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though loss today.

We played well, untill in the 3rd quarter, where everything went wrong. Altho i had chosen the right tactics, we still lost the game. We didn't dominate the boards as we should have, and had much to much Turn Overs and faules. Especially the loss of De Neef with 6 minutes left on the clock was to much to overcome.

Never the less. if you can hold a JS 20 JR 16 player to 3 out of 16 from downtown, then i think you can say we did a decent job on defending... Ow well, it's not that today's loss wasn't expected. However, the way that we lost tastes rather bitter.

Next game is an away game against South Africa. Keep your minutes down on the NT players, keep their gamesshapes high, and then we'll have reason to expect a win in that game.

Revo

today we suffered another very though loss. Especially if you look at the player ratings. Fact is that much to much fauls were committed, but the reason why still isn't very clear to me.

Hupez, usually not a guy who makes alot of fauls, goes for 4 faules in the game.

SF Mees isn't exactly an angel, but he was benched very soon due to faul trouble. His replacement, Loddo, who has played SF a few times already, isn't much better. he also soon gets himself in foul trouble. Reservist SF (and reserve PF) Dorchain has to come in the game at the SF since our starting and Back up SF made to many fauls...

fact remains that Belgian NT now has lost 2 games, and will have to either win all remaining 4 games, or win 3 games but have a very high Point difference to make the final 32 (we currently have the worst point difference from all teams who had won 2 games out of their 3 games prior to this game, so it's unlikely that we'll be able to hope to qualify if we don't win the remaining 4 games...)

you could blame the loss on the Difference of enthousiasme used, or on the fact that South Africa was the home team, but if you compare both teams in terms of players, then this should have been a certain victory for the Belgian NT.

i can't undo what has been done, so i'll have to move forward from here on. The Belgian NT has got it's back against the wall. Their is no more room for an error. We are in for a very though ride from here on.

Last edited by AthrunZala at 5/23/2011 2:00:55 PM

When I analyse just the after-game-ratings and info I can see, I'm not upset with the loss. I think it's perfectly normal.

We might have had the better team, but there are some factors in their favor, and they have proven to be enough for the win, and it's not undeserved, nuless you want to argue they where lucky we made the mistakes, and that doesn't count for a deserved victory.

here are the factors:
* They have HCA
* They play with higher motivation for the game (S.A. put more effort ni the game then Belgium), which in combination with HCA is extremely dangerous.
* They pick a good defense, and not a bad offense.
* We pick a bad offense, we attack inside, where their defense is strongest.

both last points derived from this statement: defenses and offenses are best neutral, unless you clearly have an advantage in choosing inside or outside. Translated this means: unless opponent's defense is clearly lower in 1 area, neutral attack is best.
Executed on this game, we see: we attack inside, not is it no good tactic, but it's bad, as inside defense is strongest for SA defense. Our defense is good, it's balanced, BUT they choose to attack inside, which means we should have had a better defense if we would go 2-3 zone.
It is clear that our guards get the best ratings in this game. I think with neutral or outside offense we would have had a very big change on victory. Even though playing away, and putting less effort in the game is very dangerous at all times, unless you realy overrun your opponent on neutral court with normal tactics.
I'm not going to argue about playerwages and comparing those to figure out who's got the best players either, nor will I agree on estimating the value on the field a player adds, by looking at his wage.

With all these points in favor of S.A. I think they had the best chances to win the game, right from the start. They are just not strong enough to win by a big margin, but it certainly isn't an upsetting win.

Belgian NT destroyes Irish NT

today, the Belgian NT played in a sold out Giants Arena agains the Irish NT, and they have put on a show. The Belgian NT almost outscored the Irish NT by 2 points to 1, ending with a 137 - 69 victory, which has put the Belgian NT right back on track after their sudden surprize loss against South Africa.

Manager revo had this to say: Look, we had to show our fans something after the humiliating loss against South Africa. I don't care how you look at it, we should have won in South Africa, periode. So, we came out with the mindset that we wanted to show the entire BB nation that Belgians will bounce back from humiliating losses, and that is exactly what we did. We came out hard, with a very aggresive mindset ( a bitt to agressive for our PF's, who were in constant faultrouble for the whole evening...) and we won all the hustle plays to end up with a big big victory. We wanted to get a very big point difference, to get in a as opportune position as we could, hoping for a second round participation.

especially their defensif tactic was an odd one. Our main force is inside attack, which has been pretty clear in the past games... We decided to go for a higher pace game, since we wanted to get a maximal different in points... but to why we faced a 3-2 zone, still remains unclear. We're guessing that we faced a 3-2 zone because their defence outside is horribly weak. When looking back at the ratings, their outside defence was hardly boosted at all... ow well, no time to wonder why, because it's not important. What will be important, is how we will face venezuela.

It was Belgians biggest NT victory for a long time ( possibly the biggest victory ever recorded by the belgian NT) (it was also the worst spanking that the irish NT has suffered in it's entire BB history!)

Revo now looks on to what will be a very crutial match. after having failed to win against South Africa, Revo will now have to find a way to lead the NT to victory against Venezuela, which is a much tougher country than South Africa... All the Nt players have asked the fans to book their flights to Venezuela, to be able to cheer on their NT team in Venezuela.



Last edited by AthrunZala at 5/30/2011 5:29:43 PM

article from "De standaard"

Belgium Beats Venezuela and gets a huge away win!

