Asunto: National Team

did i do something wrong :p.

It turns out I was wrong, here I thought we could beat you 4-0. But as everyone thought, we couldnt, we could only do it 6-1

Willis got 66 today, newest record...awesome game of him, few last balls...

For those concerned, I've arranged this week to play an U21 (21 & under) match against Canada. Should give players a chance to represent the national team. Since qualification matches are run this week, if any of you are in that situation and you'd rather not have your player represent the NT let me know.

A general guideline is probably checking the age rankings thing. If they're in the top 10 there they could be in with a shot. For any others that aren't in there that I consider to make the team I'll let that manager know via sk mail a bit later in the week.

If I don't receive anything I'll take it that you don't have any problems.

Cheers and good luck with your qualification matches this week.

Ok few players low in form, which is going to alter things somewhat, but we're in the process of slotting things together for the match in 2 hours. Deliberate move by myself to promote the players at a late stage, gives Seca less time to determine what players we're going to select and I've still got a few to go yet.

I haven't had any requests from managers to rest certain players, so I assume everything is fine.

What I'm hoping for here is a close game where we are able to compete against a stronger national side. Anything else is a major bonus :).

Probably a little fortunate to walk away with a draw, Lorenzo totally ran around Bowyer all game which wasn't the intended response. Figured they'd use a winger was just a guess at to which side and fortunately I picked correctly by placing Haereiti in the right area.

Beauchamp had a pretty impressive game, Tarka was a little quiet, although did contribute a few passes to Beauchamp.

With the form of Hewitt I was kind of restricted, possibly could have used another midfielder, Zmire to start with by dropping either Necevski or O'Neill but I thought the 3 strikers up front played well and probably earnt their spot in the lineup.

So yeah with the obvious fact of getting less possession due to having fewer in the midfield combined with the amount of times our mids were tackled, that ended up creating less opportunities.

However, the defense dropped back far too quickly again, they weren't meant to drop back that far, perhaps thats a t.d issue I didn't consider, will look at that later.

Anyways a 3 all draw against Canada is a pretty decent result and I'm quite satisfied with it.

Edit: Looked pretty slow out there, probably largely due to the pace of the opposition as well as being use to having faster players with our A team.
(editado)

Thanks for the match. :) Your keeper had a strong match, and you took your chances well.

I was surprised by O'Neill - didn't (don't?) think he was that good. He made a very good defender in Sebrango look bad a number of times.

Thanks again. :)

Yeah, Deeley is a pretty awesome player for us in goals.

O'Neill does that to you. He's better than people give him credit for, the only thing that usually happens, is he misses from close range but fortunately that didn't happen too often.

Necevski was giving the other outside defender a few problems before being subbed off as well, which was probably more surprising.

Think what scared me the most was Lorenzo beating Bowyer, allowing a simple cross into the box, with our defenders retreating far too much (wasn't meant to retreat that much) to allow a shot on goal, which i think you capitalized on a few times.
(editado)

Haereiti made no errors in defense this time :)
But I believe the defense was really too low on the field. I think you could have avoid 1 goal like that.
And it will be even more important that we will have more long shots so it's useless to put defenders too low.

Seca: I wouldn't be too embarrassed about O'Neill. He topped very good form for the first time ever this week when he went from v.g -> incredible form. He's never played as good as he did in that match before, never really gone close to that to be honest.

Hmm ok, if you say you thought it was his best match perhaps I've overstated about that being around O'Neill's usual apart from not missing the short shots. In that case I'll take your word over my own since you've seen him play more than I have ;).

One thing is for sure though he played a very good game as did Beauchamp.

Beauchamp did all right didn't he.... I was quite pleased with his effort. A couple of silly passes, but he hit the final pass for two of the goals.

But for some reason he wasn't credited for an assist. Oh well, for his third game he was pretty good.

Well the first goal wasn't actually an assist because Verville attempted to trap the ball and couldn't do so, despite getting a touch on the ball. Whether or not cases like that should be given as an assist is another thing ;).

But I believe the defense was really too low on the field.

Yeah, that was one thing I definitely noticed. Wasn't "meant" to be that low, but I know why it came about and that happened due to corner positioning. Canada through Lorenzo quite often got the ball past our defender into the actual corner square, and then our players retreated.

That was the only time they were "meant" to be low to prevent free headers at the gk. All the other rows had them outside the goal box so I'm going to test something on wednesday to see if I can fix this issue so it won't happen in future matches because as you said it definitely cost us a lot of shots plus probably a goal or two.

Was kinda weak game of Maras...oh well, let's give the kid some time...

the one chance he got, he ran into the defender instead of running away from the defender then coming in to shoot. Maras still has work to do :p.