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The game time might be appalling, but we've got a cracking game ahead of us in the early hours of Tuesday morning. If you're a Victorian enduring your third lockdown do yourself a favour, crack a breakfast beer and tune in for what will be effectively the first of our knock out rounds of this tournament when we take on Austria.
The Austrians have had a great run so far and currently sit one game clear of us on the standings but where there is a will there's a way. A win here will see us slide past Austria, even though both countries would likely make the playoffs, but it would certainly give us a better ranking and theoretically a better match up.
A loss would make it tough, however.
This game could throw up anything (breakfast beers will do that to ya) so settle in, buckle up and hope the GE and refreshed match viewer don't produce too many gremlins!

It was a tight game as expected and after about a thousand last minute changes of game plan and line ups we managed to overcome a solid Austrian side by 10 points in our final seeding match of the Consolation Cup. That will sees us qualify for the Knock Out bracket of the competition with a 5-3 record (after starting 0-2 due to playing through the repechage) and lifted us above Austria.
At the time of writing this we're still waiting on confirmation of the final standings, but we are likely to finish somewhere between 28th and 25th pending other results.
It is sudden death from here on but our first objective has been achieved. It is only the ninth time in 50 seasons that the Aussies have made the playoff bracket of the Cup (though keep in mind we've also made the World Cup a few times, thus avoiding the Consolation Cup altogether).
More often than not we haven't made it through the first round of knock outs - which is why game shape this week is MASSIVE for us.
If you have a player in contention for a game get his minutes as close to 60 as you can or strongly consider doing some GS training for a week if you need to. Let's see how far we can take this charge. At our best we're a very decent unit. Let's do this!

Yes, the three votes was easy in this one, working out the 2 and 1 was a little more open. I think we might just miss each other in round one, but we'll be close, could meet either in the first few rounds or the last, depending on which side of the draw we land on.

And its Spain up first.

Look, I’m not going to try and kid you, we’re going to have a heck of a contest on our hands this week, but if our managers all get on board we might be a shot at an upset here. Teamwork needed here. Let’s get this done.

In another era, I would've expected Laga'aia to have played by now, and for Xinlei and Hawkins to at least be considered. That none of these things have happened is as telling as sign as any that this is probably our strongest national team ever. And perhaps you can attribute some of this to the power creep caused by the Gym/Training Court, but BB has also lost a lot of users since I signed up way back in 2012, so it's no small feat for our team to still be this good after all of that.

Still need a lot to go right to beat Spain, but despite how scary some of their players look, they didn't look too good as a team in last seasons Euro championship.

Honestly, I expected to be getting Laga-aia into the line up at some point this season, too, but like you say the competition is tough - particularly in the guard area. The challenge for us as a nation is skill sets that would force their way in easily 10 to 20 seasons ago, when we were winning things internationally, just don't measure up against the upper echelon of international sides these days. There are some genuine monster sides out there right now. On paper as a list of skills we might be the strongest line up ever, but as a comparison against our modern day counterparts we're probably not (obviously, or we'd be winning Asian Cups and playing off at the Worlds).
But I do think we're working on it and I do think we're closing the gap, which is a massive pat on the back to our community. WE absolutely punch above our weight range. Our rating is up to 17 at the moment, which isn't bad when you look at how many managers are active in Australia compared to some of the bigger nations. There are sides with more votes on their National manager than we have active managers that could possibly vote! That gives them a massive depth advantage, so against that we're doing ok.

I am more than happy to hear any musings, wonderings or brain farts people have about how we might take down Spain. Sometimes someone's left field idea can spark a new way of thinking about a problem. I won't promise to use every crazy idea directly, but I'll use them to inform my thinking.

That last NT match Venezuela had that went to overtime... If they had lost that game we would be seeing a favourable matchup against the 50th ranked side, the swedes. Instead we come up against a nation with 1100 users! Just bad luck!

Hey, I like a Spanish BBQ as much as the next man, I'm up for biting off more than I can chew this week and giving the old chompers a proper workout. If we DO get up it cracks this side of the draw open a little. Dare to dream, I say!