somehow, without fishing outside off stump, vijay has still made 100 at about a run a ball in the 42nd over. it comes off a six over long off
https://i.imgur.com/AUBdw6M.mp4
Hollman builds a hundred run partnership with him before falling, but 3 other partners go down cheaply. Vijay ends the day on 108*(112) and MSX are 171-6 at the end of Day 1.
probably the innings i’m most proud of so far in this game, playing ‘the right way’ without savescumming constantly
and we’ll leave it there for now
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finishing up with the leics match
match 6 cont'd
it's a bright sunny morning to start day 2 of the match, and vijay continues his gameplan: [play with a straight bat within the V](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=N8baPdJ1C1c), put away the bad balls, and leave or defend the good deliveries.even if you’re hitting straight back at the bowler, no reason you can’t hit a 6!
in the 71st over, with runs free-flowing and 150 reached, Vijay feels composed enough to open up his game on the off side. still leaving the bad balls, but launching the full-length deliveries over deep point for six. there’s a reason for the urgency - wickets keep falling at the other end and Vijay wants to reach his 200 before he runs out of partners!
https://i.imgur.com/tu1ub5O.mp4
200 is looking iffy…
…and it proves elusive. Vijay is left stranded on 198 not out off 221 balls, and MSX crash to 294. the hitting apart from Vijay has proven dire. meanwhile, this is the most composed innings we’ve yet seen from Vijay, proving he can indeed show some restraint when required.
there was a bit of savescumming yes, but productive savescumming - rather than doing it to hit a good delivery better, i did it in order to remind myself to leave the bad balls. in short, tried to play it more like actual cricket!
Leicester’s second innings are much superior to their first. Vijay is only brought into bowl in the 35th over, around 5pm on Day 2, at which point Leics have sauntered comfortably to 113-1. he’s suprisingly toothless throughout the innings - ends up going wicketless in his 8 overs. Leics eventually lasts almost 110 overs and scores 378 - by which point it is 4:15pm on Day 3.
adding it all up, the run chase will therefore be 299 for MSX to win the match. Can they do it?
Funny situation here - I didn’t remember whether county matches lasted 3 or 4 days. (It’s 4.) I assumed that Middlesex needed to reach the total by the end of Day 3 in order to avoid a draw. With daylight fading, I started swinging (and save-scumming) like crazy. Not my finest hour…
Vijay plays a Bairstow-esque innings, spraying the offside with boundaries and scoring a century off 74 balls. and as the floodlights come on at Grace Road, Middlesex cruises to a 7-wicket victory. Who else would be man of the match but the guy who took six wickets and scored two unbeaten centuries?
https://i.imgur.com/G8kHeYx.mp4
Six matches in is a good time to take stock of our stats so far in our county campaign.
A fun fact on this: unlike what you might expect, batting average does not equal the average number of runs per innings.
this is because, as the cricket elders decided long ago, a “not out” innings should not be worth the same as one where you get out. if you’re not out, hypothetically you could have batted forever, if not artificially prevented from doing so!
therefore, a not out innings does not count against your denominator. BATTING AVERAGE = RUNS / WICKETS
in the previous match, Vijay scored over 300 runs for the loss of no wickets. this juices the hell out of our numerator, giving us the following batting average for the county campaign thus far: !! 182.25 !!
the bowling stats are similarly nuts. Sure, Vijay isn’t leading the league in wickets taken, but his 33 wickets come in just 809 balls, which is half as many as the league leader Amar Virdi. that gives us an eye-popping strike rate of a wicket every 24.5 deliveries, or a wicket every 4 overs. the economy numbers are even more impressive: 323 runs allowed, 2.39 runs an over, and an average of a wicket every 9.79 runs.
not only is Vijay a better batsman than current world #1 England’s Brave Joe Root, he’s also got a decent claim to be the best bowler currently playing in England.
one could say that Vijay is putting up (ahem) videogame numbers.
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I thought I was putting up video game numbers but Jos Buttler hit a 70-ball 162* yesterday and AB de Villiers once hit 149* off 44 balls, so idk anymore. I guess I’m putting up real life numbers
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WISE FWOM YOU GWAVE
So, Football Manager 2023 released today, and that means that I need to decide what save I’m going to play – generally, I always do about the same thing, which is take over a team in one of the many lowest-playable leagues worldwide, with basically the worst possible starting stats for a manager, and see how it goes from there.
So why post about this here? Because I want you, the people, to have a say in the save. Because football is, after all, the People’s Game.
