5.5. Five Years Later
Contents: April Fools; the Rabona; Gold or Silva; a late surge; Attempted Thievery and the end of our 5th Season as CD Tenerife Manager 👴🏻
🎵 Suggested Tune: Five Years – David Bowie (Acoustic Version) 🎵
So here we are, after almost 5 FM years which have included promotion to La Liga, a Copa Del Rey Final, Two League Runner-Up finishes, a Europa League Final and 25 blog posts, we approach the end of our fifth season as Manager of CD Tenerife during which we have played close to 250 games spending over €250m on players along the way.
Status Update
Last we heard, Los Chicharreros aka CD Tenerife were sitting in 4th place in La Liga level on points with Real Madrid and one point behind Barcelona who occupy 2nd place – both of those teams have made a rapid ascent up the table after disappointing starts and are putting serious pressure on our Champions League aspirations! Atletico Madrid are 9 points clear at the top of the league and look like they will be strong enough to win the title for the first time in 10 years making them the first team to take the trophy away from Real and Barca since then. Can Tenerife make a late push for an automatic Champions League place?
Atletico Madrid vs CD Tenerife – 1st April 2023
Teams
A. Madrid: Rulli, N. Semedo, S. Savic, D. Godin, Y. Gerhardt, Saul, R. Sanches, C. Pavon, Koke (c), A. Correa, A. Griezmann
Tenerife: S. Rossbach, F. Norrestrand, Y. Bisseck (c), R. Semedo, L. Klostermann, Xadas, T. Delaney, L. Tousart, J. Sancho, M. Cuisance, A. Idah
14 Mins….THE ATLETICO FANS ARE SILENCED!!! Cuisance plays the ball to Xadas who whips a dangerous ball across the Madrid penalty area, and it’s Jadon Sancho who arrives at the back post to smash it in the back of the net! Absolute scenes in the away end of Metropolitano de Madrid.
24 Mins….ABSOLUTE GENIUS!! Xadas works his way in to the box and (perhaps unnecessarily) does a cheeky rabona flick which falls beautifully into the path of Thomas Delaney who makes no mistake to make it 2-0 to Tenerife!! Los Chicharreros fans are ecstatic!!
Now I know what you’re thinking….FM is too easy; formation/tactic must be overpowered; Xadas is an FM ringer; at this point I am thinking the same – have we come too far in too short a period of time and therefore has the current FM universe we are living in become too unrealistic with CD Tenerife beating league leaders Atletico Madrid 2-0 away from home?
I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again – YOU CAN NOT BE SERIOUS! (eternally grateful John McEnroe). Granted we conceded just before half time and it was 2-1 at the break, however on comes little known (for me anyway) Israeli Forward Manor Solomon who equalises on 74 minutes and then snatches a 91st minute winner for Los Colchoneros…if the Home fans were silent before, safe to say the whole place erupted as they march towards their 11th ever La Liga title, leaving us as the red-faced April Fools as we head back to the island with our tails between our legs. There will be no day off tomorrow!!
Choc-a-Bloc
I’ve vowed to stop giving out sh*t about FIFA due to several rants in my previous posts – however once again the aftermath of the 2022 Winter World Cup in Qatar means we have to squash 8 games in to 4 weeks during the month of April. A trip to Milan following our disappointment in Madrid brings a 3-1 drubbing at the hands of our old nemesis AC Milan who as we know beat us in last year’s Europa Cup final – sadly we can only muster up a 1-1 draw at home which means our European adventure quickly comes to an end at the Quarter final stages. Thankfully this combined with an absolute bollocking during a team meeting seems to inspire the lads, as we proceed to win back to back league games – there are also goals for Adam Idah and Dejan Joveljic who we had highlighted in my last post due to a lack of goals and quality finishing – has our new training approach actually worked?!! 😲 (see previous post for details on this).
