Club 2 – Lechia

With the whole of January off it gave me an excellent chance to test the system and give a chance for players to stake their claims.

It was clear looking through the stats that last year’s champions had lost their goal scoring touch. Just 13^th in the league for goals scored made clear some fire power, so I spent £235 thousand on wide-man Haris Duljevic. Some really exciting technical ability and physically good too, I felt for so cheap it was a smart move.

The friendlies have been good and given me confidence going into the league. We didn’t lose any of the friendlies and towards the end were scoring plenty too, Lechia won the last 2 league games before the break, so hopefully we can use this momentum as we look to claw back towards the top end of the league.

As we approached our first league encounter as Lechia boss against Jagiellonia I was hit with a league rule I wasn’t aware of. There must be one under 22 Polish players playing in the 11. Intrigued by this I looked back over the results to see who had been playing for Lechia before I was here. Bizarrely, it appears rather than the game use one of the youth prospects, which there are plenty of, it gave them a greyed out player, each different and in a different position each time and that was their way around it.

This gave my opening game selection a bit of a headache, as we only had a couple of u-22 players in the squad. With that in mind and my 36-year-old Slovakian goalkeeper deciding he missed home and wanted to leave, I recalled 18-year-old Eryk Mirus from his loan to become first choice for the rest of the season. Eryk still has plenty to work on and honestly doesn’t fill me with great confidence, I do have a target in mind, there is a 20-year-old keeper at Legia who would be ideal for this situation. But a recently signed new contract means he will have to wait until at least the summer.

We got off to a flyer, scoring inside the opening minute, LWB Le Goff delivered an excellent early cross into the path of forward Schettine who finished first time across the keeper on his left. We found ourselves on the back foot after that and Jagiellonia soon found their equaliser. We went in level at the break, but with some tactical tweaks we got back on top of the game. It took until the 76^th minute but we managed to take the lead and win the game courtesy of wide-man Fatai, a player who got his chance due to his impressive goal scoring during the friendlies. 3 points on our first game in charge!

With only 14 games left to play. I’m going to do a bumper episode next time out for the end of season run through!

UP NEXT… END OF SEASON RUN IN WITH LECHIA