wwsd
Arcane
- Joined
- Jun 16, 2011
- Messages
- 8,064
So the other day, I was cleaning up my screenshots folder, and I accidentally got a bit too zealous and deleted some of the screenshots of December 2028/January 2029. No biggie, but information will be a bit scant for this period. Suffice it to say that after PEC Zwolle approached Hardman, we lost the home game against Watford 1-0, but then hit another fine run of form in January, winning all but one game, and eliminating Millwall and York City in the FA Cup third and fourth rounds. If memory serves, at this point we are 2nd in the league and have the title spot within breathing distance. To shore up our strike force, we bring in Valentin Carboni on loan from Inter:
He hits the ground running, providing competition for Aravena's striker spot, together with the Portuguese Gabriel Silva. We also bring in Swedish midfielder Lucas Bergvall for only £3M from Tottenham, in order to compete with and eventually replace Andreas Pereira.
But then, in February:
Quite how we lose this, I don't know. Or maybe I do. The fundamentals behind our success have been the position play, the passing game, the high possession, and a reliable defence, including ultra-consistent goalkeeping. All these fundamentals work fine here, except the defence: Baxter has been very consistent so far, but this time, he lets some pretty soft shots go under him, including one shot where he narrowed the gap between the near post and his body, but still let it in. Sazonov is the tallest central defender, but gets beaten in the air anyway by Daryl Dyke, the Baggies' target man.
At home against Preston, another extremely undeserved defeat:
Against promotion competitors Leeds, a sHoCkIng tWo-FoOteD LuNgE!!!!
In the FA Cup 5th round, we hold Premier League side Newcastle to 0-0 in the first 90 minutes, but in extra time, they get a penalty and then score from regular play in the 102nd minute, and our cup run ends.
As unfair as some of the defeats have been, we can't really have any complaints about this result against Middlesbrough. They fight fire with fire, also coming up with a 4-3-3 possession-based game, and they win the battle of the midfield. Eric Dier is back in the team after having been plagued by injury for most of the season, and he doesn't move the dial for us much either. Probably not what he had in mind for himself at the age of 35, either. Last season he was often our most reliable player in that half-back position, but his injury woes mean that he never really gets going in the season when we need an experienced force in the Championship title challenge.
The formation comes under criticism, but for now, Hardman doesn't want to abandon the 4-3-3 yet. Andreas Pereira and Sasa Lukic tend to function well in that two-man central midfield pairing, with Andreas surging forward. Andreas can't play in the defensive midfield position at all, so switching to e.g. 4-2-3-1 would mean benching one of our stars. 4-4-2 would be another option, but it's mostly the lower teams in the league that employ Brexit-ball. But more fundamentally, there is a lot of risk involved in switching formations mid-season, although we do keep training that 4-1-4-1 to grind out results when needed. That's the most experimentation we'll do for now. However, whether it is with this formation or another, the tactic is far from perfect yet, and it will need some more tweaking towards the end of the season and going into the next one.
Speaking of next season, we're already pre-empting the transfer window by approaching players with expiring contracts. This lad is surplus to requirements at Barcelona, but would be a fine fit for us next season, even in the Premier League:
In real life, he has just signed with Chelsea:
Our first-choice goalie gets injured too, so it's another chance for Kjell Scherpen after his poor start made him lose his spot to Baxter early on. At Blackburn Rovers, we're up 2-1 going into injury time when Blackburn get a penalty! But Kjell steps up and saves it!
We lost 4 games in a row at the worst possible time of the season, and Kjell may have just saved Joe Hardman's job here.
Bernd Leno does a bit of punditry about his former team-mates. Thanks mate! He's not wrong, unfortunately. Fosu has had a great start in the season, but his form has slumped together with the rest of the team's.
At Peterborough, we finally get CLINICAL. No wasteful shooting, no defensive errors. Even Aravena is incredibly efficient. We give our third goalie Max Weiß a chance, and he looks safe when called upon as well.
More gems coming in from the youth academy. Will they be good enough for the Premier League though? It's hard to say. But the board want us to give the youngsters a chance, as we've done for Bekoe and Fosu this season. Besides local lads, a coughing man in a trench coat also delivers us a supple 15-year-old Kosovar boy. When Joe asks how he ended up here, the man simply says "Oh, he fell off a lorry, don't ask questions mate".
