Asunto: National Team

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. ;-[

Ha I agree but one can dream for qol features right? ;)

So since my last post didn't go through as I somehow closed the window with some keyboard shortcut, disappointing to end the NT season with a 4-3 loss. Thought for the majority of that game we looked better. Definitely could have been a bit tighter with the defensive line to avoid the free kicks into dangerous areas.

So where to here.

In the coming days I'll post a ranking list of our NT players to give people indications of where their players are relative to other Australian players. I've mostly got ranking ready to go, I just want to add the 22yo's to the db now. Expect that sometime soon.

I'll also push through some sort of closure for the season to see where we were and where we are heading. Big target is to continue to improve ratings to where they should be.

We take on Guatemala in just over an hour (grr daylight savings starting in Europe and ending here tomorrow). No idea what they'll do as they've had a change in NT manager and well their club tactics don't look particularly good (so I'm not really expecting that to be used, though would be nice). They may use an existing tactic sitting with the NT if they weren't deleted before the election.

Good chance for some ranking points.

Thanks for the re-election. Aim this season is again to build our ranking points up and to take a serious look at the current squad and determining if there are players that should be in the squad that aren't.

We will be participating in the Asian cup later in the season with a game against NZ to end the season.

Was too late for the MWC but that's probably ok as there's some tight competition there.

Will update some stats this evening some time regarding where players are ranked.

Have been looking forward to this. For me, seeing the rankings of players and how they change over time (especially in seniors where you have players both getting better and getting worse) is one of the more exciting things to see

Thank for accepting the friendly mate,
It will be a pleasure to play against my former team.
Good luck for the season guys!

Thanks we will need it. We started the new NT season off with a 1-0 win but I can't help but feel our strikers were sluggish. So many 1-1 with the GK and we kept butchering chances. We probably had a further 3-4 chances that didn't result in a shot due to last minute defender tackles.

I really think we should have put 3 minimum past them which would have done our rating wonders. A win is still a win though and our ratings cracked 70 for the first time I can recall since I've taken over.

So I've started a thread and have basically listed the top 30 (plus any others in the same score group) by position. Further down the list it get's a bit murkier so if you see a player ranked 30 it may not mean they're 30th in line to play that position (e.g defenders may show up in midfield positions etc). Hope you find it useful. Feedback welcome and I can try and tailor it to be more useable in the future.

I'll just mention (despite saying in the other thread I wouldn't) that Husein Skaife is on the TL from Ginger Nuts. Currently rank #70 in defender (#10 ranked 22yo but its reasonably close between #2 and #10). If I was picking an U22 side I'd probably have him around 5/6th choice. Just mentioning in case any defender trainer was keen. Any interest please message tabby.
(editado)

As the U21 coach, I can definitely say how crowded that age group was in defenders. My rankings, which are different to cometers, had him at #6 and really very very close to #4.
Trawling through the youths thread as I normally do with these interesting ones, I came across this post on 24-12-21

Talent 2.92 - Solid
Husein Skaife, age: 17
club: Ginger Nuts, country: Australia
value : 58 000 AU$
wage: 1 080 AU$
very good form
tragic tactical discipline
height: 177 cm, weight: 70.1 kg, BMI: 22.38

tragic stamina tragic keeper
weak pace average defender
adequate technique hopeless playmaker
average passing weak striker

So whilst from what cometer says, and my own rankings, he is probably only an outside chance of being in the seniors in the future, it looks like the talent is there to give the best possible chance, however any future plans on keeping him for a team would always need to be kept in mind that he isn't a top top top priority player. With that talent though, he would at least make an excellent club player with some further training for the next few seasons.

Another week another close loss. Won the possession and territory game but we ended up going down 1-0. Will watch later and see where things could have been better. We should still gain ranking points for that though as Vietnam are ranked way higher then we are.

At least the bleeding seems to have stopped now so it’s now just about tweaking things to give us more chances whilst not giving the opponent any more themselves. So far 2 wins and 2 losses this season with the losses both being by 1 goal

Great result to be honest.

As far as ranking points go, I think you will lose about 5pt from 1382.98 but I hope I'm wrong

Yeah we did drop about 5pts. That’s unfortunate

So was unable to arrange a friendly this week. Did try to see if anyone was interested but didn’t get any response. Apologies for that.

Bit sloppy in a few areas against Chile and that probably didn't help too much. Still annoys me when they continuously pump through balls that beat our defensive line and at the other end we look at passing all directions except through their defensive line. A few times we almost ended up gifting them a goal from ridiculous backpasses. In the end we weren't good enough skill wise and tactically and didn't really deserve to win. Trajcevski not being in top form is problematic but he still got us a consolation goal at the end to make the scoreline a little more respectable.