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| Phoenix recounts his career in X11 |
Gentlemen's Practice manager Gareth Phoenix recently released a book about his career in X11... Here it is in short form...
I'll start at the beginning. I remember being introduced to X11 via a friend way back in June 2008. back then it was more of a private league thing we had been invited to. There must have been only two 8 team leagues. As I got to grips with how it works, tactics, players, skill, development etc I found myself watching the clock to come round waiting for a specific match to find out the result. Inevitably my two mates who regularly got beat by me due to my growing obsession with the game lost interest in the game. I was alone.
I didn't want to give up so I decided see what X11 had to offer. a few guys from the league I played in asked me to join another league and before I knew it I had two teams in different leagues. This was awesome! I got to watch the clock now for double the matches!! But over time the two leagues started to dwindle and I nearly found myself without any teams had I not take on running both leagues myself. This was the point I decided I needed something more A) reliable and B) A better standard, so I opened my first official team, electing to start from scratch. It was fun, I made loads of new X11 friends but the team was limited and I needed to try a new technique to try and get a team that could see how far I could really go on the international stage. I mean what is this XCL?? I want in
I managed to get a decent team in the job centre that had a nice bit of cash with them also I unimaginatively called my team AFC Phoenix as I had all my teams before. They had 14m econ, which ok isn't loads but to me it was around as high as I've ever had before. This cash gave me a good base to help develop the team to have a future. The players were of a sellable standard and I manged to raise some decent funds to go with it via these sales and this is where I came to a crossroad after reading the forums through other people's experiences and researching the top teams to see how they are set up. There were two obvious choices, you either go all youth with a couple of older players (for experience purposes) so you can develop them into monsters over time but with the knowledge that if you even managed to achieve all your goals at the end your team would all be old and no future.
Or you could build what was called a conveyor belt team so that the players ages are staggered from young to old, very much like real life. This means you can keep your team going on for ever recycling and by selling your oldest player and replacing with a player of around 16/17/18. I chose the latter as I never wanted this crazy addictive game to end and know I'm here for the long haul. To cut a long story short after about a year the side started to really shape up and we made it up to division 2 and even a cup quarter final, I also personally made it up to my highest world ranking of 84.
This step up to Div 2 was about as far as I could take this team and after just about surviving our first season I conceded that I needed to change tact and go with the "grow your own" method by filling your team with teenagers and one player older than 28 in each position.
I was excited but also devastated I was having to sell some of these players I'd grown to know over the past two years but my drive to try and compete at the top (which this side current would never do) I'd need to go back to the drawing board. So I sold them.. I sold them all bar one in each position. And bought a mixture of 17/4' and 17/5's to accompany them. I even decided to rename the team,
I'd recently started my own business and thought "hey there is like 19 thousand users on here, why not call all my teams (including private teams, which were also called AFC Phoenix) GentlemensPractice.com (Which is my business). It turned out you weren't allowed website names in the official league so I just used Gentlemen's Practice in there.
Anyway needless to say we got whipped down the leagues as the team was way too weak and young to compete. Division 1 to 2, Division 2 to 3, year after year until we landed in Division 6 with an average age of 22 and bounced immediately back up winning the division in back to back seasons to land us in division 4 at the tender age of 24 now the step up in sides started to show as did our young age, eventually missing out on promotion on the final day of the season. The following year we were a year older and a skill bar stronger and won the division at a canter and even went 3 points more the following season after promoting out of Division 3 at the first attempt.
So here we find ourselves in Division 2 again. Our team is holding at around the 26 years old average age and skill of 13 although that is slightly skewed by always having a young teenager in each position to grow and farm for cash at a later date (there's a free tip fight there) In essence we were throwing out a team around 15 skill. We start the season with a loss at home against one of my projected rivals and our captain and last seasons league leading scorer got injured for a long time. literally couldn't have started my season any worse. I only run with two strikers as they historically are harder to develop if you have more. Strikers are always lower than the rest.
So 1 fit striker and everyone pretty much knows what formation we're going to play because of that. but you know what? We did alright. We took the loss and used it to drive us on. We were the 3rd strongest team in the division and the two stronger teams we're smashing everyone too. We just needed to not lose pace with them. Somehow we managed to go 11 league games unbeaten winning 8 and drawing 3 and sat 2 points clear at the top with two remaining.
We then obviously go and lose 2-1 at home to a team in a relegation battle (I'll never forgive you Lickyzao) which cocks everything up, absolutely ruins our season and this incredible come back as it drops us down to second and in the play off place. "Not all bad" I hear you say? Well lets go all the way back to beginning of the season and who did we lose to? Yeah the team who is now 1st and we have to face them away in the last game of the season. Not only is that an uphill task but the team sat in 3rd who are now 2 points behind us have bottom of the league so a guaranteed 4-0 win. If we lose we miss out, if we draw we likely get the play off place due to our superior goal difference.
It didn't pan out. I decided to watch the game as it happens which I rarely do nowadays and we performed really well having 5 shots to their 2 but we lost 1-0 and inevitably missed out on a chance at getting higher than Division 2. It was frustrating yeah but we're just a possible 2 promotions away from the hallowed land of the Xpert International league.
Can we do it? I think I have the belief in my team that we can (well at least Division 1 and a decent cup run surely?) Time will tell. But with all the chat about "How long will X11 last" in the forums and the scribbles I find myself more in love with this stupid game than ever. I hope there are loads of people too who share that feeling, because we're the guys who will keep this site going on and on and on..
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