Against Plymouth, we are the better side, but just as we go into the closing minutes...
Why you gotta be like this man?
We draw the game 1-1, but then, at Ipswich, we win both the 3 points and the admiration of Robbie Keane:
You tell me which one you value more! The game itself is another Jekyll and Hyde performance: a great first half, but then in the second half, complacency creeps in while the opposition goes for broke. This guy Ellertsson was on our shortlist, but we never ended up getting him. He runs the game for Ipswich here, and it's only thanks to an offside that we come away with 3 points here.
With 5 games left until the end of the season, we've done well to recover from that horrible slump in February. We are 3 points behind in the title race, but with the better goal difference. Second place will also lead to automatic promotion. However, Sheffield Wednesday, Leeds, Watford and Middlesbrough are also still in the race for promotion, and are likely all going to be in the playoffs in any case.
Some sage advice from our director of football:
"I know Harry Wilson wants to leave the club, but we can just press this button here and force him to stay!"
"Yes, that worked out so brilliantly with Wout Weghort last time. Are you out of your fucking mind?"
We do get in on the market for Brazilian boys. This lad costs us £6 million and is a pacey forward with good finishing. Although we already have 3 of those, we can easily loan him out and sell him for a greater amount of money.
Against Sunderland, Quilindschy Hartman gets his second red card of the season! But we eke out a win anyway.
Actually, here I want to talk about the dirtiness attribute. This is a hidden attribute that is described in coaching/scouting reports as "has a competitive streak which can occasionally lead to him bending the rules". OK, so bending the rules is fine, but hacking the rules down with studs up is not so conducive to keeping 11 men on the pitch. Hartman has this attribute, as does Sasa Lukic. Very annoying, because sometimes they will do something retarded like this.
Hull win their game, but Sheffield lose theirs. The Premier League beckons!
Our form and final 4 matches. We still have the opportunity to take the top spot from Hull City too! But with Hull and Watford in there, it's not an easy schedule by any means.
With both our full-backs suspended, it's Hull who go up and over instead. Although technically anything can still happen, we must accept the title dream is probably over at this point:
So let's not fuck this u--
While Hull secure the title, we produce a pretty grim display at Blackpool. We are good at everything except the final third.
Against Derby, we do what must be done, but Sheffield Wednesday and Middlesbrough both win too. You can barely see it at the top of the screenshot, but Middlesbrough scored their 2-1 at Preston in the 94th minute!
This means that we haven't yet done enough to secure automatic promotion, and we once again go into a dramatic final match day. Worse, our opponents, Watford, can still secure a playoff spot, so they will not fold easily. The only good news: it's all in our hands.
The first half is a struggle to break Watford down. Worse yet, the news comes in that Sheffield have scored in their home game against Plymouth Argyle. As we go into the final ten minutes, Watford start coming out of their shell, and Ben Broggio flicks it on to Lucas Da Cunha...
Well, fuck. Middlesbrough win too, and they have the better goal difference, so we fall back from 2nd to 4th on the final day of the season. That's the reality check right there: we had the big money, we were favourites to win the league, but we simply didn't do enough over the course of 46 matches. There were many times when we were in that 2nd place, with an opening towards the title-winning spot, but failed to capitalise. On the other hand, the competition was stiff, with Sheffield Wednesday and Middlesbrough also competing for promotion, and Leeds being right up there too until they hit their own terrible run of form, with zero wins in the whole month of April. For our part, those 4 defeats in a row in February made a huge difference, with at least two of them being completely against the run of play. But there were also other games where we were on top, but gave it away, or lacked incisiveness in front of goal. All that's left to do now is face the music, lick our wounds, and take that final chance in the playoffs.
The silver lining: Leeds, as mentioned, have had a poor run of form too. In the league campaign, we didn't have VAR, only goal-line technology. But in the play-offs, VAR is used, and he confirms a foul against us in the box! Lukic coolly converts the penalty. Leeds get back into the game and Jason van Duiven scores the equaliser on an assist from Ruben Mendoza, the left winger. Now Mendoza is not a real player, but a regen, or newgen. Newgens are youth players automatically generated by the game each year, and there are always some new wonderkids emerging all over the world. Newgens can easily be recognised because they don't have a real photograph (or a blank face, if you don't have a face pack), but a CGI face that tends to look like this:
Anyway, 1-1 in the away tie is not a terrible result, but it gets better!
