Following on from Levo’s piece on the role of back room staff and how it could be improved in Football Manager 2010. The closing question was “can Football Manager find a serious use for the physio?” I for one sincerely hope so after reading about the BBC’s Ian Stringer’s experience at Leicester City this week of the ins and outs of the medical examination that players go through before they sign for a new club and it made me realise more than ever that Physio’s are nothing more than eye candy in the game.

The limit of a Physio as it stands in FM2009 is depending on how good he is at his job he will diagnose the injury and feedback how long he guesstimates that the player will be unavailable. This brings us to our first flaw in the current set up. This mostly is down to the Physiotherapy attribute, The higher the number the better he is at his job. Unfortunately attributes are also judged by what division someone is employed in so therefore their attributes are instantly handicapped. It seems a bit harsh to say someone isn’t very good at their job just because they’re the Physio for Accrington instead of Bolton. On the other hand there are different abilities that people have but you should be able to have a Physio with 20 for Physiotherapy in the lower leagues. Clubs and Physio’s should be handicapped by the medical and training facilities available to them rather than a single number (or three if you include mental attributes).

The only other function a Physio seems to have in the game is to provide you with a report on demand about a players overall fitness. Of all the fitness reports I’ve demanded none of them have told me anything that I hadn’t read on the player’s information screen. I remember in a previous version of FM (It may well of been CM4) that I’d request a Physio report and he’d tell me that the player had an underlying injury that required surgery or treatment by a specialist which would rule him out for months but would solve all the niggling injuries. Instead in the current game I get told my player is injured and a specialist can fix him in four weeks whilst the Physio will take 8 weeks. That makes absolutely no sense to me, specialist treatment takes half the time of Physio treatment? Surely by not sending him for surgery he’ll be back to playing fitness quicker as he doesn’t need to recuperate?

I don’t know what changes have been for Football Manager 2010 so I’ll assume at this point that Physio’s are still pointless and need expanding or just throwing out of the game and replaced with news items like dealing with your board is.

There’s so much scope for Improving the role of Physio’s in FM2010. One feature I’d like to see is much more detailed Physio reports especially when it comes to signing players. At the moment it seems as if a player is fit he passes a medical before you sign him but if he’s injured you’re board will cancel the deal. Some feedback from your head Physio before signing a player to advise you if the player in question is carrying an underlying injury or if there’s a part of his anatomy that would benefit from specific training along the lines of his natural fitness and stamina could do with targeting in the short term or concentrating on strength as he’s looking a bit lightweight.

Pre-season reports could be expanded to tell you which players need specific fitness training due to returning from Holiday after too many pies or which players have arrived in tip top shape. At the moment you only seem to get told of players who return still injured. The same goes for players returning from injury, some advice on how long to keep players on a light schedule to get them back to full fitness rather than risk them re-injuring themselves.

When I ask for a Physio reports I expect them to tell me how fit a player is, how fit he could be, what could be improved and if he’s got a niggle and how it would be best treated.

My last request is to sort out that Physio/Specialist/Surgery mess. The news screens are set up to make you select the right choice rather than the quickest. The shortest time period should be the Physio with the long term Specialist/Surgery options taking longer but stopping the re-occurrence. This would then allow situations as they are in real life where players have got themselves back to fitness to help their team on the pitch before having surgery later in the season or even in the summer break.

Hopefully all this waffle will be moot in a couple of weeks and we’ll find out that Sports Interactive have actually given the Physiotherapist a proper role in Football Manager 2010, until then I can only dream!

Right up until Football Manager 2008 I didn’t use the scouts as much as I could instead I used Genie Scout. For training I downloaded Tugs training and for tactics I downloaded a tactic and fashioned it into something half decent for whatever team I was managing.

That’s all changed in the games I’ve played on Football Manager 2009, out has gone Genie in favour of trusting my scouts, out went Tugs training in favour of building my own framework and I’ve built myself a half decent 4-4-2 formation that works well in the German 3rd division.

It dawned on me that with all this help I wasn’t actually winning games I was cheating my way through the game. I wasn’t managing what I had, I was checking the Current abilities of my squad and that of any potential signings to improve my squad, with the training any success wasn’t my own it was done by someone else and the same can be said of the tactics.

