Another Goal Conceded
Part 27 | Yanbian FC | 延边足球俱乐部 | 연변축구 | FM23 Hardcore Mode | Football Manager 2023
Victory
We won another one, this time against Liaoning FC in Shenyang.
It was a cold evening at Tiexi Stadium. We played somewhat mediocre, once again scoring 3 goals early in the 1st half and then letting our feet off the gas in the 2nd.
Liaoning FC are in 4th place in the league, and I was worried that they might come back to make life difficult for us. A striker named Wang Zhiyu scored a goal for Liaoning in the 84th minute, and I started to wonder if we might drop points for the first time this season.
We were able to see it out until the end, though.
Kim Yong-Il continued to make a good argument for staying in the team, scoring 2 goals and adding an assist in this match. If he keeps playing like this, we’ll keep him around. However, he hasn’t been as consistent as he could, which has me concerned.
December
We’re in December already. We’ve only got a few games before the January transfers come in. We should also be clinching our ticket to the 2nd tier before too long.
We remain in excellent financial shape, which is not really news, of course. Chairman Guo would dump money into the club if things started to go wrong anyway.
It won’t surprise you to know that we have the best attack in the Second Division North. It might surprise you to know that we are scoring 5.61 goals per game, that our non-penalty expected goals per game is 3.64, that we’re getting over 30 shots per game, and that we’ve complete over 25% of our crosses. This offense has been absolutely stellar.
But I still want to improve. We should be better than this.
Chairman Guo was actually very impressed with that 3-1 win against Liaoning FC on the road. I suppose he considers them to be our rival. I honestly don’t think we have a real rival in the entire country, but that’s just my opinion.
The fans also seem to be warming up to me, though they are a bit confused by all the rotation we have to do. We’re going down to one match a week from here on out, which means that the crazy rotation issues will probably subside.
Player Issues
Much to Charlotte’s chagrin, Lee Jin-Yong has asked to take a month off to return to South Korea and collect his thoughts.
Lee Jin-Yong is clearly a star on this team, but has had difficulties settling in. Being injured with those broken ribs didn’t help things, of course. We want to do what we can to keep him happy, since he’s pretty clearly one to hold onto for the long term.
Huang Jianwei, a right back from Yanji who we barely ever play, has gone public with playing time concerns. This one kind of caught me off guard, but we’ll figure out a way to handle it.
We’ve only played him in 5 games so far this season, and he’s been less than spectacular in each of those appearances. I went to the trouble of offering him out to other clubs, but, unsurprisingly, nobody seems interested. He might find himself rotting on the under-21 roster, awaiting the end of his contract.
And, in the only bit of good news I’ve seen over the past month, Huang Bowen finally dropped his playing time concerns. That’s excellent news. We want to build this team around Huang Bowen.
Wuxi
We’ve completed the first round of the season, and are back to Wuxi Wuguo again. We’re playing them in Yanji this time around.
We should be able to win this one easily, though our recent form does have me concerned. It feels like ages since we last scored a second half goal, for example.