CM99/00 Revisited: Fitba’s Coming Home – Part 3

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Welcome back to my Championship Manager 99/00 challenge with the Scotland national team. Last time round, I began to rebuild the team after our failure to qualify for Euro 2000 – and now it’s time to find out if that work has reaped its rewards.

I’m subtitling this article “2001: A Scotland Odyssey”. I don’t like to exaggerate, but if today’s story sees the Tartan Army successfully qualify for the 2002 World Cup, it would surely rival even Arthur C Clarke’s greatest epic fiction.

More likely, though, is that it’ll end in the sort of British ultra-violence you’d expect from another classic Stanley Kubrick film.

Continue reading “CM99/00 Revisited: Fitba’s Coming Home – Part 3”

CM99/00 Revisited: Fitba’s Coming Home – Part 2

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Welcome back to the second chapter of my new retro challenge – or “fàilte don dàrna caibideil den dùbhlan retro ùr agam”, as Scottish Gaelic speakers might say on BBC Alba. Sadly, I’ve just found out that BBC Alba isn’t a TV channel dedicated to the actress Jessica Alba, so you’ll have to put up with seeing Don Hutchison’s pretty face instead.

In this challenge, I’m managing the Scotland national team on Championship Manager 99/00. I’m hoping to erase 20 years of hurt by leading the Tartan Army to success – which, in their case, would be getting out of the group at a major tournament.

In Part 1, I took the reins for the closing stages of the Euro 2000 qualifiers. Today, we’ll be entering the new year, where you’ll find no millennium bugs – except the one that turns Championship Manager goalkeepers into supermen, perhaps.

Continue reading “CM99/00 Revisited: Fitba’s Coming Home – Part 2”

CM99/00 Revisited: Fitba’s Coming Home – Part 1

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Hello, folks, and welcome to a new Fuller FM story. It’s been a while since I last wrote about Championship Manager 99/00, so I’ve now started another challenge to mark the game’s 20th anniversary.

After my earlier exploits with Bayer Leverkusen, I’ve gone international this time around. As you know, Euro 2020 should have been starting this evening. Then you-know-what happened, and it was pushed back by 12 months. With no international tournaments to occupy us doing the summer, I thought I’d do my bit to fill the void.

Although I’m from England, the first national team I ever managed on Championship Manager was actually Scotland. I got the job early in my first proper career, but my tenure ended early as the Tartan Army were knocked out of Euro 2000 after two group stage defeats. (I was about 9 at the time, to be fair.)

Two decades on, it’s time to give the Scots another shot at glory Continue reading “CM99/00 Revisited: Fitba’s Coming Home – Part 1”