X11 season 45 - de rigueur Mortis

[Granthamian]

I just wanted to offer my congratulations to you VA for your triumph in yesterday's MLX final, even though it was not the greatest spectacle this time. I am always unsure as to when to comment on a major match because I don't want to jump the gun and ruin it for somebody else but as you have now posted your lengthy analysis it must be safe! I have to say your consistency in the MLX is outstanding, magnified even more now you seem to have regained the winning touch and are hoovering up most of the prizes.It's not just that though is it, I've been competing in the MLX for a while now and your team is always up there. Other teams come and go, like Roberto's Vipers, but they have their day and fall away again. (You just know Roberto is lurking in the background quietly building another team of monsters and he will be back to do it all over again, but he is unlikely to be able to keep it going for long). Your team hardly ever loses, as a look at the All Time Standings shows, and to keep that level of performance going over such a long period is what sets your team apart from any other in the MLX, and for me is your best achievement of all. Just now and again though leave something for the rest of us eh? Congratulations again!

And a quick word of commiseration for AE. We've all had that disappointment of coming so close and falling at the last fence, especially when it could oh so easily have gone your way. Unfortunately my Turtles are particularly adept at it! Hard luck mate but for what it's worth your team gave mine its hardest match last season and you are sure to be one of the main contenders again next season and beyond. Your turn has to come!

(PS what button do you press to reference somebody else properly (with the little avatar and the @ prefix - buggered if I can find it!)

[Etienne]

Hi Granthamian . You type the @ symbol, and then immediately after start typing the posters name.

[Etienne]

Jesus, meanwhile, despite his team still finding themselves best placed to challenge, and thereby defend their crown, has maintained his long record of never really saying anything in-game except either a.) baldly parading his stupendous DVs (when hothousing the latest crop of youths towards inevitable world domination), or else b.) complaining that the sky is falling in (when they've all gone over the hill together and he's no longer steamrolling everyone in sight) – there's virtually no middle ground, no real engagement in conversation or contribution to any proper discussion despite all his huge success over the years. Thusly, he has publicly thrown in the towel in the Pandas' latest PR... though whether that's genuine pessimism or mind-games remains to be judged, of course.

Apparently he's going to be losing every week from now on according to this mornings PR. I'll believe it when I see it.

[Granthamian]

Thanks Etienne (Yay, got it! )

[Various Artist]

No problem, VA, the stars have aligned to get us to where we are.

That notwithstanding, you'll probably be relieved to hear I've actually set tactics for today's game against the Pandas...

There's another throwing-in-the-towel PR appeared from Jesus, saying "it's time to lose every game" – well, I hope he starts today, as if we win there's actually a faint chance we could pull off a miraculous escape. (To what end, I'm not sure, admittedly – given that as I observed during our last-32 narrow cup win over a Div 3 side, I've basically assembled a squad that might be strong enough to compete at fourth tier level yet who appear to have stumbled unwittingly into the top tier, so it's not like we'd have anything except another fearful struggle on our hands for next season.)

I was amused to discover, looking at my previous matches against the Pandas, that I did once manage to coax an actual relevant response – but, yes, a ridiculously fatalistic one, considering – out of him once before when congratulating him on "yet another double" after they'd claimed two more trophies for their bulging cabinet.
He replied, "Can't see us competing again, too old now. Will give it one last shot though. Surprised to have won the double with so many good teams about. Teams that are better than me."
This was four seasons ago. They've won another three straight league titles since then, against an array of some of the toughest competition the elite game has ever seen, and they're still right up there.


Edit: Heh, I didn't see there were new posts over the page, and that the latest Pandas pessimistic PR has already been referenced!

[Various Artist]

Granthamian – thanks mate for your appreciation at the top of the page there: it put a big smile on my face, which after the weirdly deflating fashion in which I actually won the title yesterday I think I needed!

Underground have to be my biggest achievement in X11, yes, especially having stayed there-or-thereabouts for fully 26 seasons in what has always been a terrifically competitive league. It's a combination of a few things, where (to quote Etienne) the stars have simply aligned for me:

– When Kevchenko started MLX, after discussions here on OTF sparked something concrete unexpectedly immediately, loads of us dived in at once. We were overlapping in other leagues (like the OTF and Heineken) already but for the first time we were all starting together here on a level playing field. Anything could have happened. I actually got pretty much the worst of all the awful starter squads, as it happens: 'worth' a combined 1.4m econs, I think, of whom precisely one player was even vaguely worth keeping. (Midfielder Shaun Southgate, who by incredible happenstance came both with the surname of a Tube station and an alliterative first name; I hadn't planned to name my players in that fashion, but by pure accident it sparked the theme-naming we've kept to this day.) So I spent the first two or three weeks of Season 1 rebuilding the entire rest of my squad from the rear forwards, stopping each time I ran out of money and restarting further into the team after the next week's sponsor cash came in.

