An open letter to my game collection

Dear pile of games on my living room table,

As I look at you, stacked up all pretty with your beautiful box art, its saddens me to think how little time I get to spend with you now. Since I was a little boy you have been one of my biggest passions; from the moment mum first brought home that NES and I fired up Super Mario Bros, I fell hopelessly for you.

Since then we've had a beautiful relationship, I've watched you grow through generations, from NES to SNES, to Playstation 2 to N64 to Gamecube and beyond. Even when I couldn't afford you, I'd throw longing glances at you through game shop windows, game magazines and the internet. Early this year I rejoiced when I became a gamer again with the purchase of a PS3. My list of games to play is long, and I set to it with gusto.

Whole days were spent with you, playing FIFA, and God of War III, and Burnout Paradise. I picked up gems like Red Dead Redemption and Arkham Asylum second hand for bargain prices, and built up a wonderfully genre-spanning collection.

Then one day LIFE happened. Work got real, social life intervened, and things changed. Now I barely have time for you, I come in at the end of the day, tired and unable to dedicate myself to you like I used to. If I'm lucky I can snatch half an hour with you if I get home early enough. I ask myself, when did I grow up? 

I made a promise to myself not to buy any more games until I complete the ones I have, and so I've been watching triple A releases pass me by. SSX, FIFA 13, Need For Speed, and more have gone by while I try to complete the God of War Trilogy, Red Dead Redemption, Arkham City and Borderlands 2 half an hour at a time. 

That's the irony of it all; now I can afford you, I have no time for you. If I want to eat, if I want to do things like buy more of you, this is the way it has to be and I guess I'll just have to keep sneaking time with you when I can. Whatever happens though, know that I love you.

Jude

P.S. Don't even get me started on trying to find time to play Football Manager

The Derby of Italy

Tonight possibly the biggest game in the entire Serie A calendar takes place as Juventus and Inter go head to head in the Derby d'Italia.  Although both teams have a strong rivalry with their city cousins, Torino and AC Milan, there is no doubt that Juve and Inter are each other's bitterest rivals. 

The match gained its grand name in 1967, when Inter were the Italian team with the most international titles, and Juve had the most league wins. These two teams are also the first and second most supported in Italy. In addition, before the Calciopoli scandal in 2006 when Juventus were demoted, both teams were the only ones in Italy never to have been relegated from Serie A. This has added to the rivalry even more, with Juventus outraged at the awarding of the 2005/06 Scudetto to Inter after it was stripped from them.

Even without the historical rivalry, tonight's match is highly important, as it is a top of the table clash between a seemingly unstoppable Juventus team, and an Inter team that has hit an excellent run of form and emerged as Juve's most likely title contenders. While Juve are on an unbeaten run which now stands at 49 matches, Inter have also begun rolling and have won eight straight matches in all competitions. Inter are four points behind Juve in second place, and are now looking like the only realistic challengers with a chance of stopping the Juventus juggernaut claiming another league title.

After a summer of big changes and player departures, Inter were not expected to be in this position, and did have a slow start to the season. Since a 2-0 loss to Siena in September however, they have been surprising everyone, with a new-found strength showing in their eight match winning streak. Credit for Inter's play goes to Andrea Stramaccioni, the young former youth team coach who took over as manager towards the end of last season. Stramaccioni has been managing to get the best out of his players, and switching to a three man defence after the Siena match has seemed to suit the team. Players like Esteban Cambiasso, defender Juan Jesus, Diego Milito, and Antonio Cassano are also in great form. Cassano, a boyhood Inter fan, has flourished since moving from AC Milan in the summer, and has five goals and several assists already.

Juventus are a formidable side, the only criticism that possibly be leveled at them is a lack of a 20 goal a season striker. This hasn't seemed to affect them too much though; along with Roma they are the joint top scorers in the league with 22 in 10 games, with goals coming from all over the team. Players like Andrea Pirlo, Arturo Vidal, and even Paul Pogba have been chipping in with goals, relieving the pressure from their strikers. Definitely the strongest side in Italy at the moment, and with home advantage, Juve will be Inter's biggest challenge so far.

Both these teams will come into this Derby d'Italia relishing the chance to break each other's streaks, and inflict a potentially morale-destroying loss. With two teams with such a fiery history now fighting for the championship, although this match will probably not be decisive this early in the season, it should be a hugely interesting spectacle.

Best Moments in Football Manager

Football Manager is one of the biggest selling games around. Since it began life as Championship Manager back in 1992 the series has sold over 7 million copies, won several awards and been named in at least 35 divorce cases. A game that started out as a glorified spreadsheet with flashing commentary, and that even today still sees the player spending much of their time looking at screens filled with numbers; many people wonder what the attraction is and how it can steal so many hours of time from seemingly normal people. With this in mind, and with the release of Football Manager 2013 in a couple of weeks, here are some of the best moments that keep me coming back every year.

