Argh!!!

After a nice unbeaten run for the last couple of days, my main striker has got injured until tomorrow, and my form has stuttered.

Ironically, it's not stuttered due to scoring less - my wonderkid reserve striker has grabbed his chance with both hands and has hammered home 5 in 3 games. The lads are playing out of their skins but just not getting the rewards - I'll get over it.

The off-season is a hard time to judge form, as I've entered a load of user-created competitions to maintain form and fitness. There's the Scotsman's Perfunctory League (the SPL), a short league between some of the Scots in the gameworld, the Senior Practise League (the SPL...) and a few others. That means I'm playing wildly different opponents, whose style I'm less accustomed to. And I'm devising a mean new 4-3-1-2 while I'm at it...

User-created leagues and cups are massively popular. Naturally many are inspired by certain real life competitions, though my 'favourite' has always been the monster league - two leagues of 32 teams, playing each other twice, with the top 16 from each league going through to another league of 32. A true beast! The competitions can be ultra-quick or take months, they can have loads of rounds, league stages and knockout ones - a lot of flexibility. Teams creating a tournament are not allowed to make a profit, since the effort taken to host one is so minimal - allowing teams to make a profit from something so easy proved very unpopular. Should the host choose to charge an entry fee, 100% must be returned as prize money therefore - split in whatever way desired by the host.

Tomorrow is Update Wednesday (GW4 gets software updates just once a month), so that will be exciting - a lot of new graphical goodness coming, so look forward to seeing some of that action. Also a new match engine... always a trying time! Anyway, Mitze's excellent blog has some screenshots from the new update already, the lucky sod, so check it out!