FC Tatran Prešov
I’ve played as Prešov in a previous version of FM and it’s a fun team, first, and most importantly: they play in green. Second, they’re called “The Horsemen” and they got a horse on their badge. Pretty sweet. Third, they’re the oldest club in Slovakia – resurrecting fallen giants is always a good time in FM and maybe I’ll replicate my previous good luck of having the club bought out by an Iraqi (?!?) tycoon (no chance in hell).
EIF
All of the Northern/Scandinavian clubs that I’ve previously managed have actually been too successful and are all too high up the club pyramid for me to select again, so I’ve grabbed a team in the Finnish lower divisions that uh, had a cool badge. Look at that fucking leaf! There are acorns! This team is a town of 14K (and I guess this town was a merge of two even smaller towns?) in the Southwest bit of Finland that’s basically a blend between Finland and Sweden. The most important thing you should know about the town is as follows:
" Ekenäs is home of the oldest still functional movie theatre in Finland called Bio Forum."
Braintree Town
Braintree Town is a “pub club” from Essex that plays in the Conference South, a regional split of the sixth division in England. I had a great save here like six years ago where I got Braintree all the way to the Championship (the second division, don’t ask) before I ran into a bug in that version of FM where clubs would never build a new stadium, right as the new version was coming out, so I abandoned it. Apparently Braintree Town has a tradition as an amateur club, which would make things incredibly difficult, so I guess if you like pain, you should vote for Braintree.
Anyway! Those are the clubs! Make your voice heard! I’ll wait 24 hours or however long it takes for enough votes to come in to make me feel like I’m not wasting my time.
What Club should Scratchmonkey start out managing in Football Manager 23?
- FC Tatran Prešov (Slovakia)
- EIF (Finland)
- Braintree Town (England)
0 voters
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braintree is too good of a name, and also i love pain
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BIO FORUM
BIO FORUM
BIO FORUM
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ah I like the micropenis awareness leaf so much but id absolutely slap a BRAINTREE THE IRON patch on fucking anything AND PAIN ROCKS
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pls don’t overlook the tiny horse
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voted Finland for combo of bad team + interesting country
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The votes are in, and it’s decided: we are managing FC Tatran Prešov – we are Zeleno-Bieli (The Green-Whites), the Koňare (Horsemen). Prešov is the third-largest city in Slovakia, and the second-largest city in Eastern Slovakia. We play in the Druha Liga or 2.Liga, the second division of Slovakian football, where 16 teams play to try and go up to the Fortuna Liga or avoid the trapdoor to the regionally-split TIPOS III.liga, which in our case would result in an automatic sacking (getting fired) because that league is unplayable. Our biggest rivals are FC Košice who also play in the second division (who were actually FC VSS Košice until that team was dissolved in 2017, presumably because of a financial meltdown, causing a situation where a new team were spun up and then merged with a pre-existing smaller team, presumably to use their league membership) – Košice is the second-largest city in Slovakia and is just south of Prešov.
For those who wanted pain, don’t worry. Our first-team squad, while not horrible by the standards of the competition, is thin and has some notable weaknesses, most notably at central defense, where we have all of two players plus a shrimpy midfielder who can kinda sorta play there. Oh, and the two central defenders that we have are both a) very old (for sporting purposes) and b) extremely slow. Add onto this that we are completely maxed out on our wage bill, and we’re going to have to get creative to try and add any sort of depth at all.
Next time: a little more in-depth on the squad situation and talkin’ tactics.
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I managed to escape my FM addiction but godspeed scratchmonkey.
It was when I realised I couldn’t play a game without using the editor to give multiple non-glaswegian scottish teams sugar daddies, amazing youth and corporate facilites, massive potential attendances and putting the national youth ranking up to 190.
Any thoughts on Japanese Angeball Celtic?
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Honestly I don’t think I’ve watched a single Celtic game since Ange took over. I’ve only seen a handful of Rangers games during their Europa run last year. Hard to have much interest in the Scottish game when it feels like such a closed shop, at least at the top level.
The Squad Situation
I’ll generally be avoiding using player names for now because these are Actual People, even if they’re people that nobody outside of Eastern Slovakia have really heard of before. We’ve got a wealth of striking talent, with 4 players who are good enough to start, as well as a large number of attacking wing players. We’re pretty much lacking beyond 1 or 2 players at every other position, which is a classic lower-league Football Manager problem – I think I once took over a team and they had four players capable of playing leftback, and absolutely none to play on the right.
