Subject: Ireland Vs...

Well predicted :) I thought it was pretty uncomfortable viewing though, with Coyne and Dean out there wasn't much creativity in our midfield.

Can you use that formation against me in the cup final?
Defensively thats the worst formation i've seen from you. Wingbacks? You cant take midfielders and stick them in defence, you definitely cant then have them run up the other end to attack as well. That left us with a 3-man defence and naturally 1 gets sent off but no-one replaces him with the Red card or No Player order. Its just as well the Greek coach has no faith in his team and decided to defend.

3 points, that's what counts, congrats! ;-)

I didn't really like the positions of Barry-Murphy and Donegan, they lost a lot of balls! Maybe order DEF would have been better ...

Great to see the strikers defense skills! Especially against weaker opponents they get some nice chances when stealing the ball from the opponents defender ;-)

I think that's a fair point, I'm not sure what I was trying to achieve with them. Luckily the rest of the formation had enough redundancy to deal with it. Needless to say the plan for next week is completely different :)

I tried a similar formation a while back and at club level it's not a bad idea because you can get away with mids with reasonable defending at the back, at international level though you're putting defensive midfielders against international wingers and there's only ever going to be one winner.
If you want to play wing-backs with 3 centre-defenders, you have to keep one back and move the defence across to compensate for the gap. Personally i'd play a normal 4-man defence with the 2-wingbacks slightly advanced and wide of them, almost in a 6-man defence.
Still i'd rather have my defensive mids in the centre of the pitch. Only Brunton can really play both positions.
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I totally agree, it was an afterthought really when I was pushing the defence up to play a higher line the other night and I didn't think it through fully. I was thinking passing lines more than actually marking the winger but seeing as he didn't use the formation I expected they didn't really do anything wide except get steamrolled. It will be the last time I try wingbacks like that at NT level but I might use them on wednesday ;)

Jirka's boys gave us a hell of a beating today... I thought we did a bit better in the second half but that was probably down to them being tired from running rings around us. I was hoping they would have gone for 3 at the back which might have given us a few chances but with them going for a 4 and dropping back a bit we were totally closed out.

I'll have to watch it later. At least the score stayed vaguely respectable

No chance at all ... :-(
I guess I would have used a similar tactic, 5 defenders, a winger and Matthews up front.

A big problem was that their winger could do whatever he wanted to do, even though Shevlin stood close to him. Seems to be a monster this winger, I expect almost triple divine in the left side skills ...

Lizrraga and Crossley didn't get many balls, Matthews was never in a position to shoot.

That winger was a bit special alright, Shevlin couldn't have got much closer and he just breezed by him. I think we might have given a better account of ourselves with Dean and Coyne in the team but c'est la vie.

Anyway, I have seven days to figure out how to improve things, any suggestions gratefully accepted :)

Ireland V New Zealand today, with both of us having important games next week it's a chance for the B teams :)


Squad
1 Philip Cryan GK
2 Ray Larkin DEF
3 Jim Walsh DEF
4 Conor Creedon DEF
5 Andrew McCauley DEF
6 Johnny Keenan ATT
7 Richard Barry-Murphy MID
8 Conor Darby MID
9 Murray Lally MID
10 Derek Sanabria MID
11 Corey Curley ATT

12 Luke Hutcheson GK
13 Ben Sullivan DEF
14 Brett Neville MID
15 Anthony Sanabria MID
16 Brendan Cully ATT

Hopefully Curley can put one over his club boss :)

A 3-2 loss, which is mildly annoying but it was a fun game to watch especially with the new animations. Their first goal was almost a direct copy of that goal Rustu let in in the Euros, true comedy :) Our defenders, McCauley aside, showed their various faults which stop them being good options for the 1st team, on the whole I don't think anyone's forced themselves into the reckoning for next week.

For those of you that dont know, my harddrive crashed yesterday apparently wiping everything on it. It's just hit me that the Ireland database is/was on it, along with basically everything i've done in the last 4 years. Shane, i'm really hoping you kept the database i sent you at the start of the season. I'm going to try and recover the files but i'm not optimistic.

I still have the one you sent on so don't worry about that. Hopefully you'll be able to recover some of what you've lost (obv not just the Sokker stuff). :(

yeha man its everyones worst nightmare that happening and it actually did to u!

i guess from this moment on everything u own will be backed up regularly!

hope u can recover it man. the drive is probably intact just not working so im sure u can get it recovered and hopefully cheaply!

Good news - My files appear to be intact
Bad news - I cant sodding access them