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X11 season 45 - de rigueur Mortis

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    Whichever way, I think GG will be a major threat to MLX next season.

    Zalec Zmaj finished the season with 41 goals, but only third place in the division. We now need to decide whether to carry on with our attacking play, or revisit last season's playing for penalties post-season. I think we get Gotham first up, which is a very tough match.

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      Originally posted by Hot Orange View Post
      I really should take more notice of SQs. My selection policy rarely goes beyond trying to get a reasonable balance between skill and experience and DV-needy youth.
      Rock City Ferrets actively seek out SQs of all kinds. I decided to do this when I took over the team and saw that's what my predecessor seemed to have been doing, thought it looked like fun.

      You may have noticed that I didn't select Denis Redondo for our friendly - this is because his hulkism has improved to the point where he is utterly horrible, so I have decided to limit him to competitive fixtures. The best destroyer I've had since Arctic Insects' Alf Johnstone.

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        Subject: Financial event

        Methley Perseverance's kit suppliers have gone bust, just days before they were due to deliver a new supply which the team desperately needs. The commercial manager works hard to do a deal with another manufacturer, but due to the tight timescales he is forced to pay over the odds. This costs Methley Perseverance 35 500 econ.
        Is there something you should be telling us, VA?

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          Originally posted by Vicarious Thrillseeker View Post
          I've been away for over three weeks, and I'm afraid to open up the X11 website to see what mess my teams are in.
          It wasn't as bad as I expected

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            Originally posted by Sean of the Shed View Post
            Is there something you should be telling us, VA?
            Er, yeah, you noticed I hadn't been on here for about a week...?!

            Blame Sits, his announcement that one of VA Sports' most lucrative and important contracts may be slashed forthwith has nobbled the share price.

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              More seriously, I sincerely hope Sits doesn't quit the Xpert Zone and J4GL. I really like both Noirs and the Warthogs, and it would start to feel a bit lonely over in the latter league if another OTFer exits (again). Which is a shame since it's a great and well-run (by RichardSP of the 'Random' franchise) league where there's a bunch of likeable non-OTF managers, and where I'm also doing mystifyingly well with Mars Rovers. Leagues always seem that much 'colder' though somehow without a good cluster of you lot dotted around the place.

              I do understand the feeling that one is juggling too many teams sometimes, or is running some where there's a lack of 'mojo' at certain points. It's unfortunate for me that the team I have least affection for, in many ways, is Rædfearne Island... in the league I, er, run myself. Adminning is in itself such a double-edged sword I sort of both love and hate it, often simultaneously, which perhaps factors into that – or perhaps not, I think I've always been slightly ambivalent about Rædfearne despite having some not inconsiderable success with them. I'll probably feel better about them after the next CR, with luck.

              The other league I'd kind of like to bail on if push came to shove is MLX, surreally as it may seem since I've had far more success with Underground than any other of my teams. I don't regard myself as one of life's 'natural winners' and am instinctively happiest scuffling around in roughly the third tier of any given league, so the pressure to keep up UU's unmatched success in the face of a near-constant grind of critical big matches and the endless rise of new super-strong challengers always feels like a right drag. Of course, at the same time I love actually being a proper 'big team' for once, not least because we've kept it up for the entire 17 seasons of MLX's history so far, which is something I'm uniquely proud of in X11.

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                VA, bear in mind that if you quit MLX we will almost certainly name a competition after you, so you can never truly leave. Might as well stick around, son.

                More seriously, I know what you mean about administration - I've woken up early this morning to the realization that I need to do the post-season fixtures for the Trophy, Vase and Plate - which means I need to paste all the league results for the season into my needlessly overcomplicated spreadsheet. So it's nobody's fault but mine.

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                  Great effort with it though SDR. And a Led Zep earworm into the bargain.

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                    Thanks Sits, I toyed with the idea of a Radiohead earworm, but the Led Zep scanned better.

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                      Originally posted by SouthdownRebel View Post
                      VA, bear in mind that if you quit MLX we will almost certainly name a competition after you, so you can never truly leave.
                      Haha, I don't know if that's a carrot or a stick. It probably does make my staying forever more likely!

                      Underground are at a fascinating tipping point right now: next season our remaining handful of heavily-decorated Season 1 veterans will finally all have either left (Epping, Dollis Hill) or definitively gone over the hill (Leyton, Euston, probably Queensway), so I'm not sure what state we'll be in to challenge again soon. This time though we're in about as good a position as we could be, after winning MLX B – and having the unique good fortune of receiving a long-awaited academy striker at the weekend, with two regular-season games to go, in the shape of (vanilla) 16/4 Maurice Manor House. Except with precisely 512 econs in the bank at the time I couldn't even afford to promote him...

                      ...but then a night or two later we won Team of the Month – our 13th, but first in 11 months and only our second in the last 22 – without me even realising we were in contention for it. The associated prize money windfall let me bring him into the squad, before thrusting him onto the market with indecent haste. Which is a shame as I'd love to have kept him, but there was no realistic hope of developing him at this stage and we desperately needed the cash. His club-record sale yesterday plus our sweeping the division's individual awards last night means we actually have a chance of doing something about the fact a whole bunch of key players are in terrible form right now, so I'm just hoping we can navigate through an awkward last-16 clash and then see if we can keep things rolling for a change.