With our two centerbacks, there is an obvious issue:
And with both of them being 34 years old, it’s only going to get worse (all players enter into a state of freefall with their physical attributes, with Natural Fitness essentially being a barometer of when that begins, in this case the decent level both of our CBs have (all attributes are 1 from 20) has kept them marginally playable).
The good news here is that we’ve got a tiny amount of money that’s been earmarked as transfer funds, i.e. money that we can use to buy players from other teams. As soon as I can, I take that money and I transfer it all over to the wage bill. When you’re playing as a team lower down the leagues, there is absolutely no reason to spend money to buy a player who already has a team because there are loads of players at this level who are free agents and will be happy to sign for us for “free” (obviously they’ll still be drawing a paycheck). Pretty quickly, I find somebody who’s willing to sign for a fairly low amount:
You may have to trust me here that this is lightning-quick at this level, especially for a centerback. While he can play higher up the pitch as well, that lack of Stamina means he’ll be best served playing in central defense, even if his Strength is a lot lower than I’d like to see. Still, for the price, I’m not complaining. We still have a little bit left in the wage bill and I spend it all and a bit more to pick up a 21-year-old who still has potential to grow and will provide us with needed defensive cover in the middle of the park. It’s a little worrisome that we’re (slightly) over our wage limit, as this violates a requirement set by the board; I’m hopeful that we’ll be able to offload a player who might otherwise not provide much value or, the number of clubs that are circling around our star forward would be willing to pay us a substantial sum, with the added benefit of removing the highest salary at the club.
The Tactic
Starting with the Team Instructions along the left-hand side, we’re overall going to take a Positive Mentality, which basically means looking to get forward and attack, although not with complete abandon. We’ll want to get the ball back-to-front fairly quickly, so more Direct (as opposed to Short), balls played at a Higher Tempo, and to look to play the ball into the spaces in front of players, rather than to their feet. When the ball gets to our GK, we’ll want have him Roll the Ball to the defenders rather than kicking or throwing it upfield, and we’ll want to play on the Counter, which means after the other team turns the ball over to us, we will play much more attacking football for a short period afterward, to try and exploit them being out of position. Conversely, when we lose the ball to the other team, we will look to Counter-Press and aggressively close down anybody with the ball with the aim of trying to get the ball back immediately. Our acquisition of a defender who can run fairly fast will allow us to play with a higher line in defense, making the team more vertically compact and hard to play through. We’ll also press the opposition players fairly high the upfield and do so frequently, again with the eye to winning the ball back quickly, as opposed to sitting back in defense and making the other team work to break us down.
The thinking, such as it is, behind this fairly attacking approach is as follows: in the lower leagues, where players are overall fairly poor, you want to maximize the total number of chances for your team while minimizing the amount of chances for the opposition, in that order of priority. Now, this may seem stupidly obvious along the lines of “win games by scoring more than the other team”. This is a trap, and one that many FM players fall into. At higher levels of play, you always see FM players saying “Oh, I’ve been FMed” and pointing at games where they’ve generated loads of shots and a decent xG (expected goals, essentially how much you’d “expect” to score from your chances, if taken by an “average” player) and then been beaten by a team with a very small number of shots and a smaller xG. The problem here, as in many cases, is that humans are generally fairly bad at math.
If you’ve had, say, 15 shots and generated 1.5 xG in a game, that may look like you’re doing quite well and would expect to have scored. What this means if you start poking at it though is that you’re generating .1 xG/shot. So a shot that an “average” player has a 10% chance of scoring from. And facing decent-to-good players in defense, it’s not really a surprise that none of these low-percentage shots have gone in. And if the other team has, say, 3 shots and .6 xG, yes, those numbers are much lower; however, it means they’re generating better chances on average, and again, with better players involved, a 20% chance means that it’s not too surprising that you’re suddenly losing the game by 1 or even 2 goals.
So why is the opposite true in our case? Because we’re not dealing with average players. We’re dealing with poor players. And for these guys, the difference between a .1 xG chance and .8 xG chance is really not that much. So you want to generate as many chances for your team as possible, essentially because anything might happen. This is also especially true in the current ME (Match Engine) which at least at the time of writing, has players making defensive mistakes at a calamitous rate.
Next Time: Player Roles, and the First Match.
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this thread is so good, it almost makes me wanna go back to my old OOTB 2013 project where I simulated an alternate history scenario in 2001 where the XFL (its now called funball I guess okay?) was a thriving baseball league instead
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Sad!
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