Enjoy playing Champ Manager? You’ll love this!……
Every young football fan has two dreams: first, and most important, to play for their favourite club. Not so surprising is it, considering your whole childhood is spent idolising your teams top goalscorer? Naturally, you wouldn`t mind it to be you one day. Who knows, one day it could be.
But sadly, when that day comes and you realise your not going to be the next Clive Mendonca, you`re intentions change, they have to. Instead they morph into the second dream, the more ‘realistic` dream – Management. Okay it`s still a little far-out – idiotic even – but surely there`s nothing wrong with that, is there; wanting to lead your boyhood club to league to glory? If anything it`s normal.
Maybe you see yourself as a bit of a Bill Shankley or feel you could change the fortunes of an underachieving club, Alex Ferguson-esque? Either way, let me tell you, it`s completely natural. I bet there isn`t a single football fan out there that hasn`t dreamt of managing their favourite club; that`s how sure I am. I for one haven`t stopped dreaming, but at 18 I really shouldn`t be surprised for not getting any interviews.
But if that is the case, you must be wondering why isn`t millions of depressed football fans knocking about, becoming evermore so disillusioned due to the absurdity of their dreams? Simple really, football management games.
If you`re of an age to have experienced the excitement and thrill of guiding your team to a monumental 3-2 away win at Sheffield Wednesday despite your 18-year-old Brazilian wonderkid being out injured, you`ll know how addictive it is. If you haven`t – where have you been the last twenty years!
Hours just seem to vanish as you get lost in the moment, sometimes whole evenings can be lost without you barely noticing. You find yourself holding contract talks with Jimmy Floyd Hasslebank, trying to persuade him that a move to Grimsby Town would benefit his career. Obviously he doesn`t come, Macclesfield make a better offer.
Real life and Championship Manager become a strange highbred. You think Brett Pittman will become the most gifted striker in the world, but then you realise he`s struggling to hold down a place in the Bournemouth reserves. Has their manager not seen his stats? You even begin to wonder why To Madeira has never been in the Portugal national squad, even though you know he`s completely fictional.
You tell yourself that it`s not real, but you love to believe it. There`s something equally surreal and pleasing about seeing Bristol Rovers reach the European Cup. In a way, it`s making our own pie-in-the-sky dreams possible, through the concept of computer generated fiction. What a great idea! Rovers didn`t win it that year if you`re wondering, Yeovil knocked them out!
The key is to remember that it`s all just a game, even if you`ve just won the World Cup thanks to a last-minute strike from John McDermott?
