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Score on the draw, looks like this could be a promising season if we can keep the training and the GS up!

Yes, Wales and various sunny caribbean islands does like a nice draw.

Basic report on the Japan game; they were an underpowered team and their coach managed to undermine his efforts by playing LI again. Predictions paid us a big PD dividend of +70, putting us in a great position, we need to keep up the training and GS focus but at least this season it's pretty certain we are looking at a tourney spot.

Nice start mate.

Season update

Having lost the first game of our season today I think all in all I did all I could here, our game shape was terrible (no offence but of my first choice players only 3 were strong or proficient) - our DMI stats said it all in the game preparation. They had 8 players of higher DMI than ours with their top C having a DMI of 1.2 million. our highest is 380k. Their C's are devastating, no less reflected than with their sensational inside offence stat in the box score - for U21 that is unbelievable!

Having lost an approval vote over this (frankly thats insulting and hilarious at the same time) I was a bit miffed, I've worked exceedingly hard over the last 5 seasons with 4 behind the scenes providing training advice and tactics. Yesterday, I helped the team hold one of the top teams in the world down to 17 points difference with a vastly inferior team. The job of the U21 manager is to help the community committed to developing players to train those players, winning games at this level is a secondary concern frankly. I would value anyone who reads this who is training players to contact me and allow me to help you train players up. Like I committed in my election speech, I want to help the community build players for their teams, the NT and then the U21.

With the next game in mind, the next 2 games are straightforward wins, meaning I'll have taken England U21 to it's highest position in the tournament in it's history. We have had a good draw but given this performance today, we have justified our position. The playoffs will be another story but if we get past the first playoff game it will be the highest finish we have ever had in U21 history.

I want to express huge thanks to all the managers working hard to train players. The players we have are clearly a credit to a committed community that love the game and their players. If I could press you a little to try and keep your players in the U21 team a little more in shape, that would be lovely.

Thank you

V

I'd looked at this game beforehand, it was always going to be your most difficult game, and frankly I though the result was going to be a complete catastrophe.

I couldn't watch the game as I was completely concentrated on the NT game, but when I was told we were still in the u21 game at half time, I was almost as shocked as I was that we were in front of Croatia. In the end our efforts petered out in both games but to lose by less than 20 seems like a positive result.

Sensational inside offence is something people really should take into account. Its unbelievably high. As a comparison, in our NT game against Albania, their inside offence also rated as sensational.

All in all, given that you don't have the widest choice of players we've seen at u21 level, you're doing a great job.

Further, I'd say anyone who wants advice on training should get in touch immediately. Having an u21 player doesn't give a huge boost to your merchandising, but it does provide extra interest to the game, and if training continues past the age of 21, it is far cheaper to have an English player than a foreigner in your starting lineup.

Hey,

I didn't see the result but did look at their inside dominated team to think what we might do...

In terms of people giving you a disapproval vote we played our PF and C at pg and they received a rating of 3/4! I was wondering if their was method to the madness as from a non informed viewer it looks like we could have given them a game but messed up our line up....

ps It wasn't me who gave any such vote I just thought it would be good to ask this so everyone knew your thinking ;)

JB CWA Fury

Their only glaring weakness we could exploit was the OD on the C, given our gameshape I could not go toe to toe inside with them, so used patient with a mismatch. We had a second choice guard with exceedingly good outside shooting. Creating the mismatch in the way I did gave Litherland a huge advantage in shooting over their C's. Flipping the defenses maintained our defensive posture protecting the inside with a 2-3 and kept our rebounding competitive against them.

This was the only way to generate points against them with our gameshape as other than litherland, we had nobody with shape enough to score against them. As you can see that tactic was exceedingly effective in exploiting that weakness and kept the PD down.