Asunto: National Team

kinda strange to see the defenders crowd each other out in the penalty box and the striker ends up with the ball :(

It was a decent effort mate, we stayed in the game a lot longer than expected. anyway as you said earlier, it wasn't points we needed so we will just look forward to Austria

Had Willis been on the left when Storey got their defender sent off, might have been a completely different game ;).

I'm trying to work out why we're fading out the last 30, we conceded 3 goals to NZ and 5 goals to Belgie the past 2 1st XI matches. Stamina isn't an issue amongst our players and the defenders aren't moving very far deliberately to conserve stamina.

It wasn't bad. Good game. :)

Yeah I thought 2-1, maybe 3-1 their way would have been fair. Storey's 1-on-1 after dribbling a ton of them would have been awesome to see finished, but wasn't to be.

Good try against Belgium. Thought the red card might give the leg-up needed, but they were still too much. Ando was missed today - Ferris didn't really help much.

I tried to put bourke through too but it said he wasnt good enough... He has 7 caps so i thought cometer might be interested to see him.

Yeah I'm still trying to tweak the requirements to accomodate most players. Bourke should be in the db, so I'll tweak it down so you should be able to submit him.

Yeah, except Ferris isn't too far behind Ando. We probably missed Pottier more than missing Ando but either one of them would have possibly made a difference. We held them for 60minutes, then they got a couple of fortunate goals which started a landslide victory. I'd say the first 45min probably belonged to us and we just got run over in the last 20-25min.

Positive for the week is that Osterreich only managed to beat Republica Dominicana 2-0 :s. A very poor performance from Osterreich imo, should be able to have beaten them 6 or 7 to 0 with relative ease. The fact they only got 9 shots indicates to me they didn't create enough opportunities. Even with an average tactic I reckon we could bag a minimum of 5.

Makes it interesting as we could potentially secure 2nd spot with a single win against Osterreich if we can beat them goal difference in the other games.

I tried to put bourke through too but it said he wasnt good enough... He has 7 caps so i thought cometer might be interested to see him.

Actually the reason Bourke misses being able to submit is because he doesn't pass the PM minimum cut off set. However, I believe I can manually edit his skills since he's in the db, so sending a skmail to myself should do the trick until he reaches the minimum pm cutout level.

The other alternative is for me to drop the pm skill a few levels to allow him in, although it then allows others in who won't ever get a game. Hmm, I'll have a think about it.

Actually I dont know the actual skills of Willis, but I've seen them about 2 seasons ago somewhere and his 4 main midskills were all brilliant and magical then if I remember correctly and I'm quite sure he became faster (as borkos trained pace) and probably other skills have increased too :)

yup :P

Fixtures list is completed and is viewable on the NT page by clicking the fixtures list article.

Should be a few interesting games in amongst there.

Hey cometer, that was an awesome effort! We deserved to be all square after 60-mins, even maybe with a goal or two. Disappointing to go down, but that's what happens against top teams. Our luck ran out and they piled on a few goals.

I was surprised to see Belgium playing so conservatively. Also happy to see out defence stand up under pressure for most of the game. Bodes well for the rest of the campaign.

Excellent tactic though. Belgium will take more notice of us on the return leg.

Their manager already considered us as a threat, hence why I think they went the conservative option. To be fair I expected them to go for a back 5, I was pretty convinced they'd do that. The only thing I didn't think would happen would be Deroo being able to tackle Broxton almost at will. That was rather scary because Broxton has a lot of technique and had magical form.