i hope you decide to follow your own advice here if you are in charge of a NT in the future and find your self in the same situation as the Netherlands did here.
I have no interest in taking charge of a NT, I have absolutely no interest to babysit or run after managers for GS, training, finding buyers for their players or whatever else and I think there are more qualified people to run NTs anyways.
I can assure you that if I'm the Netherlands I play some broken tactic (like Patient with offset scorer), double GDP and Normal hoping that I get some injury or foul out to go my way. I could perhaps understand your reasoning at the NT level but at the U21 level the difference between teams is not that massive (with some exception, like Italy in the consolation tournament), which means you're delusional if you think (5% chance to win R32 + 10% chance to win R16 + 5% to win R8) is better than (1% chance to win R32 + 40% to win R16 + 30% chance to win R8). CT every game with the probability above has about 0.025% of landing you in the Semis. Normalling with the probabilities above has 0.12% chance of landing you in the Semifinals, about 5 times higher.
This is the reasoning I would do, but to me achieving an extra round in a second tier competition would be a worthless achievement. Of course if Holland did throw away extra Enth in losses during the qualification phase. The only benefit of the consolation tournament is:
A) Winning it (it's still a trophy and at the U21 level many teams can win it)
B) Home court advantage for the following competition
That's about it. I'd rather have my U21 coach trying to go as far as he possibly can, not settle for mediocrity. Crunching in the first elimination game is just giving up from the get go.
But they still gets to play another playoff game that can lead to another small drop in the rankings. This can lead to easier opponents next season. Not really something that will hurt them imo.
Elaborate please. I think qualification groups strength is random, but perhaps you can show us some post by BBs where it says they are seeded from the best to the worst ranking.
Even if you're right and they are seeded (which in the 30s and 40s I do not believe), I'd take the chance of playing a few extra games than winning the first and having next to no chance of progressing further to improve my team's ranking by 1 or 2.
Last edited by Lemonshine at 2/16/2017 6:21:32 AM