Soccer Supremo - A Sports Progression Fantasy

- Yeah, pretty good deal all round. We signed Lee for free after Tranmere let him go. They were underrating him and I thought he could do a job for us. He’s our best central midfielder but we needed the money, so...

- I thought you didn’t need to sell.

- After this set of deals, we don’t. Remember I said we needed to finish the training ground? We had bids for three players which came to exactly the amount needed to do the last of the essential work. To me, developing players is the holy grail. Everything else we want to achieve starts from there, and if training is a bottleneck then it actually doesn’t matter if players have room to grow because they’ll never get there. We have great coaches and I give players the opportunities they need to improve, so right now it’s all about the facilities.

- But you lost your best central midfielder. That sounds far from ideal.

- Well, yes, you’re right. In the short term. And it was a pain in the arse on Monday when two former Chester players lined up against us... and showed us why we should have kept them. Lee played great and another former Seal, Wes Hayward, savaged us. One-nil defeat. We rested some of our key players because we had a vital cup match two days later - the schedule is bonkers - but fair play to Crawley, they deserved that win. We don’t have a lot of matches where we don’t score. It always bothers me when I see a zero next to our name at full time.

- This isn’t a sports show, it’s a finance show, so we try not to discuss the actual sport too much but I watched the highlights of that match and yes it was a problem that Hayward was too hot for your defenders to handle but you still created about eight gilt-edged chances. The Australian striker, in particular, had a shocker.

- Dazza? I mean, he had some half-chances but I didn’t watch that game and think, holy shit what’s he doing? He played well and those chances weren’t as easy as they looked. Except the first one. That was a stinker. [They both laugh.] That happens, right, but it got in Dazza’s head. He’s 21. He wants to, you know, be amazing all the time. What we’ve got is Colin Beckton, who’s 34 and has been around the block and scored hundreds of goals. Colin’s got that mentality of you take the shot and whether it goes in or not you sort of set that aside and keep your focus on the next action. Technique, process, repeat, ice-cold. You can’t ruffle his feathers, things don’t bother him. He told me he worked on it for years and years but it finally clicked when he was about 27. We hope Dazza gets there quicker but if he doesn’t, so what? He’s doing his job. There were other players who missed easier chances in that match but for narrative reasons everyone focused on Darren.

- Narrative reasons?

- It’s the psychology of a match. You can’t help but tell yourself a story. A player misses one, then another, and you think ah! He’s overcompensating. Most of the time, the layman tells himself a story that’s dead wrong. This time, yeah what people were thinking happened was exactly what happened. A stopped clock is right twice a day. [Max laughs.] Okay so losing to Crawley was pretty abysmal, especially because TJ was insufferable about it.

- TJ is the manager of Crawley?

- Yeah. When we played earlier in the season I gave him a bit of a pep talk and he gave it all back to me plus ten percent. Horrible, horrible man.

- He’s a mate, is he?

- Yeah. [They both laugh.] We’re still four points clear at the top of the table and we won the cup match. Chesterfield 2-1 away in the Vans Trophy. We’re three games from Wembley and Chester have never been to Wembley. If I had to pick one match to win and one to lose, I’d have chosen to do it the way we did. Still frustrating but we’ll manage.

- The second of the three transfers I’ve got written down - I’ve just realised you said four and that’s got me worried - is Josh Owens.

- We got Josh from the Exit Trials. For listeners who have never heard of that, it’s a sad fact that 99% of young lads who join Premier League academies get released before they turn 18.

- Shameful.