Guten tag! Welcome back to Dirk van Oortveld’s quest to survive in the Bundesliga with MSV Duisburg and get them into the upper echelons of European football teams! If you want to catch up on what’s happened previously, check out this link here.
Today’s date is March 6, 2019, which means it’s time for my favorite day of the year and the one day of the year that justifies the Head of Youth Development’s annual salary… Youth Intake day!
In this update, we’re going to review a handful of the better players on the intake, I’ll look at the development of two of my favorite players from the last intake, and then we’ll cover the league situation to wrap everything up.
These are the 2019 youth candidates. We’ve actually got a pretty fair selection of decent players who, with the right development, could have futures as professional soccer players.
Just like with the last intake, for the sake of brevity, I’ll only share the stats for the top three players when sorted by Potential Ability.
Our most promising player this year is fullback Frank Stefes. He’s going to need a bit of strength training, and he’s lacking in positioning and teamwork, but he’s got the potential, and I’d like to see him develop into a regular member of the first team. I could really use quality fullbacks and wingbacks, and there’s nothing better than having a clean slate to polish out and develop myself!
Youssef Benali is another promising defensive player. He’s a natural left wingback, which would be fantastic further down the road, as I’ve still been relying heavily on just two players to fill that position, and depth will be needed one of these days when both end up injured or need to be moved on.
He’s not that bad. He’s got excellent stamina, he’s a team player, and he’s got an excellent work rate. His concentration and his decisionmaking should improve with match experience and age, but he’s not looking too bad. He’s got room to improve across most of his technicals, but the ones that matter don’t need much work to turn over to green attributes and be respectable looking. He’s going to be one to look out for in the future.
Our last player to mention for this intake is Gian Andrea Forlani. The young poacher has excellent acceleration, agility, and pace, he’s got great finishing and first touch, but he’s got a “Low Self Belief” personality type, and that appears to be reflected in his composure, concentration, and decisionmaking. He’s got the potential to become a good player if he can work with the right people and believe in his own ability and develop as I’d like him to.
This next player is one that I’m revisiting from the last intake. I wasn’t going to do so originally, but he’s been doing so well after being mentored by each of my strikers to learn how to better handle his role, and he’s been in truly fantastic form for the U19s.
The 15-year-old Tonci Simurina has been making wonderful progress in the last year! Between his competitive and non-competitive matches, he’s made over 40 appearances and is averaging over a goal a match!
For comparison’s sake, refer back to Teil 6: Die Jugendlichen to get a look in at his initial attributes. Since he’s joined the club, all of his technicals have risen by at least a point or two, his determination has taken a huge leap and is at 17 now, and his physicals have made small improvements. Young Tonci is really coming along, and the more I see him come up as the man of the match for the U19 matches, the more I get excited for what his potential for the senior team will be when he comes of age!
Looking at the month and a half of competitive fixtures we’ve gone through since January, things are looking slightly better. We’re still on a losing record, but we’ve secured nine badly needed points since the start of the new year. We had a 1-0 win against Mainz, who is still sitting below the relegation line. This was a notable match in that my new striker Francesco Forte scored on his debut after moving from Inter, and then he twisted his ankle and got a 5-week injury. But the important thing is we won at last!
We also secured a great 4-1 victory against Augsburg, another near bottom team, and we had a surprising 1-0 win against Borussia Mönchengladbach, which came down to a 73rd-minute goal from Guido Marilungo!
With nine points from the last many matches, we’re sitting in 15th place with 22 points and are now 4 points above Stuttgart and the relegation playoff place.
We’re in a slightly more comfortable place on the league table and it’s nice that we’ve got 4 points of security, but we’ve got a rough run of matches coming up really fast. We’re going to have two away matches against Hoffenheim and Kaiserslautern, and then we face four of the top five teams on the table over the course of five matches. That’s going to be a really rough month of soccer, and we’re only going to have three matches left against teams we can’t underestimate either.
We’re in the home stretch now, and we’re going to have to make every match count going forward because our place in the Bundesliga will depend on it!
