Hi fellow Aussie community,
I would just like to formally announce that I'm running for NT coaching job again for the next 2 seasons. The last 2 seasons for the NT there have been a few highs and lows. The Asian Championships exceeded my expectations when we took home the gold. However in the World Cup, I took a few risks to try to grab a semi-final berth and it didn't pay off as that cost us a chance of going into the second group stage. I wasn't too interested in just making up numbers but rather to compete unlike some of the NT coaches.
Anyways, the biggest problem we still face is the available talent we have. At the moment, we are slowly building that talent pool and hopefully in several seasons time there will be enough talent that we can pick from around 20-30 guys for the 18 roster spots available. So what needs to be done for this to happen is to encourage more managers to train Australian players given their merchandise benefits from the NT team as well as ensure that correct training is being applied to their trainees.
Strategy wise, we can still compete with anybody with the correct tactics being applied. At this moment, inside offence is still probably superior to outside offence in the game engine after much testing. I'll try to focus my attention on testing our defence. There's always a time and place for other strategies to be used. We can only do so much with the current game engine.
One area that can definitely be greatly improved is our team's gameshape management. Having tracked the gameshapes, our best players seem to struggle with their gameshape earlier in the season while producing some fantastic results later down the track. This has slightly hurt us during the world cup as majority of the oppositions have superior gameshape. That is why I would like to further deepen our talent pool so that we can select the players who can give us the best result.
So overall the NT is in great position to continue to succeed. There are still some tweaks to be made. We can definitely get better as our talent level is a still a tier below the top countries in the world and if we work on improving that we should be able to close the gap. Other things like gameshape is not in our complete control, the NT coach can only encourage managers to play their players 55-80 minutes for each given week. As for strategies, we have to adapt and continue to use the best strategy base on the game engine, player abilities and opponent. Other than that, if elected again I'll try to put more effort on the main BB forum to get more community involvement in the NT discussion.
Thanks for reading, feel free to ask any questions.
Whitebeard