Carboni does it again! Lurking outside of the box, he heads in a free kick from Hartman. Four defenders and even the goalie converge on him when they realise where the ball is going and that Carboni is coming in, but they're all too late. That's just a fucking excellent piece of positioning and movement.
In the second leg at home, we hold them to 0-0 until injury time, when Aravena finds a chance to break away. He plays the through ball to Iwobi and...
Middlesbrough have also dispatched Watford, so our last chance at promotion will be against them! Actually, Fulham haven't won a game against the Teesside club since December 2024! But statistics don't matter when the playoff final is at stake. This final does not have a home and away tier, but is played at Wembley!
As a young lad, Joe Hardman dreamed of setting foot on this sacred ground, where Bobby Moore lifted the Jules Rimet Trophy in 1966. Instead, the old Wembley, with its iconic twin towers, was demolished in 2000 and replaced by the new Wembley, finished in 2007:
It's still a stadium like no other. With a capacity of 90,000, it's unlikely that these two sets of fans will fill out the stands entirely. Instead of a cup final or England game, Joe Hardman walks onto this pitch under entirely different circumstances: to salvage a Championship season that should have been over already, considering the massive amount of money poured into the club by the new Korean owner, and the dominant performances on the pitch in most games.
It's once again the Inter loanee Carboni who opens the scoring after a visionary pass over the defence from Lukic. The game remains a very tight affair, similar to a cup final. Boro don't roll over easily, and actually have the most possession. In the 70th minute, they get a corner which finds Abel Ruiz in the box. He shoots it into the mass of Fulham defenders, but Baxter has already gone down. The ball bounces back to Ruiz, who heads it into an empty net.
Both exhausted teams are unable to produce much more in extra time, and this is going to end the only way it could have. Yes, the final opportunity for us to achieve promotion will be on penalties! Vanja Milinkovic-Savic, their Serbian goalie, is over 2 metres tall and has excellent reflexes. Our Nathan Baxter is no slouch either, although Kjell Scherpen would have probably been a bit better for this sort of thing. Still, he stops two penalties, while Vanja saves only one. Boro's second miss, by Leonidas Stergiou, looks like some kind of audacious Panenka attempt, but Baxter stays put and the ball bounces off his hands!
Our 6th penalty taker, Fosu, steps up. 21 years old, born in Ghana, he came up through the youth academy in 2024, and broke into Hardman's first team this season. On his shoulders rests not just the responsibility for the win, but the entire difference between success and failure of the season, tens of millions of pounds, and his manager's job, among several other high stakes.
Fosu cuts a slightly nervous figure, while Vanja touches the bar, showing his height. Fosu runs up, Vanja spreads his arms and dances on his line, moves forward, dives into the corner where Fosu aims, but it flies straight into the top corner!!!
The Fulham fans are in ecstacy! The poshest set of fans in the country invade the pitch like a bunch of yobs! Prawn sandwiches and charcuterie lies abandoned in the stands! Monocles fly!
Although Fulham have been here before, this has to be one of the most dramatic bounce-backs in recent history. And so, the final table looks like this:
Fulham will be joining champions Hull City and Sheffield Wednesday in the Premier League! Although we had the best defensive record, we missed a lot of chances. Middlesbrough, Leeds and Watford took it extremely close, while Sunderland and Swansea also got over 70 points, but they will have to languish in the Championship for another season. The mid-table remains the mid-table, with Norwich not making it back up. Luton Town fought bravely despite going into administration and being docked 12 points, but now they're slipping into even deeper despair, joining Bristol and Blackburn in League One.
In the Premier League, normality is restored after Chelsea's title last season. The richest seven clubs form the top seven, while all of last season's promoted teams go straight back down into the Championship, a damning indictment of the violence inherent in the system! We'll have our work cut out if we don't want to join them next season.
Joe Hardman returns to the Premier League with another sizeable transfer budget and players accustomed to his system. On the other hand, it falls on him to bring the squad up to Premier League level, and find a way to make the tactic more incisive up front, while keeping it tight against the Premier League's attacking players. While many of our Championship opponents parked the bus and had to be broken down, back in the Prem, we can expect them to try and attack us. This also has its positive sides, as our own forwards may get their chances. But we'll need to improve the supply to them and make sure we take our chances.
