Subject: NT USA vs Croatia

Well tomorrow is my first match in charge of the USA NT & its a very important game.

I have fielded what I feel is the strongest side I have available, I hope it will be enough, I get the feeling it could be a very close game.

I wish you good luck in the match. Off topic a bit, but I hope England beats Croatia in world cup qualifying in real life too.

Yep, I hope for a good pair of wins.

I have put a lot of effort into working out our best team for this match, but depressingly a lot of the players who I got updates on haven't been trained for the last two/three seasons. This is especially true in defence.

Nice work Phil! Covered very well for the guys out of the lineup due to injury or bad form.

Can I ask what the reasoning is behind the 3 subs? Does that still leave you enough conditional orders to cover for possible red cards?

Just watched the game... great win Phil. Did you talk to Capello before hand?

Congratulations, great first win. ;)

Excellent win Phil, congrats.

Well, I was away for much of the weekend, so have only just seen the result.

I'm happy with the win, but not very impressed by our performance. Yes we were missing players due to low form and injuries, but I would have still expected much better.

On watching the game, I felt that it was certainly more even than the match stats would suggest, I think a fair few of our chances were not counted as shots.

I was surprised at the high line Croatia played, not expected at all to be honest, but then I didn't know how they would play as its a new manager.

Still, the result was positive & as long as we can really destroy the rest of the teams in our group we should have qualification in first guaranteed by the time we play Croatia again.

Patterson picked up a 17 day injury today, so thats both our first choice strikers out!