For my current game I chose SV Sandhausen of the German Third Division mainly because they were tipped for relegation. Starting a game with a team expecting promotion or aiming for the top half of the table immediately puts pressure on you, picking the team that is expected to finish bottom means you can’t do any worse than is expected of you.

Not only is there no expectation it also gives you the opportunity to learn without worrying about losing, so what if we lose 3 games in a row – the Chairman most certainly doesn’t!

I started building a framework based on the type of players that I had within my squad so all the wingers had the same schedule, all the experienced midfielders had the same schedule etc. etc. Although it works in most cases it doesn’t work in all cases. If I learnt one thing from Football Manager 2009 it is that training schedules/frameworks aimed at a group of players are a thing of the past. The best effects can be found from training your players individually, I’ll trademark it as the ‘Ultimate Ledley King Training schedule’ I think! Training players as a group assumes that all the players assigned to a schedule are equal in terms of progression, believe me they’re not!

With tactics the key is to set Individual instructions as much as possible with team instructions as a fall back. But I’ve been caught out by trying to be too clever and leaving gaping holes trying to play to all my players’ strengths (or at this level, lack of them). I found out that the cleverer you try to get with tactics results in only outsmarting yourself.

Scouting has been much more fun this year, I’m now judging my players on the number of stars they have rather than how big their Current and Potential abilities are. Without buying vast amounts of players I’ve been blooding my 16 year olds from the youth team to negate the players in poor form rather than looking for a quick buy or trawling through the free transfers. Getting a big club as my parent club and them deciding who they are going to send me on loan was an eye opener, you’d think they’d send their highly rated youngsters out on loan to you but beware I got caught out by them sending me a couple of duds!

One thing I’ve been repeatedly guilty of in the past is being too competitive. If I go on a run of five or six games without winning I’ll usually either resign or start a new game mainly because I think I’ve failed. Recently I’ve just ended a thirteen game winless streak and boy did it feel great. Not once did I think about quitting this time, I knew the run had to end at some point and it was just about keeping my players spirits up and keep driving for a result. Playing with a team in this position is great because instead of playing 38 games and winning the league, every game is like a cup final. I’m expected to lose most of the matches anyway so as long as my team go out there and make a fist of it then everyone is happy.

All I need to do now is find a way of making a lower league team profitable when there are no Middle Eastern businessmen on the horizon!!

I could write this rambling piece every year and possibly every year I could write the same thing about how the ‘scene’ is becoming worse, how more and more sites are opening and even more are closing.

If I’m completely honest the community of sites we have at the moment is probably the best it’s been in the last 2 or 3 years. The staple of the community at the moment consists of FMG:Live, Los Wonderkids, FM-Britain, Sortitoutsi & here. Go back 4 years ago and the names would’ve been Goal-Kick, Throw-In & Sortitioutsi.

Now on the other hand the quality of the community has plummeted, there was a time not so long ago that anyone daring to consider opening a football manager site would be flamed within an inch of their life for having a forum with little or no main site. Sortitoutsi’s main site is nothing but a download portal these days, the same can be said of FMG:Live, Los Wonderkids’ main site is nothing more than a portal to the forums and FM-Britain’s has random bursts of activity. So are we saying that forums are the future? I sincerely hope not.

Towards the end of 2006 and the beginning of 2007 the community experienced a blogging high. The world and his wife bought a domain, signed up to WordPress or grabbed some space from an existing FM site and shared with the world the views of the game, their game or even about the community. There was guides for this that and sometimes the other.

To find a written word about FM in the community these days you have to trawl through some sometimes awfully laid out forums, hope the title of the thread is something vaguely relevant and pray that the author is semi-literate!

No-one seems to want to showcase the best of their content any-more, on the flip side I could say that there isn’t much quality around these days but that would be a tad too judgemental even for myself! More and more we seem to live in a forum culture of ‘discussing the game’ but on the other side of the coin is attracting new members to your forum. The majority of people arrive on the FM community looking for guides or a quick answer to a random question or even more likely – graphics! The don’t arrive on the FM community for the first time to discuss what they’ve been doing today or what they last ate.

For the most part a forum needs a main site to thrive and evolve with new members joining because they’ve been impressed by what they’ve seen as a guest. A main site doesn’t need a forum to thrive or evolve though. All a main site needs is a dedicated sole to churn out content and keep both themselves and their readers occupied/entertained. A forum needs a band of merry men to either keep order, boost activity or in some cases go on a power trip.