2027/28 was the season Joe Hardman briefly entered the Premier League with Fulham, but was relegated. 28/29 was the season he returned there. 29/30 will be make or break: is Joe Hardman the genuine article? Is he a Premier League manager?
He hits the ground running, providing competition for Aravena's striker spot, together with the Portuguese Gabriel Silva. We also bring in Swedish midfielder Lucas Bergvall for only £3M from Tottenham, in order to compete with and eventually replace Andreas Pereira.
But then, in February:
Quite how we lose this, I don't know. Or maybe I do. The fundamentals behind our success have been the position play, the passing game, the high possession, and a reliable defence, including ultra-consistent goalkeeping. All these fundamentals work fine here, except the defence: Baxter has been very consistent so far, but this time, he lets some pretty soft shots go under him, including one shot where he narrowed the gap between the near post and his body, but still let it in. Sazonov is the tallest central defender, but gets beaten in the air anyway by Daryl Dyke, the Baggies' target man.
At home against Preston, another extremely undeserved defeat:
Against promotion competitors Leeds, a sHoCkIng tWo-FoOteD LuNgE!!!!
In the FA Cup 5th round, we hold Premier League side Newcastle to 0-0 in the first 90 minutes, but in extra time, they get a penalty and then score from regular play in the 102nd minute, and our cup run ends.
As unfair as some of the defeats have been, we can't really have any complaints about this result against Middlesbrough. They fight fire with fire, also coming up with a 4-3-3 possession-based game, and they win the battle of the midfield. Eric Dier is back in the team after having been plagued by injury for most of the season, and he doesn't move the dial for us much either. Probably not what he had in mind for himself at the age of 35, either. Last season he was often our most reliable player in that half-back position, but his injury woes mean that he never really gets going in the season when we need an experienced force in the Championship title challenge.
The formation comes under criticism, but for now, Hardman doesn't want to abandon the 4-3-3 yet. Andreas Pereira and Sasa Lukic tend to function well in that two-man central midfield pairing, with Andreas surging forward. Andreas can't play in the defensive midfield position at all, so switching to e.g. 4-2-3-1 would mean benching one of our stars. 4-4-2 would be another option, but it's mostly the lower teams in the league that employ Brexit-ball. But more fundamentally, there is a lot of risk involved in switching formations mid-season, although we do keep training that 4-1-4-1 to grind out results when needed. That's the most experimentation we'll do for now. However, whether it is with this formation or another, the tactic is far from perfect yet, and it will need some more tweaking towards the end of the season and going into the next one.
Speaking of next season, we're already pre-empting the transfer window by approaching players with expiring contracts. This lad is surplus to requirements at Barcelona, but would be a fine fit for us next season, even in the Premier League:
In real life, he has just signed with Chelsea:
Our first-choice goalie gets injured too, so it's another chance for Kjell Scherpen after his poor start made him lose his spot to Baxter early on. At Blackburn Rovers, we're up 2-1 going into injury time when Blackburn get a penalty! But Kjell steps up and saves it!
We lost 4 games in a row at the worst possible time of the season, and Kjell may have just saved Joe Hardman's job here.
Bernd Leno does a bit of punditry about his former team-mates. Thanks mate! He's not wrong, unfortunately. Fosu has had a great start in the season, but his form has slumped together with the rest of the team's.
At Peterborough, we finally get CLINICAL. No wasteful shooting, no defensive errors. Even Aravena is incredibly efficient. We give our third goalie Max Weiß a chance, and he looks safe when called upon as well.
More gems coming in from the youth academy. Will they be good enough for the Premier League though? It's hard to say. But the board want us to give the youngsters a chance, as we've done for Bekoe and Fosu this season. Besides local lads, a coughing man in a trench coat also delivers us a supple 15-year-old Kosovar boy. When Joe asks how he ended up here, the man simply says "Oh, he fell off a lorry, don't ask questions mate".
Against Plymouth, we are the better side, but just as we go into the closing minutes...
Why you gotta be like this man?
