Subject: NT matches: Friendlies

Great Result but as i saw lucky result?:p I will watch the match in the evening ;] But Nippon will play in next match in Mini World Cup! It's Fantastic :)

but we will lose probably our position because Rossiya won with Sweden today ;P

As you mentioned, defense was good again, I planned to let them shoot from distance and tackle them from the front to minimize their advantage from the high-technique strikers.
Midfield and attack: well, if I pull back our most technical striker, the defenders can tackle him from the front, which means a certain lost ball given his playmaking (and technique) level. Currently we don't have an offensive-mid type player, but if Uiije will get 1-2 seasons of technique, he can play there.
I intended to miss the defensive mid from this match, Miyazawa (who is the most suitable as a def-mid) couldn't tackle their strikers anyway and with a def-mid in the tactic they might have chance to break through our defense. Probably I should have played the two mids a bit lower though, but it's quite hard to produce good midfield play without Inoha.

Btw we'll play with Australia next week if I'm not mistaken.

uuu Australia won last Mini World Cup, they won in final with great Turkey... it will be very hard match

I won't be able to post the line-up before the match unfortunately.
We're clearly not the favorites, but I'm going to ban cometer now, it will bring good luck hopefully :P

will only make things worse :p. Was in the process of typing a rather long message when you banned me, so as for that expect to get belted by more than 10 :p.

mod humor... weird...

had I know that two of my players would be pitted against eachother, I would have waited to sell kilkelly for another two days:)

Tactic was a bit predictable, but you did a great job against a better team... Maybe you should play wit 7 defenders(a bit like turkey against Czech Rep.)

That was my worst tactic against the best opponent so far. I feel lucky that we conceded only 3 goals. Throw-ins were messed up, the wing-strikers were totally ineffective, even the defense had a bad day with all those balls bouncing away...

We're going to play with Senegal next Saturday. I intend to give a rest to our best players and play with the reserves.

nippon was lucky that the moldavian defs were too slow and that their coach expected nippon to come over the wings

Sorry for being silent in the last week.

Game against Senegal: I was quite disappointed that our players were not good enough to win the match. Tactic was also not the best choice... so let's forget that already...

Game against Moldova: I'm very happy that Inoha could return and he had an awesome match! We managed to expose the hole in the defense several times, Hiraoka was unusually effective on one-on-ones. Great match and great result :)

nippon was lucky that the moldavian defs were too slow and that their coach expected nippon to come over the wings

IMO the defense of Moldova was the worst possible solution against wingers. Having 4 defenders positioned like this is a suicide, I tried it several seasons ago and had a clear defeat.
On a sidenote, the defenders of Moldova roughly has the same pace as our strikers.

Hiraoka was unusually effective on one-on-ones.

He was every time very effective :)

yes, the positioning of the defs was also very unfortunate. They were totally unable to cover for mistakes and even in the very unlikely case that nippon would play with wingers (nippon often plays without wingers), the backs were played too central to really be effective anyway.

because Nippon haven't got so good wingers, only Takahagi but he is weak to for world football :P