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To be honest I never paid for my first copy on CM, there was a guy (dodgy might I add) who lived near me who sold Amiga games. You paid him a nice amount of £10 a month and got about 30 games. It was a good deal but most of the time you got…how shall I put it…*****! I was 12-13 and if I asked my mother for the money to buy a full Amiga game I would have received a swift slap across the head (a typical Irish mothers response, there you are 4 years old drawing on the wall with crayon. She comes in and says ‘that’s right, draw on the ****ing walls’, you respond by saying ‘I am mam’ – and a slap in the head you got).
As it was she had bought me my Amiga 600, which pretty much broke the bank so I found other ways of making a few quid for illegal games. I had played Footie Management games a few years. I had a ZX Spectrum and loved Football Manager – which to be honest was ****. My favourite game back then was a freeware game called Pro Masters. ******** all gfx but by Christ was it addictive. Buying, selling and managing your own football team!!
So, loading CM seeing this guy pointing at you (Ron Atkinson in a shellsuit?) and finding the result for the match (the anti-piracy part…sorry lads…didn’t work!, all you had to do was write them down from an original book – but I do purchase all nowadays).
At this time I was the only one of my mates who had an Amiga and it quickly became a ritual every ****ing day that myself and 3 of my buddies would meet up in a designated house (we rotated as it ****ed the **** out of our parents to hear 4 teenage lads ‘ooohhhing’ and ‘aaahing’) and play from 6pm till 11pm weekdays and the weekends was 9am to 12am, possible sleepover. Homework? Who needed it, we were ****ing managing soccer clubs, homework, school, girls, socialising? – who ****ing needed it? (FACT – Only one of us actually finished school, and only one is now in a relationship, none married)
Two of us supported Liverpool, one Arsenal and one West Ham. This meant the obligatory fighting between myself and the other Pool fan as to who was manager of Liverpool. But I always won –‘it’s my ****ing Amiga so I don’t get them, then I going home’ usually sorted it out. He had to settle for Villa.
Then of course the fighting over the players, we unearthed some serious gems in the 94 update which caused a fist fight once. Our parents probably thought we were four 13/14 year olds experimenting, little did they know our lives were being sucked away. Their dreams of lawyers, policemen, singers, rich men who would make loads of money and take care of them when they got older were being sucked away. We now had no futures. Our futures consisted of Nii Lamptey, Steve Watkin, Andy Booth…these were our lives.
Domark (SI now) teased us with international players which you could never actually sign….bastards! I vowed to have revenge…and I still will. Other decent little players, Lothar Sippel (one of the few foreigners you could sign). J.Cureton, Cloughie, Dublin. But Andy Booth was my man. About 250K from Huddersfield, a man who replaced Ian Rush and by Christ I had dirty dreams about him. In years to come I was to learn he was fairly useless and CM researchers had got it wrong. Ask Sheffield Wednesday
Being a spiteful bastard and the owner of the Amiga, once I got home and I didn’t have the players I wanted, I would load the game up and sign whoever I wanted…yes I was a *****!
The summer of ’94, ahh what a summer, the 4 of us looked like we were dead – we hadn’t see a minute of daylight the whole summer. Every other teenager had been out every day from the time they got kicked out of the house by their parents (approximately 7.30am…again this is Ireland) and was allowed back in the house ‘When it got dark’ – again this was the summer and you could probably go picking flowers at midnight in the Summer, so normally it was quite late. All them deprived teenagers who didn’t have an Amiga and CM did things like cycled for miles, played soccer, experimented with breasts and all those other things that you just didn’t need. They had lovely burned faces and looked like lobsters. We were ghosts, locked in a room, eating biscuits and this was, often 24 hours a day. We had nothing to distract us, no school or any of those other things that hinder you CM career.
Christ we were the best managers in the world, while Souness and Roy Evans were destroying Liverpool, George Graham was swindling money at Arsenal, Ian Dowie was the ugliest player in the world at West Ham and Aston Villa were managed by some nobody called Brian Little, were were winning in Europe – Liverpool 2 (Booth, Clough) Real Madrid (Player No.10) with a win bonus of only £250!!– In those days we didn’t have a database that contained 30 million players, foreign teams had players who were simply called ‘Player’ and their number.
There was a cheat, just in case you ever decide to go back to CM 93 or that time. If a team was interested in your player (you knew this by a red arrow in their profile), get one of your mates to bid £0 for them and then wait for the interested team to make a bid, which was usually a good amount for them. Then reject your mates bid and accept the other….this is a completely useless tip…but just in case…you can never be too careful, if she tells you she is on the pill – still wear a condom!!!
1995 came and we were getting older, all 3 mates now had managed to get themselves Amigas. We still didn’t socialise like normal teenagers. While they now have ****ed away their bikes they cycled on, wanted to stay out until ‘It got Dark’ and were past the stage of breasts, it was now the lower region and it was possible that she may touch you now. We were the hermits, we our days in school working out formations and nights in our rooms alone 2 foot away from our TVs sitting in the dark staying up as late as we possibly could. With my mother, if you turned off the TV but left the Amiga on with a cushion and duvets over it to drown out the sound of the hum, she would normally check firstly that you still alive because she hadn’t heard a murmur in your room since you came home from school. ‘Are you being bullied in school?’ she would ask…’Do you want to talk about anything?’…she would ask. Yes I want to talk about something mam, I want to know why that lucky bastard Les Ferdinand had just got the ****ing winner against me, she obviously wouldn’t have had the answer as she knew **** all about football, let alone CM. I would pretend I was asleep when she checked on me and then quietly get back out of bed, which transformed in a chair also, turn on the TV and try to play CM without her hearing the mouse click. But of course the mouse on the Amiga was a brick and clicks could be heard in Rwanda, let alone 5 metres away.
But we’d still meet up and discuss players, Iffy Onuara, some Cambridge player who was great (but for the life of me I can’t remember his name…give me a break it’s been 12 years!!). Cambridge actually had a great team for some reason, but they weren’t the best. The Colliers decided because they supported Everton that they would be the invincible team, far from the truth – but I suppose when you make a game you can do whatever the **** you wanted….like ruined little boys lives.
We would chat and smoke (incidentally being the spiteful ***** I was…remember Part 1? I smoked extra long fags called XL I think cause they lasted longer and I thought they looked cool…I looked like a woman). After our chat which may last an hour we would migrate back to our nests that contained the following. One 14” TV, one Amiga, CM, a Bed which was also used as a chair, and possibly clothes. This nest contained the perfect life. Girls, homework, school were still not a factor in our lives…who needs them we ****ing managing football teams….
CM Ate My Life 
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