The news of the merger was met with a mixture of relief, excitement, and a healthy dose of trepidation. The players were overjoyed that the team had been saved, but the reality of our new situation was a daunting one.
We were no longer big fish in a small pond. We were about to be thrown into the shark-infested waters of the County League, a world of semi-professionalism, of hardened veterans, of teams that were bigger, stronger, and more organized than anything we had ever faced before.
Our departure from the Sunday League was sudden and, in some ways, anticlimactic. Terry Blackwood had arranged for our remaining fixtures to be forfeited, our record expunged from the official table.
The Railway Arms, as a Sunday League team, simply ceased to exist. We had finished 5th with 23 points from 18 games, a remarkable turnaround from the disaster of those first eight matches. But that chapter was closed now. We were Moss Side Athletic. And we were playing on Saturdays.
The reality of my situation hit me on Monday morning when my alarm went off at 5:30 AM. I still had to work. The merger with Moss Side Athletic had saved the team, but it hadn't changed my personal circumstances one bit.
I was still coaching for free that had been part of my pitch to Terry, a way to make the deal financially viable for the club. Which meant I was still stacking shelves at Morrison's, still scanning lottery tickets, still dealing with the 6 AM rush of bleary-eyed commuters buying their morning coffee and cigarettes.
The irony wasn't lost on me. I was managing a team in the County League, a proper semi-professional competition, while earning £8.50 an hour in a convenience store. My players didn't know.
I'd kept that part of my life carefully separate, arriving at training straight from work, my hi-vis vest stuffed in my gym bag, the smell of the stockroom still clinging to my clothes. It was exhausting. It was humiliating. But it was necessary. The bills didn't stop just because I'd become the Moss Side Mourinho.
Saturday matches meant I'd lost my weekend shifts, which meant less money. I'd had to pick up extra weekday evening shifts to compensate, which meant less time to prepare for matches, less time to analyze the opposition, and less time to sleep.
I was running on fumes, caffeine, and sheer bloody-minded determination. But I couldn't stop. Not now. Not when we'd come this far.
The first training session as Moss Side Athletic Reserves was a strange affair. We were at our new home, a proper, enclosed ground with a clubhouse, changing rooms that didn't smell of damp and regret, and a pitch that was, for the most part, green.
It was a world away from the muddy, dog-fouled park we had left behind. But with the upgrade in facilities came an upgrade in pressure. We were no longer just a pub team playing for a pint and a bit of pride. We were representing a proper football club. We had a chairman to answer to. We had expectations to meet.
I could see the nervousness in the players' eyes. The easy, swaggering confidence of our cup run had been replaced by a more sober, focused determination. They knew that this was a step up. They knew that they would have to be better, fitter, and more disciplined than ever before.
I took stock of what I had to work with. The core squad that had achieved our Sunday League turnaround was intact: Big Dave in goal, a mountain of a man whose shot-stopping had saved us countless times.
Baz and Mark Crossley as my centre-back partnership, both in their early thirties, both tough as nails. Scott Miller, my midfield anchor, the intelligent shield who could read the game like few others.
Tommo, the tireless box-to-box midfielder who never stopped running. Kev up front, the big target man who'd do the dirty work. And of course, JJ Johnson, our seventeen-year-old wonderkid, the player who could change a game with a single moment of brilliance.
We had a squad of about sixteen players, a mix of the original Railway Arms lads and a couple of additions from the Moss Side Athletic youth setup that Terry had thrown in.
Most of them were in their mid-twenties to early thirties, working men with day jobs plumbers, electricians, delivery drivers. They trained twice a week in the evenings and played on Saturdays.
They were fit, they were committed, but they weren't professional athletes.
The County League was full of teams with ex-Football League players, lads who'd been released from professional academies at eighteen or nineteen and had spent the last decade playing at this level. We were the new boys, the unknowns, coming in mid-season to a league that had already been running since August.
Terry had been clear about expectations.
"I don't expect miracles, Danny," he'd said. "Just don't get relegated. Finish mid-table, build for next season, and give the first team some players they can use. That's all I'm asking."
Mid-table. That meant finishing somewhere between 6th and 10th in a twelve-team league. It sounded achievable. But looking at the system's analysis of the league, at the quality of the opposition, at the gap between our players' abilities and theirs, I knew it was going to be a battle.
I knew that I had to be better too.
The tactics that had worked so well in the Sunday league, the False 9, the intricate set-piece routines, might not be enough at this level. The opposition would be smarter, they would be more organized, they would be less susceptible to a clever tactical surprise. I had to evolve. I had to add new layers to my managerial game.
I spent my newly acquired skill points with a sense of grim determination. I had unlocked the 'Tactical Mastery - Advanced' tier, and I invested heavily. I chose 'Advanced Formations', which gave me access to a wider range of tactical setups, and 'Position-Specific Training', which allowed me to create tailored training schedules for individual players.
It was a move away from the broad-strokes, team-wide approach I had used so far, and towards a more detailed, individualized style of coaching. It was the kind of thing a proper, professional manager would do. And that's what I had to become.
The system itself seemed to have recognized the step up in difficulty. When I accessed the new league table, the opponent CAs were significantly higher. The average player in this league was a 60 CA, a full ten points higher than the Sunday league average.
The top teams had players with CAs in the 70s and 80s. This was a different level of quality. The tactical analysis was more complex, the scouting reports more detailed. The system was telling me, in its own, data-driven way, that this was going to be hard.