– In those Wild West days where you try all sorts of mad stuff to start off with as there's no history, no expectations and frankly no plan, I genuinely made it up as I went along from one day to the next. Econs were so tight and signings were so bargain-basement I actually hired and fired at least one who arrived with atrocious form because it was cheaper to buy another player for sub-100k (and take a punt that they came on decent form) than train the first one up to speed. I also manually wrenched my defence's compatibility around the dial to match up with one decent signing who was Poor compat, by signing in another bunch similar to him and sacking the originals (and one luckless early signing) who weren't. This left the defence's compat way out of synch with the attack's, but I just said "sod it" and let it be.

– This is the weird bit. During all that throwing shit at the wall and seeing what stuck, we just kept winning. We had our first competitive match I think literally two days after founding the club, three matches a week from a standing start; I didn't and couldn't field the same lineup twice for about the first eight or ten games, no scouting, no win bonuses. We got thrashed 4-0 a few games into our existence by HO's Malouins and I thought, "Well, that's it, reallity has kicked in" – but no, by accident more than design we kept blundering successfully onwards and didn't lose another league game all season, and even reached the Grand Final where we lost in extra time to Kev's Toucans. (The Toucans also reached the first Cup Final, but lost on penalties to SouthdownRebel's Alemannia Altstadt-S?d – so the three people who reached the inaugural finals went on, oddly, to be the three people who have ended up adminning the league in succession!)

– That pattern then simply carried on. We lost only 1 regular game per season in each of the first four or five seasons (our winning % in these, as referenced yesterday, touched a lunatic 90% for a while) and have always been right up there in the All Time Standings ever since. We kept losing in the Grand Finals, though, as in my naivety back then I was still operating on a level where I'd never been in competition for honours in Xpert Eleven before and still thought offering a win bonus of more than about 100k on any match seemed a bit outlandish and almost immoral; after our second straight penalties loss in the fourth-season final I think I finally wised up on that account. We went on to win the next two, coincidentally or otherwise!

– Once out in front, so to speak, we've had it rather easy because of the format of MLX. Winning a lot early on meant a lot of bonus knockout games (cup/playoffs), which meant better DVs, and as a side-effect we quite often grabbed individual and team prize money too. All of which meant having a slightly better chance of funding a run for honours and slightly improved players able to better compete for those honours. Rinse and repeat the next time around. Success begets success.

– The way the stars have aligned for me in MLX in particular, however, is how this situation fortunately happens to coincide with my way of doing things. I'm a good X11 manager, results elsewhere show, but a mediocre team-builder and poor at making and keeping hold of any econs. (So, in real-sport terms, a good coach but a middling director of football and a lousy general manager.) I'm stubbornly attached to my core beliefs: when I started playing the game I instinctively hated the "unrealistic" squads comprising all youths with maybe a couple of aged 'mentors', and at the same time I've always felt the need to at least try to be competitive in any given surroundings. So I've never been able to stomach the idea of selling off a whole side, investing the millions in scouring the transfer market for world-beating youths, then just willingly accepting seasons on end of horrendous beatings until they all start to mature.
As I've come to understand the game better I realise this is holding me back in most leagues and to be honest I'd probably have more success elsewhere if I'd given that a go in, say, the official leagues. But I'm tied to the 'conveyor belt' approach to squad-building, and I'm also set on heavily funding the academy and using its products as much as possible, for no real reason other than that I like the serendipity of the YA system – I must get some perverse kick out of making it work despite the lottery of all those random variables involved, and can only describe as it being more satisfying emotionally to produce homegrown. Which is stupid... yet in MLX, by luck (or, more accurately, by the way this league is set up, as noted above) it's actually been possible to thrive this way.

– So, yeah. Other people have built better, stronger teams that have blitzed all before them for relatively short periods, but those have tended to be the kind of squads that can only operate at 100% for a brief period before either tailing back off to 70% or get ripped up and disappear to 20% of that former level and they vanish into GLX for a year or whatever. Underground in contrast might never have got above 90% of that level in all our history... but we don't often drop below about, say, 80% of it either. So we've almost always been in contention, with a puncher's chance if nothing else, while other big names have risen and fallen. As you say in your very kind words up the page, I've been able to simply keep the snowball rolling onward.


