Asunto: National Team U21

And the terrible conversion season continues

8 shot to 0 against El Salvador and its a 0:0 draw.
This season is honestly so frustrating

For the first time all season, our strikers actually decided to shoot on target and score.

We beat the #1 team in the world cup qualifying group, but due to the terrible conversion rate all season, we fell well short of qualifying despite easily being the 2nd best team in the group.

It's disappointing not to be going through given our tactics almost always matched up well against our opposition, but it does give us the opportunity to participate in the Mini World Cup for the first time in a long time.

Nail the MWC then go one better!! :)
This time I’ll remember to get my NT election votes in.

Haha thanks mate.

So there's been a change of plan. I realised if we participated in the MWC, we wouldn't see our current 21yo play at all (between that and the druids cup).
So Asian cup u21 has been brought forward, and then we will participate in the druids cup where we will be limited to playing just 2 u21s.

Asian cup we have a great chance of taking it out.
Druids cup there are some strong teams playing and we are one of the teams that have some of the harshest penalties on players allowed to be used (because our rating is much higher than the skill of our team), but I'll still be giving it a good crack and see what we can make of it

Asian Cup is fitting, since we're about to compete in the actual Asian Cup.

A little bit late but time for a new round of season stats to start the season. Once again allowing us to see how we have progressed over the past 14 or so seasons since I started collecting stats when I took over the team (for objective stats rather than subjective ones often used by other managers).



Last season was certainly a difficult season results wise where we just couldn't score for the life of us. We actually outscored and outplayed almost every match in the season but alas sokker gods had their final say.

Looking back at the players when I placed them in my large database of the skills players had when leaving U21s (ie turning 22), our BIG weakness were midfielders. Our #1 mid for the season (Junior Milne) came in at #27 for all time (since I started coaching) MIDs produced - mind you, at the time this puts him in line with "great players for their season" Mark Cook, Jay Curcija, Oliver Hill.

Strikers were also a relative weakness but nowhere near as bad. Stuart Lang was actually very good, entering the top 10 of all time, whilst backups Karavatakis and Nesic were top 30.

Now Defenders, they were far and beyond a huge STRENGTH - just WOW. Kirkpatrick top 2 ever, Van Blerk and Crews top 10 and Aguis and Cooper rounding out the top 25. To have the top 5 defenders all in the top 25 is pretty incredible.

GK - well our reserve goalie, the only one from the U21 age (as Munn is our number 1 GK and was 20yo) bring him in at last, although this is a bit harsh on Shaw because he was actually one of our best reserve keepers we have had (ie keepers that didn't go on to be the main keeper).

What it does mean though is that we get to participate in both the Asian Cup and the Druid's cup this season (not the best for us trying to get back in to the 2nd pot, but should be fun competition wise). If there is one thing we learned last season, is that even if you do the hard yards to squeeze in to the pot above, it doesn't mean you won't get messed up by the draw of the World cup Qualification groups (either getting a 5 team group or drawing teams that should be in pot 2 themselves).

Interesting to note this season is our starting rating is somehow super high, so if that continues to go up throughout the season like it normally would, we will have a very strong team. Although Druid's cup will limit this a bit as we will be limited to just 2x U21s in the team.

Goals for this season would be...
Reach the semi finals of the Asian cup at a minimum. Par would be reaching the final, and then winning would be a good achievement (we are favourites but only just - it is pretty competitive).
Druid's cup - we are in pot 3 for this despite being in the 2nd most harshly handicapped, so it will be a difficult competition. This means that Par would be 3rd in our group, but I'd really like to see us get 2nd in our group.

So we say goodbye to the following 21yo players (this is not our best U21s for last season, just the best 21yos)

GK - Owen Shaw
DEF - Kane Kirkpatrick
DEF - Adrian van Blerk
DEF - Dustin Crews
DEF - James Aguis
DEF - Kane Cooper
MID - Junior Milne
MID - Ray Goulding
ATT - Stuart Lang
ATT - Tim Karavatakis
ATT - Austin Nesic

Kirkpatrick top 2 ever

And claims he's not done yet...

