It’s maybe not that strange for one of your favourite footballers to never have played for your club. Football being so global now you can watch games from all over the world at a touch of a button or a click of an illegal stream (which this writer has definitely never ever ever done, ever.). You can pick games up from Spain, Brazil, Germany, Portugal, Holland and Italy for example. This with the median level of technical ability higher in those leagues than it has ever been, admiring that skill is surely how the true football hips….I mean purist should enjoy the game.
Maybe then it shouldn’t be strange that Radja Nainggolan is one of my favourite footballers of all time. The issue is, I can count on one hand the number of times I’ve seen him play live and likely still have change. The reason from my Nainggolan love, is to quote hearsay, pure and simple, It’s about his staring role as the powerhouse in the middle of my Fifa 15 FUT.
To tell the tale, I have to take you back, back to winter 15 and hanging out at my pal’s house playing Fifa, accompanied by Pizza Hut’s finest meal deal. We wanted to build an ultimate team to be proud of, but being students working minimum wage jobs, we weren’t going to chuck a load of cash, (that could be spent on things such as Pizza Hut’s finest meal deal, or the cheapest double at the student bar) on paying more money for a game, she’d already paid a small fortune (two of Pizza Hut’s finest meal deals) for.
So we got started, we took the draft token and got knocked out of the draft early on, because I am a complete chump who didn’t practice before using the most sacred of FIFA freebies. We did manage to bag a small amount of coins and a loan legend. So with a team of bronzes, what was chump change coins in the scheme of FIFA and Alessandro Nesta for a few games, we set about building a team that could challenge the big boys and to use a colloquialism from the heady days of English football, invoke the principles of class war and show that rich kids and their FUT teams, don’t like it up ‘em.
We started picking a formation and I knew that if I was going to be doing a lot of the game work (because of how incredibly seriously I take FIFA) I knew we were going to have to go with two up top,4–2–2–2 was the way forward. It was compact, condensed, but with the right personnel, allowed us to counter attack at pace but hold our shape when we needed to, which we would have to do, playing the brand of defensive counter attacking football that we had decided was our best route up the leagues on a low low budget.
I made that decision then, to start by picking up a striker and then a CAM. It may seem like an odd combination to blow all your budget on, but I wanted to build a team that could still pick up points and earn coins so that it could be improved but have enough of a chance to not get relegated so the process could be done more slowly. My first signing for 1000 coins, was Everton’s Romelu Lukaku, regular gold card.
Given how late into the season we were, Team of the year packs were already out, meaning it was driving down the market value of normal cards, something we were taking great advantage of. Lukaku for 1000 coins was most of our budget, but Lukaku was a get out of jail free card against low division opposition. We had a couple of, I believe the official term is ‘tasty silvers’ we’d picked up from free packs, including some second tier players with over 90 pace, who paired with Lukaku really well (and we subsequently sold for a tidy profit).
So we had our talisman striker, now we needed to go out and get that CAM I craved and I decided it was time to go back to old faithful and my Dortmund team of FIFA ’12, I decided, it made sense to go and call for the man Jakob Blaszczykowski. Picking up his loan card made great sense, getting him from Fiorentina, not only made him cheaper, but opened up the important link into the Italian league though he was out of position.
We had 3 star players, an Italian legend, an Italian league midfielder and a Belgian striker, the team was going in a very specific direction. We were on the road to the next league, but more importantly on the long road to Radja.
The team needed some work still. We were scraping through games but struggling without a second quality striker, so the sweaty silvers were sacrificed for some that’ll do bronzes and we picked up Origi to partner Lukaku for the Belgian connection. The partnership was proving fruitful but then we needed to invest in the back line to remove some of the dead links that were forming to improve our chem rating, which seemed to be holding us back a bit.
This was also at the point we lost Nesta, his loan running out after a dodgy tackle left him suspended for three games. We needed to invest heavily in the defence, and we still had Blaszczykowsi, so we went in search of Polish players in Serie A.
After some minutes of scouring the transfer market for an affordable orange link as the internet connection was far too laggy and unstable to even attempt to use FUT head or risk being booted off the EA servers, we found a 79 Glik within our price range. We then decided to take a bit of a gamble and switch Blaszczykowski, who we’d been playing out of position at CAM to play out of position again at RB.
This solidified out right hand side, with an unremarkable silver filling in at CAM and dragging us to a few more points, against teams with largely better players. (Whether or not we were playing a few leagues below our actual FIFA game play ability is neither here nor there..).
So the coins were coming in and we still needed to sort out a goalkeeper and the left side of defence. This was where the Brazilian connection came into play. When scouring for the cheapest gold keeper that we could find, we landed upon Julio Cesar. Cesar, despite his IRL stint in the 25 man shop of horrors that was that QPR squad a few years back, was still a highly rated Brazilian goalkeeper. He needed two links though and given he was playing in a league we didn’t have much interest in signing players from, it was time to go to Roma and pick up Castan.
Castan sorted out the centre but Cesar needed another orange link. We tried various combinations and then decided as as saleable asset, it was time to say goodbye to Blaszczykowski and go full Brazilian at the back.
Nothing in Serie A was appealing within our price range for the Brazilian market. There was a temptation to pick up one of FIFA ’11, Crystal Palace team legends in Naldo from the Bundesliga but the budget didn’t allow us to be reunited and in my impatient wait, I picked up his two nation and club mates, Dante and Gustavo.
The spine was now strong, but Castan needed a link, and this needed to link into our Belgian front two and there was only one option that was available within budget and within ability. Step forward, the man, the myth, the legend, Radja Nainggolan.
He was instantly a monster in the CDM role and made the team tick. I made him captain instantly and his work rate and pitch coverage was absolutely mesmerising, pitching in with goals and assists but also blocks and tackles and we started to really boss games without the ball, (read, somehow withstand 20 shots on targets, then win one nil and the other player rage quitting.) We were becoming a formidable force and Radja was the rock on which we were building our footballing church. We continued to pick up points, and more money was coming in so we started to build a plan to a team in its final form, picking up Firmino for the Brazlian wing of the team and Maxwell from PSG at left back.
We worked up playing what can only be described as Big Sam football, organised but still technical, resolute but with flair and all carried on the beautifully tattoo and mohawk adorned shoulders of our true Belgian superstar.
We had a plan to dip into the Russian league and pick up Witsel and Fernandes to complete our 2 nation 6 league hybrid of dreams but the internet connection finally crapped out on us and then my friend moved back to her uni halls in the far far reaches of the north and our short eventful love affair with Radja was over.
He may have been gone, but his avatar form and his IRL form is not forgotten. As a Crystal Palace fan, Wilfried Zaha will always be my favourite ever footballer but number 2, will always and forever be, O Captain, my captain,my leader and my legend, Radja Nainggolan.
