Asunto: National Team

Simon Papaluca is looking awesome. How's he rank among the other keepers now? Best player from the TMP junior school so far.

3rd U21 keeper atm.

Cool, a big difference in skills between top3?

Yeah except Papaluca is catching up due to receiving keeper training. Probably a bigger gap from top 3 to 4th then from top 2 to 3rd.

Pleasantly surprised for Libbesson to make the team. Stewart's a star in the making, so not surprised at his inclusion.

Yeah our midfield's looking a little on the light side atm and with Puca and Villafane both out for today's match it doesn't make it any easier.

Well we're set. Actually not the tactic that I planned to create last night, although I'm making some adjustments to the tactic as we speak to try to get it fairly close to what I planned.

Edit: Might add, most of these tweaks are ideas that should be possible to have executed under the new M.E from what I've seen. We'll find out if they work or not.
(editado)

Yawn. Hope that's not what it's going to be like when it comes out permanently, otherwise division 3/4 teams have absolutely next to no hope of scoring. Tried to make it in such a way to string passes together consecutively to stretch their defense and open it up but their massive pressing ended up squishing any chance we had of building any attack. In the end we were probably lucky to survive for a draw.

Seems you can't win without a winger if you're the weaker side anymore. Guess it's back to the drawing board to try and come up with something that works.

I guess too that was pretty close to their top team against our understrengthed U21 side, so hard to gauge exactly how much of it is being outskilled player wise, tactical issues and/or match engine related but it's a little surprising we didn't even get a shot off. Don't think we've had that happen to us under my control. Some players also seemed very sluggish (Alagich particularly) perhaps it had something to do with their defenders having more pace because Alagich isn't exactly snail pace which it certainly seemed to be like.

Will take a few games to get a grip of it but I'm not sure I'm liking the fewer chances. Loving the passing but not appreciating the snore wars. Their best chance came from beating our strongest defender with ease and thankfully Lewis was up to the task. Selling scrambled well also preventing a few rebound chances.

Edit: Realise it's late at night but would like a few comments regarding suggested ideas for improvements from observations picked up as I've watched a few results and they all seem to be near impossible to breach the line. Japan breached ours because our players don't have the best stamina levels and so faded out in the 2nd half ;).

My intention of this tactic was to create a pass to a player in midfield then have the midfielder who passed and the other outside midfielder push up quickly and wide to offer the opportunity to pass back. So most of the offense was changed to try and cater for lots of reasonably quick passes to open up a gap to get to our strikers. This didn't happen as we didn't get far enough up field due to their reasonably high positioned defense and Ielati then got caught in no man's land rather than in free space to then redirect play. Strikers probably needed to be moving more frequently then before also as they were well contained. Think Alagich had the best moment for us but got caught way too easily :s.
(editado)

Watched the game again. Few things I've noticed when comparing to the tactic editor. We essentially lost 1 midfielder in Ielati because he was swamped by their defensive midfielder. Often Libbesson and Stewart would have the ball looking for an option to find not much happening and we'd turn over the ball. We had a fair chunk of the ball that 1st half, we should have created something from that. 2nd half we tired quickly and territory and possession blew out. Liked a few of the combo's in passes but it didn't really stretch the defense anywhere near as much as I'd like.

Tactical discipline let us down a bit in the defense, a few players not quite "experienced" enough left some surprising holes in the centre of defense, none of which was really exploited by Japan but other stronger teams probably would have shot us there.

Another area of concern is goalkicks, most resulted in free ball regather for Japan as our mids were out of the range of the goalkeeper. Will look to fix this, has been an issue I've had for a while now and it certainly didn't help today.

I've got a few ideas ahead of the next game, we've got a reasonable U21 side this season, would prefer a few more strikers/midfielders but that's the whole thing about having an U21 side with a lowish active user base anyway.

Bloody Ielati eh?! I'm surprised I saw him that far up the field but there you go, you're trying things out for me!

I noticed a fair few amount of NT managers are having a go at the new ME... Hopefully the devs will listen this time.
(editado)

I'll reserve judgement until I see our first team play. It looked quite good to me. I don't think we had the players to bust through their defence, maybe it was down to the match-ups. Yukio had the measure of Alegich, who had some opportunities.
Both teams looked to have a good tactic. Neither popped a lucky goal to take the points.

Yeah, I've done the same, but div 3 and 4 sides are likely to have less than what we put out on the park last night which concerns me a little bit.

They will, but Japan looked to have a very competent defence. It will probably play out differently with weaker back-lines.

woohoo! go villafane!

Appears to be an U22 match this week after talking with the manager of Costa Rica. Gives us a few more options, particularly up front. A few of the current U21's will probably get a run though.

Well the lineup is set for the game now. Expecting to grab the win especially considering the combination plays and defender blocking aren't in place for this game. Should play very similar to the old/current M.E I would imagine. A win today should secure us that top 28 spot when there's only a handful of matches left. Main threat is Canada, so I'm hoping they don't win big against South Africa.

A 2-0 win overnight see's us creep back into 26th spot as Colombia and Hungary both went down. Canada had a decent win so the pressure is still there for us to make the top 28. Most likely the top 30 will be 2nd seed's but I'm aiming for a top 28 to be safe and make it certain.

Will be out looking for a game this week after Slovakia progressed in the U21 WC and are therefore unavailable next week. We'll see what I can come up with.

Good game of Maras. Bad luck he has only good form though.