Asunto: National Team

I’m a little concerned we’re still short in the midfield area compared to other sides. Most of our mids lack at least one skill to make them stand out (a lot missing two).

I've got a handful of good ones coming through but they're probably three seasons away I'd guess.

My NAT pipeline dried up for a bit. I had a golden generation of mids coming through to the NATS for a while there (Hammond, Bracken, Haugland, Prince, Curcija, Vasilevski, and finishing with Van G.) and I think because I had that crop my next ones are a bit of a gap away. I might need to get better with my age staggering.

I think we all just go through runs of good and bad. And with more of us training for the NT, it's also harder to get them to break in to it, and then continue on to the seniors.

I have managed to have 10 Aus trainees for a number of seasons now, which may not be the best for my team growing stronger, it has definitely lead to a lot of players competing for spots. Most end up being good enough for at least some U21 matches, but it is pretty difficult to get them to the level or senior NT when they are competing against those 1-2 years either side of their age too

It'd be interesting to know whether the new training regime has given us a better spread of positions being trained across managers... or a worse spread eg: I used to train 10 Aussie mids, now I only train 6. I wonder whether this is evened out or we've all accidently skewed the training towards a certain position.

Well I’ve gone from 6 strikers to 3 strikers,2mids,3defs and 1gk for a net increase of 4 slots. Anyone who was a striker or gk trainer have gained slots for training. One would hope we have more players being trained as a result but the quality could be interesting. Like it would appear as if there a number of teams in our a league who don’t train players at all (some very experienced at the game)

I think it's not worse than previously.

I went from MID's (with the occasional striker or defender to finish them off in Tech or Pace), to 2 strikers, 2 Defenders, 6 MIDs

I was more along the lines of individual teams keeping their youths they wouldn’t previously and then not having as good coaches as someone that would have picked them up previously or else not regularly ensuring they get the most beneficial training structure (eg playing in wrong position or setting wrong position in training or failing to play regular games to gain the most training etc). I agree it should be an improvement but it’s possible players that say agbell or yourself would have picked up previously are now not being sold on and instead trained at a lower intensity etc. I mean that’s a good thing the more we get involved in training players but yeah we still need to maximise training efficiency where we can.

Yeah that's a fair thought. Didn't read the above that way, but very true

Currently training 9 Oz....DEF (P+T+D), ATT (P+T+S)...couple of slow-burners might measure up at some point.

DEF - Arrarte 26 (43)
DEF - Craig Van Gisbergen 25 (42)
DEF - Hayden Buonavoglia 25 (37)
DEF - Rory Groom 23 (39)
DEF - Ray Tong 19 (25)
DEF - James Agius 18 (24)

ATT - Loyd Zillman 21 (32)
ATT - Denis Oliveira 20 (28)
ATT?MID - Dion McColl 20 (7/6/10-10/10)

So another week, another side way better than us and we exit the game with a draw. Didn’t get as much time this week as I would have liked to refine the tactic but we held on reasonably well. More ranking points gained, although kind of sick of all these draws. 3 1-1 draws in a row now. That leaves us with USA in 2 weeks to try and snatch 3rd position in the group. Probably sinks Panama from qualifying now too. Should have our full choice team again next week with selling and martinovic having served their suspension and we should get players like bishop back as well.

Draws v better ranked opposition far better than losses. Great results when punching above your weight.

Looks like we're going to have a week off without a match. Unfortunately, we're in a group of 5 teams and it's our turn to miss a WCQ. There are only 4 groups of 5 teams and Ukraine and Ecuador have already scheduled their match, so we're left with Paraguay. I've both sent an invite and a skmail to their manager earlier this week and nothing has since happened. Not a whole lot more I can do so it's down to their NT manager now,

Been impossible to scout this week since the match viewer is basically busted. Think Netherlands were expected to play u27/28s so it wasn’t their strongest team. That being said they still out rated us by 6. We ended up winning 5-3 in penalties but I don’t understand how the penalty takers work anymore. Thought it was highest number by att/mid/def but it didn’t seem to play out exactly that way. Should give us some useful ranking points as well.

Lol whoops. Must have overscrolled on making player subs as I subbed Crampton on to play in defense. Will be interesting to know how much that hurt us. Meant trajcevski stayed on for pens and we scored 4/4 (traj/sutton/prince and haugland). Must be lowest number first for att/mid/def)

From my understanding, when looking at the match viewer tactic screen, it goes in order of most attacking players (ie furtherest up the pitch).
It probably also does all ATT first regardless of position, then all MID etc but not certain as I don't normally play weird positional orders based on the tactic.

Pretty sure it’s all ATT first from lowest to highest number, then all MiD lowest to highest number etc. That seems to be how it went today. Might even have the set penalty taker go first actually but yeah interesting. Shame we can’t set our penalty takers for pen shootouts in match orders.
(editado)

Don't be silly.....more important things to develop & work on, than worry about being able to set pen takers or even increase subs to 5, in line with RL. ;-[