1. Managing the club you support
One obvious reason to buy the game every year is the updated squad lists for each team. The game usually doesn't comes out before at least October, giving the developers time to see what moves are made in the summer transfer window and update the squads. It also means they can see how players and teams perform at the start of the season and adjust their stats accordingly. Knowing this, as soon as I've installed and loaded the game for the first time, I can't do anything other than start a save with my team, to see how good (or otherwise) the squad is, and how far I can take them.

Top tip. For added realism, turn off transfer budgets in the first window so that no team can buy players before January and squads stay similar to real life.

2. Watching your star striker score 20+ goals a season
I'll take goals wherever I can get them; if all members of my squad can chip in with a few then I'm happy. However, there are few better feelings than watching your strikers scoring prolifically. At the moment I'm playing a save as Napoli, and Edinson Cavani is riding high at the top of the league scoring charts. It is truly a joy watching him put away chances, grabbing hat-tricks, and scoring important goals that pull out results for the team.

3. Finding out about the stars of the future before anyone else
I've been playing Football Manager since about 1999 and the amount of players I heard about before they make it in real life is ridiculous. Having scouts find players like Carlos Tevez, Sergio Aguero, Arturo Vidal, Hatem Ben Arfa, Gonzalo Higuain, Eden Hazard, the list goes on. Signing them as youngsters, watching them develop into stars in the game, and then seeing the same thing happen in real life is a nice feeling, and you feel like you know a player a little bit when you see them in real life for the first time.

4. Watching a youth player you've trained become world-class
Its great signing big stars, bringing in a marquee players that excite the fans and boost shirt sales. Even better though, is bringing youth players through. Watching a player you've developed carefully from the age of 17 or 18, over several seasons turn into one of the best and most valuable players in the game is time well spent.

5. It never has to end
Won everything there is with your team? Made it into the manager's hall of fame? Do it again with a different team. Manage a big team and make them the best in the world, or bring a small team up from the lower leagues, or manage an international team to the World Cup. One of the absolute best moments in the game is winning everything with a team, doing a Jose Mourinho and resigning, ready to move onto a new team, where it all begins again...

So those are my best moments in Football Manager. Agree? Disagree? Maybe I've missed something out? FM fans let me know.

A hard season ahead for Internazionale?

I viewed the result of Inter's match with Siena yesterday with a feeling of resignation. A 2-0 loss at home at San Siro to a team Inter would normally expect to beat, with all due respect to Siena, doesn't signal a great season ahead. After an extremely poor last season, where we scraped into 6^th place, there were high hopes for a return to winning ways. However, results so far haven't been great.

Way back at the start of August, things looked rosy with a 3-0 win away to Hajduk Split in the Europa League 3^rd Qualifying Round first leg, but that was followed up with a 2-0 loss at home in the second leg. Two more promising wins followed away to FC Vaslui and Pescara, but things have seemingly gone downhill since then. This month has seen a 3-1 loss at home to Roma, and although we won 2-0 at Torino in the next match, this was followed with a scraped 2-2 draw with Rubin Kazan and Sunday's 2-0 loss to Siena, both at San Siro.


During the summer the notoriously poor pitch was relaid at San Siro, in an effort to improve the playing surface. Some in Italy have said that this has caused a curse on the stadium, as both Inter and AC are yet to win a single game there in all competitions. I'm not so superstitious though, as I can understand that a period of rebuilding is happening with several former leaders of our team such as Maicon, Lucio, and Julio Cesar having left, and several young players now stepping up to try and fill their shoes; a few bumps in the road are to be expected.

On paper the team put out against Siena looked relatively strong: Samir Handanovic, a good goalkeeper who replaced Julio Cesar. Nagatomo, Rannochia, Juan, and Alvaro Pereira in defence, Cambiasso, Gargano, Guarin and Wesley Sneijder in midfield behind Diego Milito and Antonio Cassano. Nagatomo is a hard-working fullback who likes to get forward, and who scored the last minute equaliser against Rubin. Rannochia and Juan are young centrebacks with a lot of promise, who until yesterday's game were receiving praise as a centreback pairing. The midfield seems solid, with the ever-reliable Esteban Cambiasso, Walter Gargano, a tough midfielder, and Guarin supporting Wesley Sneijder and allowing him to go create for two top strikers, Diego Milito and Antonio Cassano. The match was also notable for being the first time 39 year old Javier Zanetti, or Captain Fantastic as I like to call him, was rested since December 2008.

