Subject: [NT] Summary of the past season

Dear friends,
This season is getting close to its end and I think it’s time to summarize it. This time it will be longer than last time (sorry for that :)) because I am not going to be your senior NT coach next season.

Squad:
Although our players are still far worse than those from other stronger national teams, there was a great progress in their strength during last season. Especially some of them has become much much better than they were at the beginning of the season. I would like to thank to my scouts for their great work, especially to Marek0090 who really helped me a lot to keep our national team database up to date :)

Matches:
We have played 15 friendly matches so far, there is still one more to go next week. I tried to find out interesting opponents for our team. I had only problem with arranging one match against Kenya (it’s funny that it was Kenya that caused us great problems last season too although their manager has changed ;)) Then there were some minor problems as some managers wanted to play older teams than they earlier agreed to.
We managed to win 6 matches, unfortunately we lost the other 9 matches. Some defeats were really painful some of them were result of really close games. There were few matches in which we played an equal game with much stronger opponents. That is really promising for the Cypriot future! :)
The matches I liked the most were those against Wales and also the last match against Macedonia although we lost both of them. I think they were really nice… I think that the worst matches I have played this season are those against Latvia and against Malta.

Ranking:
My goal for this season was to get a lot of ranking points for our NT. I think that I have quite succeeded in this task. We got to the World Cup Qualification group from the 5th pot and that gives us quite a good chances. Here you are the graph of our ranking (sorry for the weeks 12 and 13 – I forgot to update my table :()


What you can expect in next season?
Well, you know that I am just one of two candiadates for the coach of your U21 squad but it doesn’t matter if I win or not because these points were well discussed with Misi: (@Misi if I forgot something or if I wrote something wrong, please correct me :))

- You can expect quite interesting friendly matches (I hope that they will be interesting for you as well) We won’t play just U21 squad, we will also try to use our U19 players. You can take a look in the [U21] Friendly schedule topic, where we can discuss it more.

- Misi has suggested new type of football pool. It will be quite similar to the real world betting. The best of you could win the right to decide the most important matters of the last match of the season. I will work hard to make the web page for it soon so that you can get familiar with it in one free round.


A recent event has forced me to add one more paragraph. You know that I always wanted to hear your opinions on my work and discuss everything. As I had almost no feedback from you I thought that you were quite satisfied with my work and results... The more surprised I was when I have seen the article from one user that was written in such a way like if I have never done anything good for Cyprus. I thought about it for quite a long time and the longer I think about it the more unfair I find that behaviour to be. It is interesting that I haven't heard any positive criticism (or just a comment) from him for ages and the only comment comes in the time of the election. I really don't understand why we can't have discuss it earlier on if he is so unsatisfied? It would have made both sides more satisfied. I always tried to keep friendly relations with everybody and to be honest I am quite sad about this way of acting.


Anyway, it's almost sure that EVOLGHTOS is going to be your NT coach. I hope that I pass him the team in a good condition and that my work was quite successful so that he can base on it :)

I really enjoyed those two seasons with you and your national team...

I am looking forward to the next season with you either just as your friend or as your U21 NT coach too.

Yours ostulc

PS: Thank you for your time you have spent on reading this article and for every your comment.

amazing job

What a long text. But anyhow, good one. =)

You didn't forget anything. But still I'll inform a bit more;

For people, as ostulc said, there will be a brand new football pool. I don't reveal a much yet, because we'll publish it today or tomorrow, depending on how fast ostulc finishes the website. But as I simply explained in my speech, 4 best gamers in the pool are able to set the players for a match. You can do few more things too, but the simpliest way to tell this, is to say, that the last U21 match of the upcoming season will be your match.

So, you can test the new type of football pool with next friday match and few others what we'll pick. But still, as I said, I wont reveal much. You'll know everything at least tomorrow, if not today. =)

So, we've also contacted the Coach favorites of a few countries, and tried to schedule a few matches. Already couple of have been confirmed. So on, as ostulc said, there will be many U20 matches, and we'll try to schedule a couple of U19 matches too. But share us your ideas for the matches. We'd appreciate them. =)

I realised that I have forgotten about one thing I wanted to mention. I would like to congratulate to demetris for winning the last season's NT pool. Unfortunately after few rounds he was the only one who sent me the results but still, he was really good :)
And I would like to thank him too for being so active :)

Thank you for everything ostulc...i hope you will be U-21

Nice review and thanks for all the work done, looking forward having you close to our community for seasons to come.

Regarding the "article" issue. Who do you mean and what was written, because i didn't see anything that resembles what you mention. A misunderstanding maybe?
(edited)

It may have been misunderstanding... Panahand has written that I have been playing always the same tactics that was leading to bad results... But unfortunately I haven't other possibility due to the problems in our squad. The only thing I don't like at it is the fact that he hasn't ever told that he doesn't like my approach.

Anyway thank you all for your good words :)

great job ostulc!!i hope to continue in NT U-21

Thank you demetris :)

nothing my friend..continue the great job!:P

You referred to me and I have to write to solve the issue.

I never meant anything about your job so far which was amazing and great. I also thank you for spending your time in trying to improve Cyprus players. However, I was really annoyed by the way we lost from Malta a team in the same situation like us.

Moreover, we were keep saying that we dont have strikers. What did you do about it? You could have used more strikers in all the games since you know that they get an extra 50% training by playing an NT match. In my opinion, this is one of the things that need to be done if we really want strikers to face any opponent.

Ok, I may have misunderstood you... Well - I agree with you that the match with Malta was quite bad... I didn't use more strikers because in my opinion the most important for us is to create chances. If we play more strikers it may lead to the fact that they will get the ball often in the field and then they will lose quite a lot of balls. But clearly in the match with Malta I should have used only 4 defenders because the one was a bit unnecessary. As I told you, I have expected completely different tactics (playing for one high placed winger) To be honest, in the match with Malta there was one other problem. I usually create the tactics from scratch but this time I based it on one tactics I used in the past... I made quite many changes but I forgot to save it...

Well, your point of playing the striker to get 50% more training is quite correct... But to be honest, I was (and still I am) quite afraid of unnecessary injuries...

i have to make clear some things you said.

-------
player plays 90minutes league match only - he receives 90-95% of maximal training
player plays 90minutes friendly match only - he receives 85-90% of maximal training
if he plays 90 minutes in both matches - he receives about 95% of maximal training

by playing nt match he can receive additional boost 50% up to 100% (maximal training) which means ordinary about 5% only
--------

Anyway, I did not understand the maximal training.

Whatever. By playing NT match he gets extra training.

I think that Nostalgie wanted to say that if he plays in the NT match he just gets very, very little of the bonus training and the risk of injury is not worth of it... You can be lucky and nothing happens, but you can even destroy a player just by playing him in NT...

it is a maximum player can earn in training, when he plays additional nt matches difference is only about +5% which is nothing if you consider risk of injury when player can lose much more training than he could ever get from playing in national team


i feel we have just very bad luck about strikers. we did everything we could to improve our offensive power, saving strikers from new teams, watching their training and consulting it with actual owners; but they mostly have pretty bad talent and if there were superb potential juniors from your youth schools - they were only keepers, defenders and midfielders


this is why countries like malta have strikers with sum of skills (pace+technique+striking) about 45 and we have only 37 max and believe me it is very annoying to play with such weak strikers against countries with divine defenders


(edited)