As you have seen in my previous post about Universitatea Craiova‘s quest to become a major force in Europe in Football Manager 2011, the team did pretty well if we are to judge from the board’s expectations at the start of the season. Therefore, the board decided to allow me change the expectations for the end of the season, but I refused to – still, it was nice to see that the good results were seen by the board!

There are not just good news, though, as I had to sell Julius Wobay who played great as my first team left winger, but who was nearing the end of the contract and wanted nothing less but 27,000 EUR per week, a sum 5 times bigger than the maximum the club can afford. So since it was obvious I was going to lose him anyway, I decided to get some money and did a pretty good deal. However, I would’ve loved to keep him at the club.

I have also brought in over the Winter break a new central midfielder as I wasn’t quite pleased with what I had, Argentinian Rene Lima who did a really decent job until he realized he couldn’t adapt well so I had to offer him a leave of absence. I hope his problems will be gone by next season, so here are Lima’s stats:

Universitatea Craiova also managed to do well in the cup, as I’ve set my goal, and we’re now through to the final where we’ll face Unirea Urziceni, a team I am confident we’ll be able to defeat without too much problems and make sure that we have a spot in European competitions next year:

However, the greatest surprise comes from the league table, as you saw in the title of this post: Craiova stands at a very comfortable #3 position in the league, just 2 points away from the leader, Dinamo Bucharest. However, the battle is really really intense with just 4 games left from the season and any team could drop all the way to number six… it’s a really interesting battle and even though we have some difficult fixtures to come, I hope we’ll do well:

And due to the performances the team had, there’s no wonder that we had 6 players chosen for the team of the week!

Stay tuned for the last update for the 2010/2011 season in FM 2011: maybe Craiova will be both league winners and cup winners! That would be simply amazing!