Championship Manager

Having been forced to use my laptop to access the internet due to the malacious worm that was downloaded into my desktop, I discovered an old copy of the football game Championship Manager 2 installed on it. Drawn partly out of nostalgia, I started a new game, amazed that CM2 could run on Windows XP at all. To give you an idea of how old the game is, it begins in the 1995-96 season with Blackburn Rovers as the reigning champions (they still had the old SaS partnership of Shearer and Sutton upfront). And Steve Bruce was still the centre back and captain of Manchester United. I'll be blown.

Of course, there is no challenge in taking United in the game and winning it all oh so easily. So I resolved to take a Division 3 team (the modern day equivalent of a League 2 team, in the good old days the Championship was called the 1st Division) and get it promoted all the way to the premiere league - in just 3 seasons. That would mean winning promotion consecutively from the bottom to the top.

It was a challenge that is far easier virtually than in real life (where it is more or less impossible). I decided on Wigan Athletic, partly because they are in the current Premiere League, so I can make history happen virtually, only a fair bit faster. My cause was not aided by the fact that the first two times I got things going, the game crashed midway through the first season due to data corruption. It was third time lucky that the problem seemed to stop.

As a write this, Wigan did make it to the Premiereship in a scant 3 seasons. Things got very hairy towards the end of Season 3 in attempting to win promotion out of Division One with the two automatic spots (and the title) literally going down to the wire. It didn't help that all my strikers decided to stop scoring. And I must shamefully admit to restarting the game a couple times out of sheer frustration when results didn't go my way!

In my first match in the virtual Premiere League, I ended up facing, of all teams, Manchester United at Old Trafford. I was absolutely shocked when my team actually pulled off a 4-2 win (switching to a 4-3-3 formation must have bamboozled the virtual Alex). I got hammered 1-7 by Leeds at home the next match though.

I'll continue sticking with this and I aim to play as many seasons as it takes such that the virtual game time coincides with our real world (i.e play the game until it is the 07-08 season in the game). Like any good manager I'm setting targets for the team. I want to win the title by then. That will be a vast challenge seeing that Wigan's stadium in the game only holds about 4,500 people and I only have around 3m pounds in the kitty from selling various players (my biggest purchase was less than 100k pounds). Still, never doubt my virtual football managing abilities, nor the bug in the game that causes it to clone amazing new foreign players at the close of each season!