Until last week I was staff on the forums here at FM-View until I made a conscience decision – to quit as forum staff. The forums were providing too much of a distraction from contributing to the main site. I’m not in this game for the power trip or the adulation, I’ve had my time in the limelight. Gone are the days of Q. opening a billion different ventures, providing a quadrillion data updates etc.  I’ve learnt that one person can’t do everything without the help of a few other like-minded people chipping in. My plan these days is to do what I want when I want rather than trying to break my back trying to please a forum full of people that would rather not do anything productive.

All it takes to become ‘staff’ on a FM site these days is post 30 times a day, string a whole paragraph together and make sure you use a spell checker. Gone are the days when you actually had to do anything before you got a shiny badge. Hopefully with the impending release of Football Manager 2010 we will see a rise in the quality of content and productivity across the community or all we’ll be left with is half a dozen forums that wither away because they’re not doing sufficient to entice people to want to either join or stay at their sites.

I’ll leave you all with some wise words from Charles Darwin …

It is not the strongest of the species that survives, nor the most intelligent that survives. It is the one that is the most adaptable to change.

One thing we’ll definitely not see in Football Manager is the addition of Streakers. Not only would it be pointless but only Hentai fans would get excited at the prospect of computer generated boobs! Whilst not a regular occurrence every weekend the fact that most streakers are overweight, middle aged men would quite frankly scare most young children that play Football Manager.

An old feature that used to be in the game was complaining about the referee. From what I remember there’s an agreement in place between the Professional Game Match Officials and Sports Interactive that means we can play with proper referees in the game on the condition we can’t complain about them. Now if Referees and their assistants were given the tools to do a half decent job week in, week out we wouldn’t moan at them every weekend and then the Professional Game Match Officials wouldn’t need to run scared from a computer game.

Thanks to rival studios having exclusive licenses we won’t be seeing the J-League anytime soon in Football Manager. Whilst I agree with the concept of having licensed content I hate exclusive licenses.  Surely someone must have realised now that restricting licensed content to a console game when you could license it to games which are played  predominately on a PC can exist together? For this reason as well don’t expect to be able to have the German National Team playable soon either.

Due to the world we live in today, don’t expect failed drugs tests or the return of potentially life threatening injuries to the Football Manager series. Because people take how they can be perceived too seriously these days and will threaten to sue anyone that paints them in a negative light, Sports Interactive won’t be adding these to the game in the future. It really does annoy me that people can’t get to grips that whilst Football Manager may be based on reality it isn’t! The fact that with time, dedication and some serious cheating you can make Accrington Stanley champions of the Premiership. Drugs tests and the bans that follow are a reality of football (Armstrong, Bowyer, Pagotto, Ferdinand, Mutu & Kenny being case in point). If a virtual Lionel Messi fails a drugs test and is banned in game then so be it – it’s a game for christs sake!

Another thing which reflects badly on those involved and is another contentious point is Hooliganism. Although not as prevalent as it once was it’s still around not only in England but also in other countries. I can’t see clubs allowing their image and name being used in game only for a 3D replication of 1,000 fans invading the pitch and ripping out seats. Whilst it would be great to see your finances suffer from the ensuing repairs and fines and having to play behind closed doors, I don’t think SI/Sega would be so happy to see their finances suffer when the legal action starts!

The other things that always get mentioned that people would like to see are becoming a Director of Football or starting off as an assistant manager. Whilst I can understand the reasoning behind it for the most part it would be like being an international manager. You only concentrate on doing some of the job some of the time. Surely that’s taking the fun out of the game?

Other ‘shouts’ for features to be included are becoming chairman, Wags, buying a house, setting the ticket price, selling concessions in the stadium. If some can explain fully when any of the following have been part of Football Manager’s job then I’ll accept they are valid additions to the game. To me they are pointless side shows designed to keep occupied when the rest of the game is shit.

If you can think of anything which I haven’t mentioned then feel free to comment below

The title may seem shocking to some, the 3D match engine was introduced in Football Manager 2009 but I’m still yet to fall in love with it. I was bought up on the good old versions of CM/FM where the highlight of the match highlights when the commentary bar flashed in your clubs colours to indicate that you’d scored. Even playing FM2009 I still stuck to the plan of setting my tactics, hitting play and waiting for that flashing bar. Looking at yesterdays blog from Miles and also today’s about pitch side tactics and also the touchline shouts means I might have to make the switch to 3D!