Gold or Silva
Amidst all of this fixture chaos, there’s a rap on the door and our trusty Assistant Manager Inigo Idiakez bursts in the door with Head Physio Gary Lewin being dragged in behind him…I’m bracing myself for terrible news, like Xadas has broken his ankle trying a double rabona or Jadon Sancho has hurt his back carrying England (😆), however the glint in Inigo’s eye tell me something positive is afoot….
Needless to say my reaction was this:
We gave him a run with the u23s and then brought him on as a sub in the Deportivo game, and even though he is only at around 80% match fitness there’s no time to waste in getting him back in the team as Real Madrid and Barcelona continue try to force us out of the Top 3 – he starts against Celta Vigo in the league away from home, and the kid obviously has a lot of lost ground to make up as this happens:
Despite the game finishing in a draw, Silva plays 70 minutes unscathed after scoring a brace and there’s a storm brewing in Tenerife as we prepare for our last 5 fixtures. Somehow our next game is the reverse leg of the Celta Vigo fixture which I’ve not seen before (we will blame FIFA again because why the f*ck wouldn’t we?) – and it’s complete deja vu as the boy Silva again bags a brace in a 4-1 win in front of our own fans. Talk about back with a bang! This is followed up with a well-earned 2-1 win over Bilbao who dropped out of the running a while back, thankfully so as both Barcelona and Real Madrid continue to keep winning and its now a three-horse race for second place in La Liga.
a Late Surge ⚡
Three games to seal our fate. The draw against Vigo allows Barcelona to go 2 points clear in 2nd place and 4 points ahead of us, therefore it’s between ourselves and Real Madrid to seal third position which would be a drop from our Runners-Up position last year however overall, a pretty good finish for this young Tenerife side after five years under Manager MaddFM.
Fortune might favour the bold as we have the easier run in on paper with two home games to play, while they will travel to the Nou Camp hopefully knowing that anything but victory will see them finish outside the top 3 for the first time since the 2003/2004 season (assuming we win all our games!)
Tenerife fixtures (left) vs Real Madrid fixtures (right)
Round 1 🥊
No change…
Round 2 🥊🥊
Anything we can do they can do better…..
Round 3 🥊🥊🥊
F*CKING GET IN!!!!!!!!!
FORCA BARCELONA!!!! He might be on his way to Bayern on loan in real life however it’s Philippe Coutinho who has sealed third place for us by scoring the winning goal against Real Madrid, our 3-1 win over Villareal means that we finish in 3rd position in La Liga and therefore have successfully dethroned Real Madrid and condemned them to 4th place as hoped.
A cracking end to our 5th season at Tenerife and although we haven’t challenged for the title as planned, our young team (average age 24) has shown bags of character and potential especially with the injuries picked up – hopefully we can make a few signings during the summer and take this team to the next level, FM20 is still a long way off so Roy De Los Rovers will continue until we either lift the title or until the beta drops!!!
🚨 Intruder Alert 🚨
Just as we are preparing to depart for the summer break, we receive not one but two unwanted approaches from a certain oil-rich French club – first PSG attempt to poach Mickael Cuisance who only joined at the start of this season and contributed 4 goals and 7 assists during the campaign, and after being politely told to go f*ck themselves they then return with a measly €53 million bid for Jadon Sancho who himself scored 5 goals and provided 6 assists despite having several injuries which meant he only played 26 league games.
Needless to say we tell Manager Joachim Low to get the hell off our island and go back to what we all know he does best:
And that’s it for Season 5! Since taking over back in January (IRL) we have guided the club from the depths of Spanish Secunda Division (SD2) right up towards the summit of Spanish football to do battle with the big boys in Barcelona and the two Madrids. My next post will review our progress against our original save objectives – if you’ve not seen these, feel free to go back in time to the start of this save where we kicked of this save 25 posts back!! We will also do another scouting feature this time looking at how we go about searching for a Centre Half after previously posting about Scouting a Striker in Football Manager. As always thanks for reading – thoughts, comments and retweets are appreciated and don’t forget to hit the Follow button below to stay tuned for more FM blog updates 🤘. Cheers & thanks, MaddFM aka Paul.
