Time Travel is Dangerous

By: Daryl | June 3rd, 2009

Apologies for the delay. But I have a good excuse. I’ve been travelling through time.

It was the strangest thing. I sent the team out to attack Man Utd at Old Trafford, as we’d agreed. But Man Utd absolutely terrorized us, dominating the midfield. Thanks to Igor Akinfeev’s heroics it was still 0-0 at HT, but there was no way he could do that for another 45. And so I switched to a 4-1-3-2.

Second half was much more even, and I twice had great chances to go ahead. But then in the 77th minute, the (pretty entertaining) match in front of me was replaced by a blinding blue light and white text that said something incomprehensible about cache errors and a BIOS malfunction. And then everything went dark.

When I finally came to, I found myself in the press conference. The press conference from THE DAY BEFORE the Man Utd game. Clearly I’d travelled back in time.

And so I was faced with the moral dilemma faced by all time travellers, from Doctor Who to those guys in Primer (if you hate your brain and want to hurt it, go rent that movie). Should I use my awesome knowledge of future events (ie Man Utd’s midfield will crush me if I go 4-1-2-1-2) to my own advantage?

I asked myself: “What would Alex Ferguson do?” And the answer I hear back was “Stop asking stupid questions. Alex Ferguson would do everything in his power to win a football match.”

And so, I set the team up in a more balanced 4-4-2, like so:

Basically Camacho is instructed to play more defensively, Veloso a little more offensively. But it gave our midfield a more solid shape and made the game a lot more even. Wayne Rooney still put Utd ahead in the 55th minute, but that’s when Miguel Veloso came to life. As soon as were 1-0 down, the man was everywhere, winning every tackle and playing all kinds of great through balls. He eventually equalized by firinig in a 20+ yard free-kick in the 77th minute (ironically the same minute as the blue screen incident on the original game).

Final stats looked like this:

Result: 1-1

Apologies to all for not sticking with the original plan of attack. But I hope the time travel incident explains why I changed to the 4-4-2. Be mad at me for a while if you like. I can take it.

Unfortunately, time travel always has casualties. And in this case that casualty is our captain Fabricio Coloccini, who’ll be out for two months with some sort of old man hip injury.

The other center backs are Steven Taylor (just back from injury), Matts Hummels (good but green) and Andriy Rusol (good but slow). We can probably get by, but we’ll definitely miss Colo. So…

Big Question For Everyone: Do I need to sign a replacement? It’s Jan 17th, 2012, so we have a couple of weeks before the transfer window closes. There’s only £1.8m in the transfer kitty, but we might be able to raise some £££ with a few quick sales. What do you think?

p.s. Next game is vs West Ham (18th) at home. I’m going to assume everyone’s happy going back to the attacking 4-1-2-1-2 for that game. Also, Marquinhos is away on Brazil U-23 duty again, so the forward line of The Pog and Lewandowski picks itself. Let me know if you disagree…