Stephen >>
domingo marzo 24 - 21:12 Yes, that's cheating's Andrew Hundley, alright. A Seaburn Beach legend! First up, I have to come clean and say that I was not the first to do this. The move was inspired by another manager, @Lied. I just saw an opportunity to do it with a player who had the 'dirty' trait.
As you probably would expect, there are pros and cons with doing this. When he was born, he was just an 'ordinary' YC10 created at 14y51w with one staff member. This is not particularly young for a YC10 and he would have had an uneventful career if I'd just trained him in scoring and maybe added a bit of duelling.
'Dirty' is not a trait that I'm particularly fond of. While it does cause opposition players to collect more yellow and red cards, it doesn't cause those same players to foul more. You have to manufacture that with a ton of duelling. I thought I would experiment by going 'all-in' with duelling.
I had hoped that he would win more fouls than he did, but I think with most defenders having 'correct' his opportunities were limited. He did win some crucial penalties and freekicks in his time, but less than I'd hoped for. He did however get far fewer yellow cards for diving than I'd expected.
His stats aren't that great, but he often played only 45 minutes for me as I had to rotate my squad. I think if he'd played the full 90, he would have scored about a goal every other game. What I can't say is how much his duelling helped the other striker score. I suspect it helped, but by how much? I will probably find out this season now that he is a staff member...
His best moments were in Europe. He often seemed to score there, and often crucial goals.
Never had any problems with squad selection but I think you're right. He probably would have been classed as a 'weak' player. I think if you had a squad where you were trying to get lots of youngsters first team experience, then this would have been a problem.
I wouldn't rule out doing something like this again in future, but there are some downsides:
- Firstly, the player will never play for the NT as he can never make it onto the automatically generated shortlist. That was fine for Hundley as he was never going to be good enough for England as a 'normal' player so I wasn't losing out. However, a more special player would have missed out on this.
- Secondly, sell-on values are affected. His market value was a lot weaker than it ought to have been. I never tried to sell him - I had a few enquiries for him over his last seven or eight seasons - but I expect I would have been disappointed.
I hope this is helpful, though I appreciate that this turned into a massively long post!