(editado)

Without knowing the previous #1 current skills, from putting the pieces of the puzzle together that have been shared, I'd say that if Kirkpatrick is training in Pace and Def to mid Divine and then his secondaries, he should become the top quite easily (I worry the previous #1 wasn't trained ideally once he got to 2x divine, which is a shame)

Once again, that was a terrible roll for RNG.

We had a penalty kick, a rebound of the penalty kick with noone in front, multiple shots between 4-8yd out, and still no goal.

Thankfully we got a draw, but this RNG I have been getting is making me dislike the game. I don't know if they have changed something game wide, or whether there has been a sneaky change made by someone not happy with things, but it is utterly ridiculous.

Anyway the big match will now be against Israel next week. Israel are yet to play tonight but I doubt they will have any issues doing away with Singapore, and they got the forfeit win against Zhonghou (who we just drew with), so our only real hope will be to beat them.

Unlikely to have been changed. Devs wouldn't dare touch the match engine at this stage. They can't even get UI elements right without issues, without the complexities the match engine code would have.

The last change they did on the viewer was update to make it HTML rather than Flash but that has nothing to do with the match engine again.

Suspect it's mostly noticeable now because our U21 team is now a lot stronger then it use to be on average, so we're controlling games more often but failing to secure wins. At U21 this isn't helped by the fact most teams have divine GK's but most strikers aren't divine, thus chances of misses or saves are therefore much higher. Not sure what our current U21 strikers are sitting at but that could be one reason. The other could be that handicap system I've mentioned as well. So a change there is the shortened seasons and the ability for most people to now train keepers instead of a dedicated keeper trainer, thereby the keeper pool should be stronger.

I find with penalties though strikers fall into the miss more then they score category by some margin, or score more than they miss category. It's seems to be rare for them to be 50-50, it's one extreme or the other. Something to keep in mind if we continue to miss pens.

Edit: Just looking at our skills versus what I expect their GK to be, I suspect my initial thought may have been what has happened. Their GK is huge for U21 standards and also in top form. Our strikers aren't in amazing form and definitely won't be matching their GK's stats so we're going to have a hard time scoring.

End of the day though it still is annoying having control of the game but not being able to find the net.
(editado)

I mean could be worse. Could be This match

If I'm reading right, Scotland gets a walkover tomorrow in Druids, putting a bit more significance on our game against Schweiz. Though, with walkovers, it's a bit of a mystery who will end up playing who in the knock-out rounds.

Going in our favour, Schweiz just snuck into cat A, so they can only use U20 players, while we can use 2x 21yo?

On the other hand, not sure how strong our U20 stocks are. I guess we'll find out tomorrow night.

Interesting format for a comp. Good luck, achmid.
(editado)

This is correct

It's not much of an advantage, but at least it helps us ever so slightly.

I feel there is a pretty big drop off between ages, especially when it comes to depth, and we have a LOT of players out of form which is unfortunate. Players who would be starters aren't even in the lineup due to form.

It should be an interesting match for sure. Unfortunately, I will be at work when it is being played

We do have a bunch on debut as well, which should make it interesting (double digits within the squad).

Haven't watched the game but looks like we absolutely dominated that match despite the 3:2 scoreline in our favour (they only had 2 shots).

We were so good, that we actually had 4 goal scorers....with Langdon scoring an own goal.

Good start to our run in the Druid's Cup, let's see what next week holds

Our opponent is still in the World Cup, so looks like we get a walkover for the 2nd round of the Druid's cup.
This will put us on 6pts and in a great position to place 1st or 2nd in our group.

All teams go through to the cup phase of the Druid's cup, but in theory, it should mean we come up against an "easier" team for at least the 1st round of the cup stage. This can easily be messed up though by teams currently in the world cup who are forfeiting matches, thus ending up near the bottom of their group.

I will try to arrange a friendly this week, but many teams are caught up in the various different competitions

Nice to see Prince score some goals.