Subject: National Team

I think the idea to get the points was a clever one, the game itself wasn't really that demanding when we take a closer look at who played for Poland. :)

There's more to managing the NT than putting the right players in the right position. :)

Great 95 rating from Elrich... his best in a while. Plus he becomes the most expensive player in Australia for the first time. $6.6million and climbing.

+75 ranking points - wohoo :)

67pts to 33rd Bulgaria
68pts to 32nd Bosna
113pts to 31st USA

32nd place is in our reach, 31st will depend a lot on our game against USA. Win/loss will be a matter of getting or losing about 100pts [as if we get 50, they lost 50 etc.]

Now it's time for Mini World Cup! The draw will take place today.
We'll play it for 3-7 weeks, depending on how we perform.

From Mini-WC topic:

This are the 7 seeded teams: (the number is their ranking at the moment)

32. Bosna i Hercegovina
33. Bulgaria
34. Australia
36. Scotland
37. Ireland
38. Canada
39. Latvija

The rest of the teams will be drawn randomly.

We're seeded...and one of the favourites for the trophy. :P
Looking at these teams, we can lose or win with all of them, so this competition should be interesting. Hope to meet Latvija somewhere in the tournament to get our revenge, even without Sharoni...or we can play against Scotland and have a direct revenge on Sharoni ^_^.

Playing against Bosna and Bulgaria is something I'd prefer not to do, as they present high level and a loss against them would probably mean being out of top 32 for the WC Q. draw. A win on the other hand...

hehe
We play anyway later this season.. so be patient..
;-)

Well it appears like we drew Greece, Moldova and China. Could be interesting for 1st place in the group.

Drum... Divine...

Ok, so we're the smallest NT in our group - who cares! :p

All 4 teams are at the same level 70-73 in stats. To be fair it's hard to say if we'll even qualify from 2nd place :p.

You better :p. We beat Moldova easily enough last MWC.

Well it seems like they improved since then skill-wise, they make higher notes than we do :p

I'm completely flabbergasted after the game, don't know what actually happened on the field. All balls went to Drum/Huxley even though Barnes was placed in a better way. Lots of weird off the target passess and even when the strikers managed to get through the defence they got the ball kicked out from behind almost every time. Finishing was woeful as well.

They went to Drum because he was more often than not the player who had no defenders on him. Barnes wasn't positioned very well for large chunks of that game as he had 1 defender sitting right on him at all times.

To me we didn't exploit the fact they had 3 central defenders at all. Yes we tried to play in the gaps but since they had players so compressed in midfield it made it difficult, especially when they had the midfield numbers because we went in with 5 defs. If anything the tactic we went in with actually made their tactical choice far better than it should have been.

In saying that we still should have won, but it now makes it difficult to progress. Disappointing day when you can't put away a weaker team who plays a back 3.

Edit: Confused about why Erdogan wasn't played especially given Bowyer and a solid form Villafane got game time. I only assume you were afraid of Erdogan picking up a 3rd yellow and then not being available for the next round. Still, I'd rather use and ensure the current situation and deal with future events later if they happen.

Anyway, it just means we need to win both our remaining games to progress.
(edited)

A pretty convincing win today, 2:0 in goals, 7:2 in shots. It wasn't a good game though, there was a lot of free space between the mids and strikers which killed our offensive game.

btw. their strikers were amazing, what kind of technique do they have?!

Shouldn't we just assume these days that most countries have at least triple unearthly if not triple divine? I'm not sure that a couple of extra levels in tech would make too much of a difference given most countries also have a backline consisting of divine defenders.

Congrats on the win as well

Yeah, but still - our superdivine and divine defenders in form couldn't tackle them while Barnes was being tackled easily...and Barnes has superdivine form :).

Once our s-divine defender was tackled in front [in the end of the game] - weird.

anyway, 3pts is all that matters, though the tactic needs a lot of tweaking.