The year is now 2024 and we have just finished the first half of our second season in the Polish First Division. We set the goal before the season to gain promotion to the Ekstraklasa (the highest division in Polish football) but it has been a bumpy ride. You can find earlier parts of our journey here: https://tomikorkeamaki.wixsite.com/impactsub
Jedźmy!
Mistakes are the portals of discovery
- James Joyce
The last time we checked our journey so far, we had just finished a heartbreak of a season as we were just one win away from promotion. Now we had all the reasons to be optimistic about gaining a promotion.
Summer didn´t go as great as we would have liked. We knew that one of the key positions to upgrade was our defence after we had lost promising youngster Kacper Żarejko on a free transfer to division rivals Ruch. His shoes were difficult to fulfil and are still a bit of a work in progress but for central defence, we were able to snap up young Ukrainian defender Yegor Matsenko. Hopefully, our fan base is ready to accept him to the squad as he has some history with our fierce local rival Legia Warsaw as well.
Another Ukrainian also arrived as we continued our strategy of strengthening our midfield with the arrival of Kyrylo Voloshyn. Young midfield arrived first as a loanee from Warta Poznan but after clashing with Warta's manager about his playing time, we signed him for £73k.
It´s never an easy task to be in the lower division and have somebody from the top division ask for your players. At some point, I think we had at least three unhappy players because I blocked their transfer to a higher-reputation club. To make things even worse is to have a contract with a player with a low minimum release clause that you can´t change when you try to negotiate a new contract.
This happened with our promising shadow striker Chilohem Onuoah. Several clubs came asking for his service with low transfer fees and eventually Piast Gliwice matched the release clause that was shamefully low at £85k. The club was willing to loan him back for the remainder of the season which was a no-brainer to accept as we need his talents at the club. Absolutely gutted to lose him like this. A huge error on my part (again).
We started the season well with a comeback win over Wisla Pulawy and our main guy Jan Los continued from the point where he finished last season and scored vital two goals to secure a great comeback win. At this point, I thought that he was on a 68-goal-per-season pace. Little did I know as two games later he was injured and suffered a major injury that kept him sidelined for four months.
Injuries kept piling in. Next, we lost Onuoah to injury and Abba Bichi, now having his chance with Los injured, also got injured. For the first two months, I think we played with different starting line-ups in every game and we just could create a form. The best game to describe the difficult situation was our FA Cup game against Sliask II, in which we lost on penalties and were knocked out of the cup in the first round again.
We didn´t change anything in the tactic, though we tried out an inverted wing-back on the left side. Maybe it was the voices in my head but we made a promise to trust the tactic and not make any changes. We could make an argument that the reason for our uneven form is injuries to key players but the main reason was sitting behind the laptop. Before entering the last month of the season before the winter break, I noticed that I had made the same mistakes I have done also in previous versions of FM.
The reason was having too big of a squad to handle. At some point, I think we had at least over 30 guys in the first-team squad. We rotated the squad too much and we never ended up having a regular starting line-up. Injuries played their part in the reasoning to rotate the squad as much as we did but it wasn´t the whole story.
This has been a problem for me when having a long-term save and especially entering the season after promotion. I just tried too much to have as much cover for every position as possible and just signed almost anybody from the free transfer market as a cover. The results were to be seen after we made some cuts to the first-team squad and were able to field our regular starting XI.
There was an old hero rising to the occasion as others were falling to the injury list. Our prolific veteran striker Michał Fidziukiewicz came knocking on my door after being dropped to a minimal role, asking to be given a chance to have more playing time and the time was right. He stepped up for Jan Los and has scored 10 goals in 16 games. Last season Fidziukiewicz didn´t have a big role in our system. He was our saviour hiding in plain sight. If I said that I loved him in Liga II, now I adore him.
On the deadline day of the transfer window, we also continued one of our goals for the save to sign Nigerian players and we were able to sign a couple of interesting players. One of them was a promising young goalkeeper Brian Okonkwo. He arrived on a free transfer after playing for Arsenal. We loaned him back to England to Nuneaton Boro to gain match experience.
Another Nigerian player we signed was Idris Kabiru. A former Olympique Marseille player also arrived on a free transfer. He had a rough start for his Polonia career as he was also one of the players in the long line of injured players but he scored a beautiful hat trick against Wisla Pulawy in the final game of the first half of the season. He could become a special player for us on this journey.
With so much misfortune in the first half of the season, it feels almost like a miracle that we currently sit in the second position in the First Division. Also, it feels like we don´t deserve to be in this position. Apart from our form in the final six games of the first half of the season and being unbeaten for two months, I feel like we have been a mediocre side. Hopefully, the return of our key players can push us to have a strong finish to the season and have our dreams of promotion to be fulfilled.
LKS Lodz has been unbelievable and I don´t think that they will drop so many points that we would have a chance to be crowned as champions of the First Division. We still have a huge job ahead of us to at least be in the promotions playoffs but we are confident. We have to set our target high and that is to gain automatic promotion and that would require finishing at least in the 2nd place.
I´ve heard the term "Depth is key" on many occasions when talking about team sports but I have made it a problem for the sides that I have managed. Now I see that and I have to try to change my way of managing this team to have success. Mistakes truly are portal discoveries.
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