Asunto: National Team

Hehe. What an amazing game I had today...muhaha :)

it contrasts with last week... :p

It was reserves :p

Current schedule for rest of season

Week 11 - free
Week 12 - free
Week 13 - Costa Rica (format and confirmation required)
Week 14 - free
Week 15 - Malaysia (competition match if I get a competition going. Meant to start it last week but we didn't have a match arranged until Saturday morning)
Week 0 - New Zealand (1st XI grudge match)
Week 1 - Egypt (our U22's against their 1st XI)

Again, teams appear to be short for this week and I haven't had too many interested offers, other than Egypt which I postponed until week 1.

lol and its already week 10/11.... better get cracking :P

hard to have a competition when matches aren't finalized until the night before, slightly unfair ;).

Depends. You might have to go with a "Who am I..." style competition instead of one relating to matches.

Or even a "Guess who we're playing this week" multi-choice style competition :P

Hehe true. Didn't think of that ;)

or go with a simple tipping comp, it always does the trick... and doesnt require too much detailed knowledge so you can get a wider audience.

We'd understand if you're too busy with school to do something more detailed.

I've actually been finished uni for the past month, so that hasn't been the problem this time. Just haven't gotten around to getting the competition set up officially and have wasted many a night over various sokker issues. In saying that though, hasn't been easy to arrange matches with NT's as the U21 WC has 40 teams in it instead of the usual 32 and everyone around our level is involved in it.

Then because I couldn't think of a way to have a competition without knowing the game in advance, I didn't end up making the competition. Was going to start it last week but couldn't arrange a game, then had plans to start this week and a similar thing is happening despite constantly asking for friendlies. We'll definitely get one going but if it happens to be played early next season instead of this one is another thing.

appears trying to arrange friendlies earlier didn't help much this week either. Got rejected by all those I sent invites to. Given that the only other team atm without a friendly is China, chances are we're unlikely to get a game this week. Have sent an invite to China as a last resort option but I haven't got my hopes up.

After that last game against Cyprus I'm not all that surprised.

Probably going to happen more frequently during U21 WC's in future because we're increasing in strength and sides look to avoid playing us because of it, even if I'm happy to arrange a different format to make it a bit closer but that's the breaks. End of the day we don't lose any ranking points (although we lose the potential to gain a few more).

Anyway, doesn't change the fact I'm not happy about not having a game this week but there wasn't a lot more I could have done to arrange one without entering into the U21 tournament which isn't going to happen under my reign due to the weakness of our U21 sides compared to other NT's.

There are some scarily good U21 players out there. Shame to miss a game, but them's the breaks.

yeah there are and it's one of those reasons I don't enter U21 tournaments when my priority is to secure a 2nd seed for the WCQ which is an official tournament. I'd enter U21 tournaments if U21 was a separate side though.

Anyway, gives me a chance to pluck players from the database I haven't heard from since beginning of October this year and fire off skmails to get those updates if any, before trimming the db back a bit and trimming the NT squad back to 40. Just gone through the database, taken me about 30-40minutes and I've now got to send off approximately 250 skmails, probably about half will be trimmed afterwards anyway. Good times lie ahead, if you see me online in 10 hours I'll probably still be doing the same stuff :D.

If you give me a list, I can send some off to share the load.