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                        Originally posted by SouthdownRebel View Post
                        VA, bear in mind that if you quit MLX we will almost certainly name a competition after you, so you can never truly leave. Might as well stick around, son.

                        More seriously, I know what you mean about administration - I've woken up early this morning to the realization that I need to do the post-season fixtures for the Trophy, Vase and Plate - which means I need to paste all the league results for the season into my needlessly overcomplicated spreadsheet. So it's nobody's fault but mine.
                        Dunno, I reckon I bear a fair share of the fault for that too. Sorry!

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                          Nah, it wasn't your spreadsheet Kev. I'd tried doing a random draw for the friendly competitions but felt they should use the same method as the Championship playoffs. So I built a Google sheet that recreates the league tables, works out the seedings and the draw, plus the divisions for next season. The only manual input is the actual fixtures & results but this takes longer than I had hoped - I'd assumed the fixtures would follow the same pattern of teams playing each other in every division, which would have made it possible to build out automatically, but this wasn't the case. As a result, I was left with a lot of copy and paste from each division's fixture screen and to split out each team's goals into separate cells because X11 puts them together in one string.

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                            Heh, I was apologising for creating this monstrous competition in the first place and dumping it on you, but if you're going to make it even more complicated, well...

                            Thanks for the friendly invitation - Steaua are ready to be thrashed on Monday.

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                              I'm sure Statto would approve. Of the spreadsheet, that is, if not the possible thrashing.

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                                If anyone is wondering what is going on with the OTF league, I'm hoping that RobM will bring back Thorntree Star (or another team) now that he's better. If not, we'll go again as we are.

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                                  I'm sure we're all happy with you bringing us along into the next season in your own time Etienne. It should be said more often that I really appreciate the way you've done a great job running this, our core league, for the entire time I've been in the game and beyond. The way you're so unobtrusive about the process 99.5% of the time means it perhaps goes overlooked more than you deserve – so thank-you, and more power to your elbow sir.

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                                    I'd wholeheartedly agree with that, VA....

                                    And while I'm here, what is the minimum required to maintain a 5 star YA? I thought 300/300/250/repeat was the minimum, but I see that whilst potentially 'downgrading' one of my YAs from 300 to 200, it seems to have maintained 5 star status (after one week at 200). So can you do 300/300/200, or is the minimum 300/300/250/300/300/200 (which I'll surely never remember)??

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                                      I hold mine at 300k every week, as there is not a hope in hell that I'd remember to adjust it back the following week.

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                                        And on the subject of Admins, I'm absolutely in awe of Etienne, Sean, Sits, SdR and VA for the fantastic work they do and how well they run their respective leagues. Thanks chaps.

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                                          Speaking of which, we're going to need a recruitment drive in MLX - three managers have resigned over the weekend and another hasn't been seen since August 5th. If anyone with VIP is interested in signing up or filling in temporarily, I'd be grateful.

                                          Edit: and, of course, many thanks to Foxy for the kind words
                                          Last edited by SouthdownRebel; 09-09-2018, 19:59.

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                                            Make that four resignations - the Boys SAN manager has just quit, presumably in a fit of pique after I awarded his opponent a walkover.

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                                              And another one goes after missing their last 16 fixture. Frankly, if we're clearing out managers who can't be bothered to participate in the post-season I don't view this as an entirely bad thing.

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                                                Originally posted by nmrfox View Post
                                                And on the subject of Admins, I'm absolutely in awe of Etienne, Sean, Sits, SdR and VA for the fantastic work they do and how well they run their respective leagues. Thanks chaps.
                                                Thanks Foxy. To be honest I'm just spinning the wheels in the Human League.

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                                                  Thanks too Foxy; to be honest I've got the Brythonnic in a pretty good shape right now (he says, inevitably presaging a wave of resignations before next login) and so it's not too much effort.

                                                  I try to maintain a flow of official communication so that everyone can be aware of new managers coming in, and indeed to welcome all new managers, and to provide things like season roundups, important dates for the CR, friendlies etc – and I think that's generally appreciated judging by the occasional comment of thanks and/or praise that trickles in. We've got 109 of 110 places filled right now, albeit including one long-term absentee whom I'm keeping in place until I've set up the coming new season, so I guess I'm doing something right.

                                                  I always try to preempt any late-season resignations by publicly asking that everyone kindly sit tight until two or three days after the CR so I have the chance to draw up each new season without undue delay – which, human nature dictates, some still ignore, but enough do heed me to make life easier! I might need to ask our resident super flying stand-in managers like Kev and Gawpus to be on standby though for a request to step in temporarily in order to guide a vacant team or two through the season transition next weekend, if you fine gents would be amenable to that?

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                                                    Originally posted by SouthdownRebel View Post
                                                    And another one goes after missing their last 16 fixture. Frankly, if we're clearing out managers who can't be bothered to participate in the post-season I don't view this as an entirely bad thing.
                                                    This is an excellent point. We're also getting rid of mostly ones with crap team names, too, which is always a bonus as far as I'm concerned. Do they have any good alliterated names in their club histories that you can revert the vacant sides to?

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