It’s never going to happen, but imagine for a second that you are there on the touchline at Anfield, carefully casting an eye over your eleven multi-million pound investments as they boot the ol’ windbag around the pitch in an effort to bag themselves a goal. A home match against Derby is always something to look forward to if you’re finding yourself a little worse for wear when it comes to the league table, and with your full strength squad out on pitch strutting their stuff it’s fantastic stuff to watch. Then you let in a goal. Then another. Oh, and then you get fired.

So ended my initial steps into Football Manager 2008, much in the same way my time with Football Manager 2007 ended some months back. There’s been something about the last three or four Footy Manager titles that I just haven’t been able to fathom, with most of my efforts ending in my team falling drastically below standards and my virtual self usually ending up in a virtual job centre after a matter of months. You could argue that taking the Liverpool job all the time leaves me on a hiding to nothing anyway, but then you’d just be being cruel.

Football Manager 2008 is, as you fans probably guessed, not a drastic change from previous titles. What Sports Interactive have done instead is hone their giant database monster into a sleeker, more smooth beast, giving us plenty of new little tools, features and designs to work with in an attempt to make the managerial experience as smooth as it can be. With a whole host of new licenses added in and an upgraded, fleshed-out international management offering that’ll separate the Robsons from the McClarens, anyone wondering whether they should shell out the £25 or so on this season’s edition will find themselves pleasantly surprised by just how fresh and interesting all the little changes make the game.

Let us start with the international portion, as it’s highly likely that those folks curious as to how well they can manage the hopes of a nation will turn to this first. Whereas before you were simply offered a selection of players from different clubs and very little else, you are now given a larger selection pool from which to select your international superstar heroes, player interaction options so you can tell Kenny Miller to get off his arse and start playing regular first team football (it worked, too!) and plenty of media interaction moments during which you can explain that, yes, Estonia did surprise you and, yes, losing to them has really messed up your qualifying campaign.

Something that both the national management and club management side will also instantly show you is that the fans and the board have a much bigger say in progress this year, with each game subject to a confidence bar and a comment or two on how they felt you did. It not only happens for on-pitch antics either; my January transfer window double scoop of Giles Barnes and Ricardo Queresma for Liverpool was met by fan excitement initially, but after a few dodgy games for the former they weren’t shy about letting me know that they though I’d gone and spent £7 million on a complete duffer. Whereas sackings and the like came pretty much out of the blue at times in previous games, Football Manager 2008 does a superb job of making you very aware that your grave is being dug for you.

With the majority of the changes and tweaks being minor it’d be rather dull for me to start listing them off like a PR list, but there are a couple of further little additions that really do improve the show no end and deserve a bit of a mention. An expanded finance section will, for example, allow you to tool around with ticket pricing, wage budgets and the like in an attempt to run a tighter ship/squeeze the cash out of the hapless fans. Talking to players and managing expectations through media reports also seems to have taken on greater meaning too, and checking how a player reacts to certain situations and tailoring your responses to suit can really boost or destroy their performances.

Match day options have been given a bit of an overhaul too, with all your pre-match selection and tweakery flowing nicely into the main match screen. Changing things around mid-match should you be like me and find yourself getting tonked is now on-the-fly too, with a click of the tactics button bringing up a team selection screen with your options whilst the match plays itself out in a miniaturised version of the excellent 2D top-down real time highlights display.

In general, everything adds up to – yes, I know – make this the best, most streamlined version of Football Manager yet. Of course, the issue with it being as much of a timesink as ever remains, and it’s as punishing as previous iterations if you haven’t got your eye on the various facets of training, staff and the like. Still, the series is making improvements in the right areas and once again has given us a another superbly polished effort to agonise over whilst the world continues to spin outside.