Ten games. No losses. Top of the league. No, seriously… I look down at the microphones and digital recorders in front of me. There’s certainly more of them there than there were a month ago. I look up, and glance around the press room. A lot of hands are raised…

It’s time for pre-season. That means seeing what our formation (and our U23s) are made of. — Over the years, Football Manager has changed a lot. When I first started playing, games were described through text-based messages racing across your screen. These days, it has a match engine. What that means is that you can watch your team play. Okay, behind the scenes the game is still…

Time to take a first look at the squad and see what we do… or rather don’t have: enough players. — This is what my assistant manager Brandon Brown and my coaching staff feel is our best Eleven. As mentioned already, I’m playing with random player names turned on (and ‘fill empty teams with players’) so if you’re an actual Oldham fan, don’t expect to see any names you recognise there…

There are things the Chairman should have told me before I signed this contract… “It is with great pleasure that I welcome you to Oldham.” I look up with a start. This is my first time in Oldham and I have very quickly discovered that it is not like living…

The Football Manager journey begins. And it begins with a big question: why Oldham? — Oldham Athletic are a big club. No, really. I accept this may come as a surprise to many of you. Certainly those of you too young to remember the time before football existed (1992 according to Sky). It’s true though. Indeed, unlike Luton Town (also a big club. …

I have been playing Football Manager games for 25 years. It’s time to show you all why they’re amazing. I have played over 13,000 hours of Football Manager. On the surface, that may seem like a horrifyingly large figure. It’s certainly not something I’ll be adding to my LinkedIn page…

It was a while before he even realised she was on the platform at York Road. He’d been running on autopilot. It was… God, what? Five years since he’d last seen someone there. — Neville applied the brakes and brought the train to a halt. He was secretly delighted that the cab eased to a stop directly in line with the black London Underground roundel on the platform wall opposite. Okay, he couldn’t remember a time when he hadn’t done this, but it was…

One of the most popular shows of the eighties, Knight Rider was the result of unique combination of a quirk of Glen A. Larson’s contract, and a chance meeting on a plane… — “Knight Rider is the Lone Ranger,” Glen A. Larson once explained in an interview with the Archive of American Television (AAT). “It’s one man comes into town and he has a little bit more going for him than people think — and that’s a great theme! I didn’t make that…

What price art, in a world where it no longer pays? — Fatima turned the key slowly and pushed. The front door opened with barely a click. She smiled to herself. She’d got the whole routine down to an art now: Wait round the corner until seven forty-five, as that’s when the evening matches kicked off, then open the door quietly. The…