Asunto: National Team

Yeah, your mother would tell you to make your bed and it wouldn't happen for days :P

:D

Good to see you haven't left the Australian forums with these quick replies :).

As if!

borkos is used to sulking, he supports Newcastle!!

LOL! Just saw you won in Eesti!

Congrats mate! All the best, should do an excellent job. Although, you don't have a very long way to go to beat the previous manager :P

Thanks :)
I hope I'll manage, the situation isn't too easy. I must beat Osterreich in my first game as NT coach if I want to think about getting 2nd place. :)

Firstly, congratulations borkos for becoming the Eesti NT manager. Secondly, as I have done each week a few stats to get the ball rolling.

Australia vs Suomi

# Users 114 - 865
National team rank 29 - 17
Rank points 1606.59 - 2015.17
Previous encounters
2006-06-03 Suomi - Australia 2 - 0
2005-11-12 Australia - Suomi 1 - 10
Major Goalscorers during past encounters
Tomi Takavainio 8 (Suomi)
William Newhill 1 (Australia)


Fortunately this week is only an U21 match and there isn't as much pressure on performance. This doesn't mean I've gone any lighter preparing for this match then any other as treating this like it was a qualification match gives practice at working out which players can do what and how effective they are under a given position.

Was an interesting time choosing the squad and a few things may change before the match actually starts but I'm hoping we have the depth to perform well under pressure.

If anyone feels like they wish to comment on anything relating to the match that they feel would be better to be sent to myself rather than posted, by all means contact myself via skmail.

Other than that, I hope we're able to perform well and challenge the U21 side of Suomi. :)

Awesome result Cometer :)

I do think we can have to consider ourselves a bit fortunate. Their 10 shots to our 8 mostly came from better positions than ours. The tactic minimised their chances and kept us in the game and provided us with enough chances of our own to give us a chance.

Hirons looked a little rusty in his first game back from injury, but still managed to turn their defensive mid regularly and couple of their defenders at times. His finish wasn't quite there but some decent passes and tackles to go with his dribbling certainly gave their defense plenty to think about.
(editado)

:D. Wasn't expecting to win but we ended up winning 2 - 1. Still a few things need improving as I thought the defense shifted back to quickly which created some chances for Suomi who fortunately didn't convert.

When Hirons missed one on one, I was a bit disappointed but fortunately Storey was there to put away the rebound.

Nohra and Leijer performed well throughout the match with some key defending and passes to get us out of trouble.

Overall, I'm delighted with the victory and shall await feedback from the rest of you lot as to what went well / what didn't.

Cheers. We were fortunate I agree but we took more of our chances which I suppose ultimately is what won us the match.

Hirons played alright in patches I thought. Always can look a bit poor when you're up against a quality opposition. At least he's fit to play against myself this week :)

I knew that Suomi would use wingers, as they've alternated between 2 tactics just modified a few things here and there and so was fairly confident they'd play one of those two again.

That helped significantly in designing a tactic for this game as I knew if we could cut down their wingers and play fast balls down the centre we had a chance.

Ive only skimmed through the match (and if i get called into work tomorow thats as far as ill get) and the only downside i could see was the defence int he middle of the park, as the ball got closer to our goal looked fairly weak, they had oneof their players almost on the dot unmarked which could have been disasterous.

But bsides that, nice win, and hopefully you will continue that on

yeah, that's one of the things I noticed. The defenders were retreating quicker than they were meant to, so that's something I'll have to take a look at for future reference.

great match, 2-1 with suomi ^^

The defense thing i noticed too, i also thought that the strikers were split apart a wee bit too much so they would have to go through 2 defenders to get close to goal. Otherwise you had a bit of luck on your side and won nicely, werd :P

pity that Byers didn't play that good too :(

Yeah Byers was a bit disappointing, but I could just be underestimating the Suomi defense on that side as well.

At 1 - 0 down after 80min I was fairly happy with the way we had restricted them but was a good last 10 minutes that's for sure :).

Very cheeky. Very cheeky indeed. We should not've won that game.

Well done cometer, the tactic covered them nicely and we found plenty of space in attack as well.
One comment I have is that Hirons and Byers were having to fetch too many balls due to the AMs being set too far back. That probably cost us a few chances.