Subject: u21 coach

the team did exactly what I had planned .

All the midfielders played well. They all had high rating and with the possession of the ball and all the passes to winger and to attackers helped making opportunities.
the two substitutions helped even more the team perform with more speed.

we have still work to do. 4 more difficult matches and everything can be done.
so please everybody be patient.
I will try to do the best by having the correct players at the correct positions.
next week is tha match against France. very difficult match. we will see after Thursday's training how the formation will be

oraios:)

cheers

this match could end into a great success, but it ended up with a loss.

clearly, France has very very ( and there are very many "very" here ) fast players. that's why we could not make anything better in our defense and in our attack.
I knew that this was their advantage, so I tried to have many good players at mid in order to gain as much possession as possible. Of course this is not easy with such opponents, so I think that 40-60 was an acceptable balance.
Play at first half is by far against us. And that's justified too from the fact that I selected to have many defensive players in order to keep the score in low levels and not these 4-1 or 7-0.

I had some good opportunities to score. I did it once but they did it twice even if they had to play with one player less. I tried a new player playing as wing back. He performed extremely well apart from 10 minutes in the second half. His personal opponent is Antoine. He is just unstoppable.
France is a great team .

I believe this score ( 1-2 ) is a success.

Hope Denmark will lose, good job mate, it was an unlucky result :)

well, it would be really surprising to see Kypros next season in WC group. I hope you will succeed.
Even though that kypros ex coach, ostulc, leads Danmark :-(
(edited)

I think it was a fair result.
Denmark had some very good chances, we had some other as well

I didn't expect that Denmark's coach would change his formation.
Although he played with winger and we didn't have any wing back, his player did nof create any chance from that side.
we have still 2 matches. we will see how we will play

Unfortunately, there are not many things to say.
We had to win, bust at the end we did not.

We only had 3 good chances to score.
It did not happen. 0-0 was the result.

I didn't have any chance today to go through to world cup and that's why I used some of the 20 yo.

We were very lucky in some matches and very unlucky in some other matches. It's not my style to complain about match engine or anything else.
It was clearly my mistake in both matches against Honduras. Especially in the first match, the set up of the team was extremely defensive.

Good luck to France, which was clearly the most powerful team I faced and I think it has extremely good players.

I believe that Cyprus has valuable players and there is hope for the future

Thank you for the interesting end of the qualification... You had a great season thanks to Sevket and other decent players.

However let me ask one question: I didn't have any chance today to go through to world cup. We had the same points today, you were playing weak Latvia, I was playing strong France. I think the cards were on your side...

today at your match, I would bet all of my fortune for your win.
France is first.
Last week and this week too ( as expected ) ,France used many 20 yo players and you used all of your best players.. The reasonable result was your win.
This is what I think.

If you were first at this group since 2 weeks ago, you would also use 19 and 20 yo players.
I would do the same thing.


**And also: I was -6 at the goal difference **
(edited)

I still think that I was likely to lose today ;) Even with those 20yos, France was way stronger (in terms of player values, they have almost 1mil€ on average whereas I was about 800k€). Furthermore the values are a bit confusing (when I have to play even players in crappy form or those distributed in a weird way). The next point is, that France was still fighting for going through from the first pot - and they really wanted to win today. I think that there was about 90% chance of French win. From this viewpoints, I don't see any reasons why you wouldn't have played for win today...

As for the -6 goal difference - if you won and I lost you are through as you have simply more points.

this is how I thought.
maybe you are correct , maybe I am correct .

good luck for world cup..

forgot to mention that I will focus on players that are now 18 and especially 19 in order to have as much as powerful players we can at the age of 20 and 21 playing again in qualifications.


I am extremely sorry that I disappointed all the Cypriot users giving so much hope without having the proper ending

No problem mate, good job ;)

good job, anyway... the quali has been interessting