With Season 12 winding down and Season 13 getting set up, I wanted to take a couple minutes to look back on the past two seasons for the national team. We had our ups and downs, made huge strides forward in some areas, but ultimately fell just short of a trophy.
So, how'd we do?
Well, the route to World's wasn't exactly as planned. After cruising through much of qualifying, a surprising and difficult-to-explain loss to Colombia left us in 3rd in the group, and needing to go through the repechage to make World's. We drew two top-10 (or top-15) teams, in Nigeria and Portugal, but were able to hold them both off. The CT vs Portugal left us at a slight disadvantage entering World's (with slightly less than the 5 enthusiasm direct advancing teams got), but this ultimately didn't seem to make much of a difference.
In the opening round of World's, we drew a group that included host team China, and eventual champion Spain. We made the decision to TIE both of those games to build enthusiasm, and this seemed to pay off, as we won the rest of our matches and made it through the first round at 3-2. Unfortunately, as we knew, both China and Spain advanced, so we went through at 1-2. We were able to reasonably expect that it would take a 4-3 finish (or 3-4 with huge PD, which we were very unlikely to have) to make the semi's. So, the plan was to beat France at all costs, TIE Italy, and hope we had enough in the tank for Iran and Germany. Through the first 3 games, the plan worked, and we entered the final game in control of our own destiny. Unfortunately, the low enthusiasm finally caught up to us against a very good German squad, who beat us soundly, and left us out of the semi's based on point differential.
All in all, we were really gunning for 4th place at World's the whole way. With China hosting, and the strength of Spain and Italy, that was probably the best we could hope for. And we missed it by PD. In fact, our only season 12 losses were to the teams currently ranked #1, 2, 3 and 4 in the world, one of which had home court advantage. Although this is disappointing, I think we did a good job putting ourselves in position to have a shot right up until the last day.
What could have gone differently?
Looking back, there's two decisions that didn't work out as hoped, one I would change, and one I wouldn't. The first was way back in the first round of qualifying. We used a normal vs Uruguay, and lost. We normaled that because it would have essentially clinched a spot in the semi's. We thought it would be a safe win with the normal, but they found a weakness we had vs 3-2 (which was largely eliminated by Season 13, but I'll get to that), and beat us. Had we TIE'd, the extra enthusiasm probably would have been enough to beat Colombia and finish at 4-1, in a 3-way tie for 1st. Part of the rationale was that we thought we would likely lose the PD battle, but in retrospect, it was probably more important to build some more enthusiasm. Ultimately, I don't think this would have changed much--had we skipped the repechage, we would have had slightly more enthusiasm entering World's, but I don't think any of our 4 losses at World's would have turned out differently.
The second decision was using a CT vs France. We *needed* to win that game, but given the margin of victory, we may have underestimated our chances in a normal-normal. That would have left us in much better shape vs Germany. Although it's easy to say this was a mistake given the final outcome, I don't think I would have actually changed the decision to CT, since it was not a game we could have left up to chance. Put simply, if we lost that one, we were done.