Incidentally, it's really worth a read of the discussion out of which – with remarkable haste – MLX sprang in mid-February 2015. It starts on this page of the old thread, where there's an HO roundup from the Heineken League matches then a lovely discussion of a certain Xpert Zone pools win (!), before an innocuous couple of comments from Foxy and SDR about having 5 or 6 Xpert Eleven teams. Sean chimes in to point out MortalJoe's number, there's a bit of talk about enjoying different types of challenge, I mention having a yen to try a CL-format league, and then Kev replies with a reluctant-sounding yet soon to be very significant post...

[Various Artist]

Been reading through two or three pages of the old thread around the dawn of MLX, and was slightly startled to be reminded that I introduced the names 'United Underground' and 'Mars Rovers' (as a possible alternative) for the first time in the very same post. One got the nod for MLX as there was a burgeoning alliterative theme; the other remained unused for fully 21 and a half months before I finally brought that idea to the J4GL.

I also note that I was so enamoured of my initial UU squad I described them, rather colourfully, as possessing "all the innate footballing talent of an aardvark on stilts" and expected us to get "thumped" by Vicarious Thrillseeker's Omdurman Dervishes (later Kenya Kongonis, etc., now Teulu Goleudy) in our maiden competitive game when the Cup kicked off the next day. MortalJoe wrote up the reports for those first matches: we won 2-0, and our first ever competitive goal was scored by Bertrum Belsize Park -- who would go on to play just 9 times for us and never score again before he got flogged off once more.

[delicatemoth]

Ullapool Northern Star have just SMASHED their transfer record to bring in a 22/10 forward. She also becomes our second young foul-mouthed captain, I guess that's generation Z for you.

https://www.xperteleven.com/player.a...=12547641&dh=1

[Etienne]

Ultimate League - mathematically safe - both the Outcasts and Glorious Bastards would need to win all their remaining games to overhaul me, and they play each other on the final week.
Drakaina - need to be promoted - Promoted.
OTF - need to avoid relegation - Not Relegated
Xpert Zone- need to get promoted - currently second. Quite complicated this one. Second place will guarantee promotion, and we are currently five points ahead of third with five games to play. Third would be enough if we get more points than than third in Pro Zone A. We are currently 7 points ahead of both fourth in Pro Zone B and third in Pro Zone A.
Heineken League - mathematically safe
Human League - need to get promoted - Promoted
MSL - need to avoid relegation - Not Relegated

[jdsx]

I'll do my best but don't hold your breath...

We managed to survive for 90 minutes, Etienne Unfortunately the Highlanders scored in the 91st...

[jdsx]

Ullapool Northern Star have just SMASHED their transfer record to bring in a 22/10 forward. She also becomes our second young foul-mouthed captain, I guess that's generation Z for you.

https://www.xperteleven.com/player.a...=12547641&dh=1

Looks good dm. Although if her last performance was only a '4', I hope she's moody as well - or just very unfit, maybe...

[jdsx]

I see from the scribble there's a 24/18 defender for sale...at 361 million....

[Various Artist]

If we've any OTFers with VIP who aren't among the crowd of us already in Major League X11, there's one place free at the moment that I'm looking to fill before the new season gets underway. And it's not for just any team – Alemannia Altstadt-S?d are a fine old club, one of our founder members and inaugural Cup winners, who belonged to SouthdownRebel, my predecessor as league admin.

They have a solid side and will be playing next season in the upper (MLX) tier. I'd love to get an OTFer in charge again!
http://www.xperteleven.com/team.aspx...d=1269643&dh=2

If needs be I'll get a temporary manager in today though to see them safely through the season transition process, and then free up the slot in a day or two after I've successfully set the new season up.

[pebblethefish]

VA, you have encouraged me to go VIP. Hope you're on commission. Team applied for (although given my management style, a bot might have been better)

[Various Artist]

Oh that's fab pebble, I've just this second seen the application and quickly backtracked to this page to see if it was a crazy coincidence or not! Brilliant news, you'll be in in a moment then – a very warm welcome.

[Sits]

Excellent news and fanned.

Talking of the MLX, Kakanui KuneKune have a new signing. And if names mean anything, he’s destined for greatness:

[Sits]

Apologies, I wasn’t given an option to choose image size.

[ad hoc]

If you could also sign his brother, then you;d have the Sz?csis (which would be pronounced "Say Cheese")

[Sits]

If only.

[Granthamian]

You could rename one of your other players Sits. I see the barbers have not reopened yet in his part of the world!

[Sits]

But what given name could possibly match Nimrod?

[Various Artist]

Elgar.

[Sits]

I see your thinking. Another option might be Comet.

[pebblethefish]

Hang on - if I've understood Ad hoc correctly, then the surname in the singular would be pronounced "saychee"? So how about "Ver" as a first name, very fashionable?

[Various Artist]

Ver Sah-chee, though, not Say-chee, surely?