Subject: National Team

Their manager already considered us as a threat, hence why I think they went the conservative option. To be fair I expected them to go for a back 5, I was pretty convinced they'd do that. The only thing I didn't think would happen would be Deroo being able to tackle Broxton almost at will. That was rather scary because Broxton has a lot of technique and had magical form.

What has Broxton's technique to do with it? Deroo has superdivine technique, and while dribbling it's his technique vs defender's defence...

and believe me it's normal for him ;)

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you're missing what I'm saying :p.

I'm saying Deroo was tackling Broxton, not the other way around ;).

I'm well aware of Deroo's technique level and I wasn't saying anything about that because that is indeed normal ;).
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I thought Belgium's tactic was fairly ordinary. Surely as one of the best teams in sokker, they have a stronger midfield than they showed today. I think a 0-0 scoreline at half-time would have had a few Belgians nervous.

After 60min I thought we might be able to take the game then they quickly replied with a fortunate penalty and a sideways pass from Nikas which was going nowhere but their winger to allow the cross.

Still the aim was to make it competitive and I think despite the scoreline we certainly made them earn their win.

Next few qualifying weeks should be a bit of a cruise with Guatemala, Republica Dominicana and Ghana.
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Certainly competitive... at half time I was seriously thinking we could actually steal the points!

times like that with the red card they got you want a conditional order:

"if player X is missing switch Willis to other side"

Should never have substituted Beauchamp.... he's the man :D

times like that with the red card they got you want a conditional order:

"if player X is missing switch Willis to other side"

I actually think it should be the other way where you nominate a player as a "wing defender". If your opponent is playing 1 wing, put the wing defender on that side.

Well both could work if you could go in with alternate tactics, saying if such and such play tactic B.

World Cup Qualification Match Round #2 Pre-Game Time Filler

Guatemala vs Australia

# Users 39 - 105
National team rank 72 - 28
Rank points 748.79 - 2074.81
Record In World Cup Qualifications 5-1-15 , 23-8-18
# of World Cups attended 0 - 2
Record In World Cups 0-0-0 , 0-1-5
Previous encounters
None


Guatemala are still trying to find their way onto the big stage. They've only been in 3 WCQ campaigns and have only managed a small handful of wins against the lesser sides. They've made some decent performances though with a 2-0 loss to Canada last time probably their best result against a strong opponent. Against us they should have nothing to lose and it's these kind of games that often put more pressure on the side needing to win by a large margin, especially if they delay conceding. In saying that though, Guatemala started this campaign strongly with a 9 - 0 win over Ghana. Having never played them before shouldn't be too difficult to overcome, the question is whether or not we're capable of piling on goals early. They appear to have one of the best U21 keepers around atm, don't know where that sits against senior keepers though but it could be a sign that Guatemala are starting to improve.

An early kickoff but one of the latest games, when we take to the field at 1:30 tomorrow sktime. That allows us to watch the Osterreich - Belgie match and get an early gauge of where we might sit against Osterreich later in the campaign.

In other news Osterreich escaped with a draw against Belgie. Shocking display from Belgie, opened up too often, too easily and coughed up the points. Hurts us for a 2nd place finish a little bit unless we knock off Osterreich and I'm still confident we can do that.

We're set to take on Guatemala. Should be some goalscoring action hopefully. We've got both Nikas and Kilkelly unavailable but it's probably as good a time as any to be suspended for picking up 3 yellows. Strike force ready to go, hoping we're able to score a few goals early to relieve any pressure and then kick on to reach a respectable target of 10+ goal difference.

I guess it probably wouldn't hurt to say that Ando and Broxton are playing their 100th match for Australia. A fitting way to see both of them reach that milestone together on being the first ever players from Australia to play 100 caps for the country. I'm sure with the U21's introduced we'll see a lot more 100 capped players but these 2 have done it without playing a single U21 game and are what I'd consider legends of our NT.

May we play well for them and for our qualification campaign.

Me think you was a bit overconfident... :p

5-0 looks a fair result, they made an effort to be defensive tactically and their GK was exceptiinally good. On the other side Ando saved 2 or 3 boiling occasions.
It's 3pts in the bag at the end of the day. Yesterday's result will force us to respect Austria and think we can do better on the return leg against Belgium... it's all positive :)

Their back 7 did a fair job of contesting all of our attacks. That said I thought our finishing was abysmal in the air, Stephenson had a shocker for mine.

Wouldn't call it overconfidence personally, I would call it poor finishing. 4/15 and 1/9 isn't really the conversion rate we needed. Most of the shots we had should have been regulation find the back of the net.

Normally if we get 26 shots we bury at least 8, especially when Stephenson gets 9 shots he usually scores about 5 or 6 alone.

Another one of those goalkeeper wins battle ;).

Only other option on hindsight would have been to push the defense further forward and to drop one out of the defense but I wondered if they were going to try to use 2 wingers against us like they have against other opponents.

They cut out a lot of our attacks but we still generated a large percentage of chances. I'll settle for a 5-0, although it is short of what I aimed for and I'm positive Austria will surpass that.