LA-Revo was very happy after today's preformance. He was clearly dissappointed about how things were going, and with the starting SF, PF and C getting into faul trouble early on in the game. However, their relievers ( SF Ottevaere, C Francaart and in a lesser way, PF Mees too) stepped up their game lvl. Ottevaere went to grab a few key Offensif rebounds with ended up giving hugh second chance positions...

The game remained close untill in the 3rd quarter, when starting PG Thys got injured. Belgium supporters held were already fearing the worst, but back up PG Waelput went pestachio's! He lead the team as if he was the starting PG all along.

And then came the 4th quarter, where Belgium finally started hitting their 3 ball.

La-Revo: " we knew we had in it us. And i knew that TD30 (Tijl Deseure) had it in him. We made 6x 3 point shots in the 4th quarter, which quickly put the game out of reach for Venezuela. When the Starters finally had calmed down for the 4th quarter, we just took the game into our hands and never gave them a chance to come back..."

LA-Revo was very happy with the victory, since it's was the first victory ever over Venezuela when Belgium wasn't playing home, and it was in season 10 that belgium had beaten Venezuela for the last time, getting a narrow home win back then.

However, LA-Revo stressed that nobody was out of the woods. The Belgian NT still is in a though spot and might have 2 pretty difficult games to play still. Nothing is certain. But atleast, with this win, the mistake that was made against South Africa was corrected.

Article written by James Beckett

Last edited by AthrunZala at 6/6/2011 8:16:16 PM

Nice win :D

I think that we can finish in the top 16 with 2 wins. Good luck ;)

i'll need that luck. their are plural reasons why i'm not 100% confident, but i guess all we can do is wait and see. We avoided getting into a very hard spot (in which we would have been if we had lost here) but we still aren't in a very comfortable one either...

if i can get that top 16, i'd be very happy. it would give us a HCA in the first round, which always is a very nice thing to have.

but let's not get ahead of ourselves first. With the horrible condition of our inside (and the injuries on key players, such as De Neef and Dorchain) our GS in the big men compartment could have some serious problems. Let's hope for the best, but expect the worst...

this allstar week is difficult for everyone to keep their GS of their players high, and those still in the cup will have an even harder time still to manage the Gs of their players, since their opponent of thrusday isn't known yet...

Revo

Nice one Revo!
Gongratz!
Now you should look at the ratings of italy's last game...
Or Poland's ratings or Spain's ratings... God how can you ever beat that? :O
That should be your goal ;P

Last edited by Laur3ns at 6/7/2011 9:32:15 AM

Nice one Revo!
Gongratz!
Now you should look at the ratings of italy's last game...
Or Poland's ratings or Spain's ratings... God how can you ever beat that? :O
That should be your goal ;P

their are 2 reasons why Italy/spain are stronger than Belgium.

1) they have more manangers ==> more draftee's, more guy's get trained properly, better number of top draftee's, larger number of trained players, more players helping out their NT as NT staffmembers, thus enabling them to keep track of more players, monitor their training better, etc etc.

so they have a much larger pool to chose from for their NT and even if a player ends up with a trainer who won't train him, it's no problem. they'll have a few others ready to take up his spot almost immediately...

2) they have got farm teams aswell. in their community, their are some managers who just make cash to keep the GS up from a NT player, or to train a NT player to 400k salary (which no normal team can handle... Top BB teams can take up to 950k salary for their entire team... paying one player 400k isn't very good in that case, cause you still need to divide the remaning 550k over minimal 5 other players...)


The only way to improve their NT, is by finding a new farm who can hold up even more salary... They don't have that much room left for improvement. Where as we still have alot of room to improve. (we also have less managers to train top guy's too...)

One day i hope that the Belgian NT will be able to play in the world cup. But that won't be happening anytime soon ( unless we would be able to win the consolation tournament to get HCA in the european championship the season after or so).

Belgium belongs in the top 25 in the NT. A NT has to evolve step by step.

when i started as NT staffmember ( that is now 6.5 seasons ago) a Guard needed to have OD 14... Nowadays, you won't find a Guard with an OD less than 17 on our NT.

you can't just say: ok, next season, minimum lvl of OD is 17. no, you have to gradually build it up. step by step. the next step, will be to move the minimal OD lvl for a guard up to lvl 18.

my first 2 seasons as a NT coach weren't exactly very succesfull. however, i've sticked to my plan, of gradually improvement. i keep asking the owners of the NT players for training. But you can't expect improvement from one day to the next day. And the efforts paid off last season, earning belgium a ticket to the european championship for the second time in their BB history...

Our NT team still isn't a very strong one, but it's not a team that can be pushed over anymore. If NT teams, such as Germany, feel the need to play normal against your NT because they aren't sure to win against you using TIE like they used to do, then it's fair to say that the Belgian NT is moving up nicely. All that has to be done now, is to ensure that we keep moving forward. We can't be happy with what we've achieved... We have to keep improving, cause once the improvement stops, then our NT will come to a halt and we'll lose alot of spots on the NT ranking again.

This said, the NT team that i have now, is the legacy of Sum.
Hupez, Waelput, Thys, Deseure, Loddo, Mees, Ottevaere, Dorchain (just to name a few) were all trained under Sum's supervision when he was the U21 coach. Joe and I have continued Sum's work, taking care of the training after their 22nd 'anniversary", but It's Sum who scouted those players when they were 18y old, and who motivated and advised their trainers on how to train.

It was Sums efforts ( and that of his staff aswell) that got the NT where it is now. If Joe's Legacy is as good as Sum's, then chances are high that our NT will keep improving and will, slowely but steadily close the gap with the top NT nations. But we'll only see Joe's Legacy in a few seasons time.