If SI have appreciated the importance of this, most fundamental part of the game, they've not always shown it. Accepting a devastating play-off final loss is just that much harder when you fear the competition has been compromised. Football Manager is as compelling as it is because it mirrors real-life.

If I won a game thanks to two right-back assists, or lost one thanks to my left-back suddenly losing interest in intercepting a pass, the experience felt cheapened, or unfair. Small flaws that became magnified over time, perhaps, but ones that could cause maddening frustration.

You can now scan your face into the game, with sometimes perturbing results. I'd regularly see a fullback just suddenly slow down when chasing a long through ball, leaving a forward to nip in for an easy one-on-one. But I hadn't.Īt the other end of the pitch, my defenders seemed to be outpaced too often by opposition attackers, even when the stats suggested no mismatch in speed. It'd be fine if I had set up the team to play this way, or if I kept stumbling across the Vanarama South's answer to Cafu. Across dozens of seasons my right-back, invariably, was the best player on the team, delivering assist after assist - usually crosses tapped in at the far post by my left winger. There were, however, enough wrinkles in the match engine to occasionally tarnish the experience.

Hundreds of hours with dozens of memorable highlights, from snatching an Algerian wonderkid from under the noses of Valencia playing as League One Chelmsford City, to winning promotion to the Football League as Weston-super-Mare thanks to a last-minute 30-yard volley. Across three long career saves I invested as much, if not more time in this iteration as any of its predecessors since my student days.

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