Player Manager 5: A Sports Progression Fantasy by Ted Steel

Author:Ted Steel [Steel, Ted]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Podium Publishing
Published: 2025-02-25T00:00:00+00:00

Good work from Magnus to knock the ball out for a throw-in.

It goes long into the penalty area.

May and Taylor climb.

May wins it.

The ball bobbles around—Brown knocks it out of the penalty area.

Jack collects it. He’s got Spennymoor players all around him.

He turns away from one challenge, turns more, keeps turning.

A simple forward pass …

And Brown is away!

He hits it wide to Aff.

Aff sprints down the wing.

Great cross!

Hetherington was so close to it!

A stunning counterattack.

And so it went. Spennymoor tried to press my new signing, tried to deny him time and space. But he was far too good. He was CA 10 physically, and CA 100 between his ears. It was unreal watching him.

And it wasn’t just fancy footwork, neat and tidy passing. Twice he sprinted—yes, sprinted!—and launched into fierce tackles. In those moments his expression changed from one of boredom, indifference, to one of pure savagery. My ball! That’s my ball!

He turned the tide. We were starting to dominate—the possession stats shifted our way. We added three shots to every one from Moors. Our passing got slick and rhythmical.

Then, disaster.

A little hamstring tweak for Joe Anka. He self-reported early, so no more than a week out, but he’d been playing fantastically well. I had both Donny and Pascal on the bench. Half an hour to go. I liked the idea of using Pascal for the last ten minutes when the other team was as tired as they were going to get, but for thirty minutes plus injury time? Ryan Jack was shorter than average. With two short guys, Moors would loom over us at set pieces.

I can’t explain it, but I threw Pascal on. Maybe it was how great the pitch was. Maybe it was the way the match had been played in a good spirit and it seemed no one was going to try to break his legs.

There were the usual laughs as he ran onto the pitch. It did look like we’d sent a ball boy on by mistake.

And for five minutes, we were forced back. All our hard work clawing our way into a dominant position, gone.

Had I made a terrible mistake?

Five more minutes of scrapping and battling and fighting for territory and keeping it tight. A time of dread—every set piece seemed like a death sentence.

And then:

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