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• • 9th March 2018 On Championship Manager 03/04 there was an extremely successful tactic which turned out to be a bug in the game. Then a few years later Frank Lampard went and turned it into real life for. You might not play it anymore, but virtually anyone with an interest in football has delved into the world of Championship Manager or Football Manager at some point. The management simulator is played (and ) by adults who should probably know better, and the growth of mega-money games like FIFA has had little impact on its popularity.

There are many reasons to love CM/FM, but perhaps the game’s biggest draw over the years has been its staunch commitment to realism. From youth team training to the minutiae of contract negotiations, the game has always done its best to imitate real life — often at the expense of ‘fun’ in the conventional sense. Once, however, it failed to do so. Championship Manager 03/04 was significant for two reasons. First and foremost, the game was a swansong for the original series, the last CM developed by Sports Interactive and published by Eidos.

The breakup of those companies marked a schism in CM history. Download 2012 w2 form free. After 03/04, Eidos kept the Championship Manager name but delivered a succession of games filled with bugs.

Sports Interactive adopted the new Football Manager title, but its game was much truer to the original series. Football Manager, confusingly, became the *real* Championship Manager. But CM 03/04 was significant in another way too. Significant because it delivered, wholly by accident, CM’s first ‘cheat’, a quirk of the match engine that allowed one tactic to run riot over all others.

The ‘Diablo’ tactic That tactic was the infamous ‘Diablo’, a wide 4-1-3-2 that, for one reason or another, produced a silly number of goals. A really silly number.

First shared online by a gamer named ‘El Rosso Diablo’, the tactic was built around a free-roaming central midfielder with a ‘forward arrow’ right up to the central striker position. That midfielder, who mysteriously never seemed to be marked, would calmly slot home goal after goal from the edge of the box. The famous Diablo tactic — CM & FM Nostalgia (@CM_9798) Looking through some message boards from 2004 reveals how excited gamers were about the tactic. “I just played one of my personal best matches,” said Anton. “I hammered Valencia 8-1 in the European Super Cup, in wet weather.” “This tactic is very good!” added Raven. “When I saw Gung Ho I thought ‘Oh shit’, but I tried it and it’s superb. It’s all out attack and good defence at the same time!” Unfortunately, there was a problem with Diablo.

It was too good. Gamers using the formation soon realised their midfielder wasn’t supposed to score multiple hat-tricks per match, however good his stats were. The tactic wasn’t tactical genius; it was a bug. • • • • READ: • • • • Cue the mass stigmatisation of Diablo and its users. Cheating was, after all, incredibly un- CM.

But some refused to jump ship. Anton, our friend who hammered Valencia in wet weather, actually took great to argue the moral case for Diablo. To the accusation of Diablo being a ‘cheat’, he responded: “In that case, any tactic that exploits your opponent’s weakness in real life has to be considered cheating too. And don’t tell me that teams in real life don’t use the midfielder who makes penetrating attack runs through the middle. “Also, many teams in real life use the same tactics: would you consider them to be cheating off of each other?” And finally, the ultimate challenge: “All the tactics like Diablohave been created by understanding how the game works on a computer and in real life If Diablo is a ‘cheat’ tactic, prove it.” Vindicating Anton Unfortunately for Anton, Sports Interactive moved swiftly to prove it. Its next 03/04 update completely neutered the Diablo, teaching the match engine to deal with the forward-running central midfielder.

It wasn’t real. It could never be real.

Those crazy days now seem like a long time ago. While many remember the Diablo fondly — you’ll still find it discussed every now and again on Football Manager forums — most now agree that the ‘tactic’ wasn’t really a tactic in any footballing sense but rather an exploitation of a serious glitch in the CM match engine. Yet for a few years in Premier League history, one man did his best to prove that the Diablo could have been real. Did this man, this kind, empathetic man, read those message boards of 2004?