We draw the game 1-1, but then, at Ipswich, we win both the 3 points and the admiration of Robbie Keane:
You tell me which one you value more! The game itself is another Jekyll and Hyde performance: a great first half, but then in the second half, complacency creeps in while the opposition goes for broke. This guy Ellertsson was on our shortlist, but we never ended up getting him. He runs the game for Ipswich here, and it's only thanks to an offside that we come away with 3 points here.
With 5 games left until the end of the season, we've done well to recover from that horrible slump in February. We are 3 points behind in the title race, but with the better goal difference. Second place will also lead to automatic promotion. However, Sheffield Wednesday, Leeds, Watford and Middlesbrough are also still in the race for promotion, and are likely all going to be in the playoffs in any case.
Some sage advice from our director of football:
We do get in on the market for Brazilian boys. This lad costs us £6 million and is a pacey forward with good finishing. Although we already have 3 of those, we can easily loan him out and sell him for a greater amount of money.
Against Sunderland, Quilindschy Hartman gets his second red card of the season!
But we eke out a win anyway.Actually, here I want to talk about the dirtiness attribute. This is a hidden attribute that is described in coaching/scouting reports as "has a competitive streak which can occasionally lead to him bending the rules". OK, so bending the rules is fine, but hacking the rules down with studs up is not so conducive to keeping 11 men on the pitch. Hartman has this attribute, as does Sasa Lukic. Very annoying, because sometimes they will do something retarded like this.
Hull win their game, but Sheffield lose theirs. The Premier League beckons!
Our form and final 4 matches. We still have the opportunity to take the top spot from Hull City too! But with Hull and Watford in there, it's not an easy schedule by any means.
With both our full-backs suspended, it's Hull who go up and over instead. Although technically anything can still happen, we must accept the title dream is probably over at this point:
So let's not fuck this u--
While Hull secure the title, we produce a pretty grim display at Blackpool. We are good at everything except the final third.
Against Derby, we do what must be done, but Sheffield Wednesday and Middlesbrough both win too. You can barely see it at the top of the screenshot, but Middlesbrough scored their 2-1 at Preston in the 94th minute!
This means that we haven't yet done enough to secure automatic promotion, and we once again go into a dramatic final match day. Worse, our opponents, Watford, can still secure a playoff spot, so they will not fold easily. The only good news: it's all in our hands.
The first half is a struggle to break Watford down. Worse yet, the news comes in that Sheffield have scored in their home game against Plymouth Argyle. As we go into the final ten minutes, Watford start coming out of their shell, and Ben Broggio flicks it on to Lucas Da Cunha...
Well, fuck. Middlesbrough win too, and they have the better goal difference, so we fall back from 2nd to 4th on the final day of the season. That's the reality check right there: we had the big money, we were favourites to win the league, but we simply didn't do enough over the course of 46 matches. There were many times when we were in that 2nd place, with an opening towards the title-winning spot, but failed to capitalise. On the other hand, the competition was stiff, with Sheffield Wednesday and Middlesbrough also competing for promotion, and Leeds being right up there too until they hit their own terrible run of form, with zero wins in the whole month of April. For our part, those 4 defeats in a row in February made a huge difference, with at least two of them being completely against the run of play. But there were also other games where we were on top, but gave it away, or lacked incisiveness in front of goal. All that's left to do now is face the music, lick our wounds, and take that final chance in the playoffs.
The silver lining: Leeds, as mentioned, have had a poor run of form too. In the league campaign, we didn't have VAR, only goal-line technology. But in the play-offs, VAR is used, and he confirms a foul against us in the box! Lukic coolly converts the penalty. Leeds get back into the game and Jason van Duiven scores the equaliser on an assist from Ruben Mendoza, the left winger. Now Mendoza is not a real player, but a regen, or newgen. Newgens are youth players automatically generated by the game each year, and there are always some new wonderkids emerging all over the world. Newgens can easily be recognised because they don't have a real photograph (or a blank face, if you don't have a face pack), but a CGI face that tends to look like this:
Anyway, 1-1 in the away tie is not a terrible result, but it gets better!
Carboni does it again! Lurking outside of the box, he heads in a free kick from Hartman. Four defenders and even the goalie converge on him when they realise where the ball is going and that Carboni is coming in, but they're all too late. That's just a fucking excellent piece of positioning and movement.