Despite the strong team, we were caught on the break twice, with Siena scoring two counter attacks in what was an exciting and pretty open match. I was most disappointed about how disorganised the defence was for the goals, with our defenders seemingly panicking as the Siena players ran at them. Again, these players haven't played together many times, and they are young, so hopefully this will improve as the season goes on.

Inter have the chance to bounce back away at Chievo on Wednesday and despite how much they frustrate me sometimes, I'll be supporting them as usual. I remember the 90s and early 2000s, with the long period of failing to win the league, and especially the gut-wrenching Sunday afternoon in 2002 where we lost the Scudetto to Juventus on the last day of the season with a 4-2 loss to Lazio. Since 2004 it's been better days, with league wins, and the treble-winning season of 2010 where we won the Champions League again after 45 years, on my birthday. After all that success I can handle a couple of less than perfect seasons. Forza Inter.

Does football need a salary cap?

The Guardian's website reported last Thursday that the Premier League is thinking about trying to put a salary cap into place before the money from the next televison deals for 2013-2016 comes in. Footballer wages have been climbing for years, and led to a lot of discussion about whether players deserve so much money for kicking a ball on a field. As football, and the Premier League continue to expand and with TV deals getting bigger, it seems the trend will be for wages to get even higher in the future if left unchecked. With this in mind, I think a salary cap has got to be seen as a good idea.

Salary caps are used pretty successfully in North American sports, including Major League Soccer, and in rugby in England, France and Australia, with teams having a maximum amount they are allowed to pay out for player contracts each season. In 2011, the NFL salary cap was $120 million, while the NBA's 2010-11 cap was $58 million. Caps are agreed before each season, and take into account team revenues, so the cap is at a reasonable level for every team and it's level of income for that year.

Benefits of a salary cap are that, in theory, it prevents rich teams from signing a large number of highly-paid stars and dominating because they perhaps have a wealthy owner. It should also level the playing field so that leagues stay competitive, and you don't have the same teams winning everything every year. European football could probably benefit from being more competitive, with most of the top leagues now being won by the same teams that spend the most each season. The second main benefit of a salary cap is to guard against teams signing high contracts to try to gain success, then ending up with financial problems down the line; aka Leeds United syndrome. Because a cap has already been worked out based on the team's income, it can't live beyond its means and so should be relatively protected financially.

The drawbacks to bringing in a salary cap seem to mostly centre around how to go about implementing it. For the Premier League to be able to bring one in, 14 out of the 20 teams would have to agree, and as the Guardian article mentions, the teams have not seemed too interested so far. Another drawback is whether there would be any player related problems. In 2011 the NBA experienced a lockout where the start of the season was delayed from November 1 to December 25 because of a disagreement between owners and players about the salary cap. Could we see a similar thing in football?

The next drawback is deciding how salaries should be capped. Should teams have a total amount they have to be under with their entire squad like the NFL and NBA, should they have a maximum amount they can give a player, £180,000 a week for example, or should they be restricted to spending a percentage of their turnover from the previous few seasons?

The final potential drawback I can see is whether a salary cap would need to be applied by every league in Europe at once to be effective. Like governments always warn when asked to tax high earners more, there could be an exodus from England and the Premier League to other leagues without salary caps. However, even if European leagues managed to get together and agree a cap we could see players following Didier Drogba and Samuel Eto'o to places like China and Russia on huge contracts, or anywhere teams didn't have to worry about a cap. I could argue though that this could be a good thing, with talented footballers bringing up the levels of developing leagues, and adding another factor that could increase competition.

All in all, a salary cap could bring seismic changes to football, changing the game for the better in my opinion. In the NFL, the New Orleans Saints went from finishing their 2008 season with a record of 8 wins and 8 losses, not even making the playoffs, to winning the Superbowl in 2009. That sort of unpredictability would make football even more exciting, and I think a salary cap could help do it. It seems as if a cap would be extremely hard to bring in, with a lot of parties in football possibly not seeing it in their interest, but I think it would do the game a world of good.

Serie A Returns

Calcio lovers rejoice, Serie A is back today! The Italian league usually starts after most of the other big European leagues have kicked off, which is quite annoying for those of us eager to get underway. However, it always feels like the football season has started properly once Serie A is off and running.

This term Serie A feels quite strange. Firstly there's the matchfixing scandal that has been running all summer, with a large amount of players and teams charged and punished. These charges have led to points deductions, player bans, and the strange sight of champions Juventus having their coach Antonio Conte suspended for pretty much the whole of this season, although bizarrely he will be training the team on a day to day basis, he just won't be allowed to sit on the bench or give instructions during matches. For that a member of his coaching staff, Massimo Carrera, is standing in.