One thing I’ve missed in Football Manager is ‘quick tactics’. Two clicks and the way your team plays completely changing, now with these two features I’ll be able to exploit a quick change and hopefully increase my chances of winning. At the moment any tactical change seems like calling a time out in a basketball game, getting the notebook out and running through a whole set of game plays and then sending them back out again.

It’s moments like that that frustrate me as it brings me back to the reality that it really is a game at times rather than my own virtual reality. By bringing in live tactics my dream of sitting in the dugout becomes more of a reality. Hopefully with the new and improved match engine, new pitch textures, crowds and all that other random eye candy that’s included I only want one major improvement – Camera Angles!

To me, camera angles in FM09 made watching the match more like watching the game on television than from the managers point of view. At best the main stand camera was the ‘Phil Brown seat’ but the rest of the views was like you were sat at home with Sky Sports HD on and sitting in the armchair with a couple of chilled beers. The camera angle that should be default is dugout view, a real life manager has to make tactical decisions from pitch level yet I can make tactical decisions based on viewing the match from the International space station. Maybe I should employ Neil Armstrong as my Assistant and have Buz Aldrin as my tactical guru!

That’s why I’ve never really used the ’2D dots’ or the 3D view as it ruins the illusion of what I should be able to see (that and I have a short attention span and am rubbish at tactics!). I like my games to be as realistic as possible hence why I’ve spent the last four years providing Data updates for everyone to play with the latest and most up to date data and for the last year I’ve been responsible for improving the quality of the research for the German Oberliga – all in the name of improving the game.

The only other improvement I ask for in expanding the match day experience is to start ranting at the fourth official and be sent to stand on top of the Old Trafford dugout! Building on that, how about having ‘dugout view’ as the default and then getting sent to the stands where you can only view the match from the main stand and having to relay your instructions to the assistant. Depending on how good he is could sway whether he follows your instructions and can accurately relay them to the team or if he does his own thing and costs you valuable points, I leave you to think that one over ….

The story behind this post started two months shy of three years ago, both Niniev and myself were leading Manager-Crisis whilst Danlufan (the owner) was on one of his many unexplained “A.W.O.L Missions”. The problem we were having at the time was that Dan wanted clean cut material for the main site and to keep everything fairly decent and respectable. The problem we were having was that FM2007 had just come out and was frustrating the hell out of us. Whilst managing and providing the content for the most part at Manager-Crisis was still keeping us there there was a part of us that wanted to push the boundaries a little bit and let rip now and then.

We decided that we’d have our own little blog and there we could do as we pleased without worrying that Dan would take offence. A name for the blog and an identity was easier to come up with than the actual content in the end! With Niniev hailing from Edinburgh and myself from South London, coupled with the fact that we both grew up on football before the Premier League existed (before Sky owned the monopoly on football rights and when you could see live games on ITV) left us with the easy choice of choosing Saint and Greavsie as our ‘persona’.

For those of you who don’t remember who Saint and Greavsie were (which I have a feeling is everyone apart from Niniev and myself!) Here’s an excerpt of two old codgers rambling …

I still claim to this day (and probably until I die) that I am the person solely responsible for getting the alteration of pitch sizes into the game – The Proof!, maybe going through the archives at S&G then SI might read this one about how pointless a physio is. Then again I may be getting ahead of myself and they’ve actually given the physio something to do in FM2010!

Anyway, back to the story … S&G was never intended to be prolific and Manager Crisis began to pick up once again, Niniev took more of front seat whilst I buried my head in Data updates as usual and S&G fizzled out. There were times when S&G could’ve been reignited but it usually favoured one or other of us and as the site was intended to be both us neither wanted to do it without the other.

So, after a couple of years apart with myself arriving via Goal-Kick and Niniev being here a while we’ve reunited! Yes, Saint and Greavsie are returning for FM2010 exclusively at FM-View (Maybe I should put some disclaimer here as I usually leave places regularly!)

With the relaunch of the Main site and the semi-regular content that we’ve been adding recently it was decided that whilst FM-View was heading back into a magazine format with a little bit of something for everyone it was still lacking one thing – Opinion! And that’s what we’re aiming to inflict on you all!!