In the second leg at home, we hold them to 0-0 until injury time, when Aravena finds a chance to break away. He plays the through ball to Iwobi and...
Middlesbrough have also dispatched Watford, so our last chance at promotion will be against them! Actually, Fulham haven't won a game against the Teesside club since December 2024! But statistics don't matter when the playoff final is at stake. This final does not have a home and away tier, but is played at Wembley!
As a young lad, Joe Hardman dreamed of setting foot on this sacred ground, where Bobby Moore lifted the Jules Rimet Trophy in 1966. Instead, the old Wembley, with its iconic twin towers, was demolished in 2000 and replaced by the new Wembley, finished in 2007:
It's still a stadium like no other. With a capacity of 90,000, it's unlikely that these two sets of fans will fill out the stands entirely. Instead of a cup final or England game, Joe Hardman walks onto this pitch under entirely different circumstances: to salvage a Championship season that should have been over already, considering the massive amount of money poured into the club by the new Korean owner, and the dominant performances on the pitch in most games.
It's once again the Inter loanee Carboni who opens the scoring after a visionary pass over the defence from Lukic. The game remains a very tight affair, similar to a cup final. Boro don't roll over easily, and actually have the most possession. In the 70th minute, they get a corner which finds Abel Ruiz in the box. He shoots it into the mass of Fulham defenders, but Baxter has already gone down. The ball bounces back to Ruiz, who heads it into an empty net.
Both exhausted teams are unable to produce much more in extra time, and this is going to end the only way it could have. Yes, the final opportunity for us to achieve promotion will be on penalties! Vanja Milinkovic-Savic, their Serbian goalie, is over 2 metres tall and has excellent reflexes. Our Nathan Baxter is no slouch either, although Kjell Scherpen would have probably been a bit better for this sort of thing. Still, he stops two penalties, while Vanja saves only one. Boro's second miss, by Leonidas Stergiou, looks like some kind of audacious Panenka attempt, but Baxter stays put and the ball bounces off his hands!
Our 6th penalty taker, Fosu, steps up. 21 years old, born in Ghana, he came up through the youth academy in 2024, and broke into Hardman's first team this season. On his shoulders rests not just the responsibility for the win, but the entire difference between success and failure of the season, tens of millions of pounds, and his manager's job, among several other high stakes.
Fosu cuts a slightly nervous figure, while Vanja touches the bar, showing his height. Fosu runs up, Vanja spreads his arms and dances on his line, moves forward, dives into the corner where Fosu aims, but it flies straight into the top corner!!!
The Fulham fans are in ecstacy! The poshest set of fans in the country invade the pitch like a bunch of yobs! Prawn sandwiches and charcuterie lies abandoned in the stands! Monocles fly!
Although Fulham have been here before, this has to be one of the most dramatic bounce-backs in recent history. And so, the final table looks like this:
Fulham will be joining champions Hull City and Sheffield Wednesday in the Premier League! Although we had the best defensive record, we missed a lot of chances. Middlesbrough, Leeds and Watford took it extremely close, while Sunderland and Swansea also got over 70 points, but they will have to languish in the Championship for another season. The mid-table remains the mid-table, with Norwich not making it back up. Luton Town fought bravely despite going into administration and being docked 12 points, but now they're slipping into even deeper despair, joining Bristol and Blackburn in League One.
In the Premier League, normality is restored after Chelsea's title last season. The richest seven clubs form the top seven, while all of last season's promoted teams go straight back down into the Championship, a damning indictment of the violence inherent in the system! We'll have our work cut out if we don't want to join them next season.
Joe Hardman returns to the Premier League with another sizeable transfer budget and players accustomed to his system. On the other hand, it falls on him to bring the squad up to Premier League level, and find a way to make the tactic more incisive up front, while keeping it tight against the Premier League's attacking players. While many of our Championship opponents parked the bus and had to be broken down, back in the Prem, we can expect them to try and attack us. This also has its positive sides, as our own forwards may get their chances. But we'll need to improve the supply to them and make sure we take our chances.
2027/28 was the season Joe Hardman briefly entered the Premier League with Fulham, but was relegated. 28/29 was the season he returned there. 29/30 will be make or break: is Joe Hardman the genuine article? Is he a Premier League manager?
"
Reminds me of this for some reason (minus the kill part):
