Asunto: England NT World Cup Qualifiers

Today we play our first WC qualifier against Belarus On paper we are stronger but its not clear what level of importance people ar going to go for, so there is a fair amount of risk...

As an aside, a few people have been mailing me to ask me to use substitutes in matches so that some other players get games. I'd like to explain my position on this. In my mind the most important thing at the moment after qualification is getting the chemistry of our best players up to 100%. This is to put us in as strong as position as possible for the world cup. Once our first XI are up to or near 100% then I plan to start resting those players and using second string players, so that we have a set of usable substitutes for the world cup too.

I don't want to upset anyone by leaving players out, however I want to put the performance of the team first. Also the players I pick are picked because they are genuinely the best players available. I have had a couple of people saying they have players with better ratings than the ones I pick. This is because if you look at an NT match you see the players with very low chemistry. All players are getting one or two lower ratings in NT matches than they get in matches for their clubs.

Hope that clears a few things up - lets hope for 3 points tonight

You are getting in to this.

Yeah! If only another team ha started at the beginning to provide us with some decent players we could be the top team! alas..

Real test tomorrow with the Croats coming to town. Ratings work out about even overall, so could go either way!

Nice play against you on saturday ... Without B. Jordan but with S. Folcke ^^

Looking for forward to it!

England are draw specialists? atleast we beat spain 1-0 in real life!!

Seems so, good result agaisnt France as they highed it

I was disappointed with playing for a draw. There needs to be more passion and pride in the shirt!

Welcome to 606

606: Insert ill-informed opinion here. And that's just just the presenters.

Well its almost time to start the wc qualification process again.

Weve lost a few friendlies recently but we have also mostly fielded second string players. Hopefully our performances now should see us through to the WC without too many problems.

We have to assume that the world cup draw seeding will be based on either the finishing position in the qualification groups, or team ranking, so a strong finish will be nice - but I will settle for qualification!

The scoreline against spain was pretty weird, even though they probably had the better team.

Yeah odd ones happen. We just have to hope that at the WC the odd ones go our way

0-0 draw with Belarus tonight. Would have taken that before the game but in the end a little sad we didnt get the win.

Croatia move top with an easy win. Looks like the current top 4 will ease through so have to start making choices about the importance of ranking versus fitness.