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Pe data de 16-09-09 va incepe o noua editie a Cupei ProSokker. Pentru mai multe detalii accesati link-ul din bara de meniuri
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After we had talks with managers of the most powerful national teams (Poland and Eesti), we thought it would be good to have some interviews with managers from countries not so very well developed in sokker. Let’s see what they want to do regarding their national team, why they are not a big sokker community, their problems and satisfactions.
For this week we met Cometer, the manager of Australian national team.
And look what we obtained:
Hello, Cometer and thank you for this opportunity! First of all, present yourself, as sokker manager and real life person.
My name is David and I'm from Canberra, Australia. I have a high interest in sport management games such as Sokker and Battrick. I also enjoy sports such as AFL (most readers probably haven't heard of it), Rugby Union, Table Tennis, Football etc. I'm happy to watch almost anything sport related, so you can see why I'm active here in Sokker. Other interests include being with friends, music, you know the usual kind of things.
As far as Sokker goes, I've been playing since September 2005 as manager of the team The Comets. During that time I've won the top league in Australia (A League) twice and have also won the national cup (Australia Cup).
I took control of the Australian NT 8 seasons ago now as another challenge to the game and have achieved reasonable results without doing anything special.
Now, let’s see closer the Australian NT: what is its best performance and its best performance with you as its manager (some short history would be good).
Our NT has an interesting history for one with limited success. We've qualified for the World Cup on 2 occasions but have never scored a goal in the tournament.
Taking a quick look over our history we qualified for the first world cup in 4th place in our group under the management of Sriram. We then managed to get a draw with Sweden and put up a good effort against France but failed to make it out of the group stage. This happened to be the best we've achieved to date but that was before countries with large numbers had too much of an advantage.
The 2nd qualification campaign we ended up failing as we were in a group with 5 teams and had 2 less games then everyone else. That was under the management of borkos007.
The 3rd qualification campaign we managed to qualify for the world cup and got eliminated in the group stage.
The 4th, 5th and 6th qualification campaign we've finished 3rd and just missed out on qualification by 1 point or in some cases goal difference.
As far as my management of Australia goes, qualifying for the 3rd world cup was the furthest I've taken the Australian NT where we failed to get a single point from the group stage.That also happened to be my 1st season in charge.
Despite the lack of world cup results, we've finished runner up of the unofficial Mini World Cup on 2 occasions.
You represent a small sokker community, despite the fact that you have a large country, with around 20 million people there… how do you explain this?
One of the major differences with a country such as Australia is that football (soccer) isn't our major sport. We've got so many major sport competitions that the interest gets spread across all the sports. So for example, cricket, rugby league, rugby union, AFL to name just a few other than football. That instantly takes away potential interest from Sokker. Battrick (a cricket management game) has a huge list of Australian users. However, other issues such as being ranked poorly on search engines makes obtaining users difficult.
Are the Australian managers willing to help you by training young Australian players or in other ways? How is the general atmosphere on your community?
The community is great for what we have. We may not have the thousands of users that some of the top countries have but what we lack with numbers we make up for with active and keen managers. The forums are usually active with discussions and people try to help out wherever possible. Most active Australian users train players for the NT when they can to assist the NT. Our NT wouldn't be where it is if it wasn't for the efforts of the entire community.
A question that I always ask: how do you manage to deal with both, NT and your club team? Isn’t it hard to manage both and have performance? How do you keep a balance between work for the two teams?
Time is the major factor to managing both with performance. I've always had a lot of free time to dedicate towards running the NT successfully and that has helped remove some potential performance issues.
Initially, the sudden responsibility of managing the NT and the club can be challenging as you are getting use to how the NT works, communicating with the users about player skills, training options and that is where your club can suffer performance issues due to putting in a lot of time into the NT. Over time though you just adjust and whilst you've still got time available, managing both the NT and your own club becomes natural.
Usually I dedicate Thursday to Saturday for the NT, spending about 5-6 hours just in creating possible ideas for the upcoming game. The rest of the week is used for club matches, scouting the transfer list for Australian players etc.
Did you ever play against our national team? How do you see our team?
I've played against Romania before, although it was a long time ago. I believe we drew 1-1 back in 2007. A lot has changed since then, particularly the strength of Romania's NT.
As for following the Romanian NT I can't say I've followed it extremely closely. I have been more focussed on following teams in the same ranking point range as us due to participating in the Mini World Cup which occurs at the same time as the World Cup. From what I have seen though, you're already a strong NT and it looks like you're on the way up to becoming a much stronger NT to rival teams like Poland, Italy, Spain etc. With the amount of users you have, you should be pushing for semi final appearances in the not too distant future. Perhaps it might take a few seasons to reach that mark though and as they say luck of the draw with youth pulls can make a massive difference.
I'm sure if we manage to draw you in the qualifiers next season I'll be catching up pretty quickly on how far your NT has come ;).
What are your plans for the Australian NT? Where do you see in the future the Australian sokker team?
My plans for the Australian NT haven't changed since I took over really.
My number one aim has always been to get people interested in the NT as an extra incentive to be active in the game and to produce future national team players. Without the users, there is no national team and no excitement in the game either.
This is usually why in the past I've tried to hold different match types to accomodate different users as well as communicating to the users about upcoming matches. Also by getting people involved some people might decide to take over as the NT manager when I'm no longer able to.
Fortunately with the introduction of the U21 NT's, users can attempt to learn how to manage a NT before taking on the top level job and I can give assistance if they request it.
My second aim is to qualify for every World Cup that I can. For a side of our level, it's a really enjoyable but frustrating experience. We're not as strong as say Romania where qualification is easy, but we're not weak enough that qualification is impossible. That makes qualification interesting because it usually comes down to a couple of games. In our case lately it's been decided on goal difference or 1 point so that's been discouraging.
The future of the NT is a little harder to judge. So long as we keep the users we have active, we should be able to maintain our current position. Though to perform well at world cups I think we need another 100-200 users which we struggle to get and keep.
I think the future is still bright for our NT though and hopefully we'll be able to challenge teams in the world cup in future seasons.
If you would have the opportunity to change one thing in sokker, what would you change?
I'd really like to improve the navigation, particularly to help and keep new users. A lot of things are in unusual places and take a bit of getting use to. Juniors and the tactical editor come to mind.
Along with this I'd like to see some sort of introduction for new users that rewards them financially for completing but at the same time helps them understand where everything is. I think this is lacking and despite the best efforts of mentor programs it's still an area that should be looked towards automating to improve the standard of the game.
In the end few words for our readers from you…
Hope you enjoyed reading the interview. Feel free to pop down and visit our forum. Most of us are happy to talk so long as it's genuine and not spam. Otherwise feel free to train Australian players for the NT. We need each and every player we can get.
Thank you very much for your time and good luck in sokker and in real life!
Thanks, same to all who read this too.
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