The second reason Serie A feels strange this season is because of the global economic situation. A lack of money has meant that there have been no big transfer signings by Italian clubs, with many having to sell their stars, the best example being Milan with Ibrahimovic and Thiago Silva. Italian clubs have been forced to make signings on the cheap, mostly using loans and co-ownership agreements. Milan fans expecting a big name to replace Ibrahimovic have so far had to make do only with Giampaolo Pazzini, gained by swapping Antonio Cassano and 7m with Inter, although Kaka has been linked with a return all summer. This transfer drought means that many clubs will start with no recognised world class players, a shocking development for a league that used to be graced with the best players in the world.

This financial situation has contributed to make this look like what will be the most open and unpredictable season for a long time. Juventus start as favourites for the title, as current champions, and also with probably the strongest team as a whole. The Old Lady will still have to deal with their coaching situation though, as well as juggling European football commitments in their return to the Champions League. Behind Juventus, there's a wide field of several teams that could challenge; Milan may not have had the best transfer window ever, but they are still a big team. Inter had a poor last season and have reacted by trying to rebuild, with several new signings, and attempts to move on players like Maicon, Julio Cesar, and Lucio. As an Inter fan I believe this season could go either way, with either a title challenge, or another poor season as the new signings fail to gel. A lot will also depend on how rookie coach Andrea Stramaccioni does in his first full Serie A season. Another possible challenger is Roma, who hired coach Zdenek Zeman, known for wanting nothing less than spectacular attacking football, that can be beautiful but which also sometimes leads to his sides being stung in defence. Possible outsiders for a title challenge are probably Udinese, who qualified for the Champions League for the second season in a row, but who sell some of their best players every summer, and Lazio, who had a surprisingly good last season behind the goals of Miroslav Klose.

Serie A has had a difficult summer, with all the scandal and its financial situation, but this season promises to be exciting and open in a way not seen for a while. I can't wait to see what happens.

Take a look at the first few fixtures of the season here

London Olympics Love-in

After years of build up and 17 sport-filled days the world's athletes are on their way home, and the 2012 London Olympics are over. I must confess to feeling a twinge of sadness, which has entirely caught me by surprise, because like many people I started out as a cynic. For a long time I felt no connection with the games, they were just an event I had nothing to do with, going on in another part of town. Also, with all the money spent on them, the gloomy economic situation, and the typically British pre-event media pessimism, I expected a spectacular cock-up or at the very least to be extremely bored. Then, I sat down to watch the opening ceremony and cynicism died and I became a believer.

I hurried back from the pub with a group of friends to catch the opening ceremony. I think we were expecting nothing more than a slightly scaled up school disco, with some coloured lights and a couple of the sort of fireworks you could find in the back of a corner shop; nothing to compete with the growing financial muscle of China. Salute to Mr Boyle though, he amazed the world and exceeded all expectations, leading to a scene where a group of lads in their 20s gathered in our living room cheering Mr Bean, the Queen's skydiving skills, and the good old NHS. It was beautiful.

From then I felt the stirrings of pride in London, the city I grew up in and have lived for most of my life, and an eagerness to watch as much of the games as possible, best expressed as the thought "Might as well, its the Olympics".

If nothing else, the Olympics are an opportunity to watch sports that never usually would get the time of day on mainstream channels. Handball, water polo, archery, fencing, the list goes on. I tried to dip in and out to see what was going on in different parts of the games and really experience it all. Luckily, the BBC's coverage was formidably comprehensive, with all of its channels including BBC Three and Four putting in overtime. Most of my watching however was done through the amazingly efficient BBC Olympic schedule website. A website laid out for users to choose any sport to watch live, or to catch up if you missed things, that marked each stream with highlights so you could rewind and find them easily; this brought it home to me that we are truly living in the future. Much congratulations to the BBC; this is why it needs to be defended at all costs, so we don't end up with an #NBCfail situation where we have advert breaks in the middle of events and broadcasters making us wait till primetime to see things, instead of watching live.

I also have to comment on the 100m final, aka the most electric 9.63 seconds I can remember. It is amazing how much you can enjoy something that is just so basic and natural as running; enjoying seeing a person go as fast as they can is just human nature, even from childhood seeing who can run fastest in the playground or down the street. Watching the race was my undoubted sporting highlight of the games, with all the anticipation, the absolute silence in the stadium before the starting gun, and then seeing the athletes powering up and going, with Usain Bolt pulling away in the end. Amazing.

So that was the Olympics. I was so proud; seeing how excited everyone was about which big events were scheduled each day, seeing Buckingham Palace and Hyde Park and Big Ben and countless other historic landmarks as the backdrop of events, reading media reports by journalists from other countries on how welcoming the city and the country were and how impressed they were. The only dip was probably the closing ceremony, although could it ever have lived up to our newly raised expectations? Besides, getting absolutely everything perfect is not the British way. Regardless; well done London, you did it.