Asunto: National Team

Trajcevski had 0/20 against them last time :p

What can you expect, he had a minor car accident the day before shattering both legs and his pelvis.
I don't know, these managers these days :D

4-0 result which seems incredibly harsh given we had probably as many chances as they did. Many of ours didn't get the last shot off and most of their chances ended up being saved but rebounded to their other striker (for the extra shot). Selling had a mare of a game, missed a lot of tackles and also played them onside on numerous occasions.

They're a better side then us but I don't think they deserved to win by 4. 1 at most.

1-0 win against Slovenia but probably a little fortunate after having 2 midfielders red carded in the first half. Playing with 9 including only a DM and a winger gave them so much space to move us around and they probably should have scored at least once. Defenders played well for us though and we got a goal against the general run of play.

Pondeljak and Sutton are enough to handle to midfield :D

So I've entered us into the Mini World Cup and the Asian Cup for this season which blocks out most weeks. That's a good thing as I think the next month is going to be challenging for myself as I'll have limited access.

That being said we drew Estonia (Eesti), USA and Hong Kong for the Mini World Cup group stage. Regardless of whether we progress from there we have fixtures right the way through the MWC as we get to play off for whatever minor places we get. Minimum acceptable finish is 3rd in the group, would like to try and get 2nd though. Finishing 3rd gives us a better run for the rest of the tournament albeit we can't win the MWC from that point on (but may result in better match ups for ranking points.

Asian Cup we should have a good chance of doing well there.

As a side note, I want to begin to communicate more privately about particular players and whether they have a chance and what skills they need. I've done it with some of you already but would like to start doing this more broadly (especially for those with uncertainties about NT futures etc).

Solid effort today without our 2 suspended midfielders (bishop and prince). Brought VG back in as cover despite his poor form as he’s one of our best mids still in skills.

Ended up winning 2-1 and only conceded when Myburg failed to clear away or tackle their striker in the box after a cross.

Finally will gain some ranking points after a bit of a drought last season

Nice work on the win. The building blocks have been there, this may be the season it all turns around

VG's form is a nightmare, it's been rubbish for two seasons. It gets up to about 3, then drops back to 0.... it's killing my team!

Have you tried working out whether 1 game, 2 games a week helps? Or even say partial games?

I found when Crampton went through years of awful form in his early 20s that when I started playing him in 60min spurts his form started going up. Took me ages to find somehh th gin that worked and now he’s been too form pretty much for seasons now. I don’t believe form is completely random, it doesn’t really seem probable that players mostly end up on one end of the spectrum for eternity. We also know for a fact if players never play they end up in low form and stay there. I feel like there’s something else at play that influences things and then there’s a random chance thrown on top. Problem is there’s no mention of what specifically those other things are so you’re left essentially guessing in agony trying to find something that works.

He gets plenty of game time. I'm not so sure if SK is sophisticated enough to have tricky hidden formulae for getting a player out of poor form. I think it's moreso that there's probably a bell curve distribution of player's form and VG is just an outlier at this point. Happy to try something different though. Perhaps I need to sacrifice a goat.

Ordinarily I’d agree the path of least resistance would be more likely but when current devs mention form is complex (or that’s what they say publically you wonder). I just know with Cramptons case he was going nowhere for seasons and I changed something he went up, repeated the same thing he went up, stopped doing what I was doing thinking he was going to move and he fell again for a few weeks and then I went back to the other process and he went all the way up to divine in a matter of weeks. Whilst that could simply be rng (and it may well be, rng is funny at times), I’ve also heard stuff before from years back about the complexity of form and that it wasn’t entirely random (wish I could remember the thread)

11 shots to 8 in our favour and we lose 3-1. A little harsh again especially when 2 of USAs goals came from. FK outside the box and a GK fumble to rub salt in the wound. Meanwhile we can’t buy a goal at the other end despite creating some opportunities.

Yay a decent result for a change. 2-0 with a 10-1 shot count advantage. Bad news is that probably means we qualify from the group for a much harder rest of the tournament.

We finished 2nd in our group behind Estonia as a result of them forfeiting to us in the first round. We’ve drawn group B winners which is Ireland which is probably a nice draw of who we could have got. Winner of that game then plays Iceland or Russia (and we’ve recently beaten Iceland). Let’s try and win this thing which wasn’t the initial aim when entering the tournament but we’ve got an outside chance of making the final now. Still going to be difficult with so many players in low form or unavailable due to injury and with myself still travelling but will give it a go.

Pretty tight game against Ireland and we narrowly lost 1-0. VG came on and got sent off within a minute.