Return of the reserve league... please?
Posted: January 14th, 2013, 9:43 amSeriously, I'm becoming more convinced this needs to happen.
Think about it, I suppose you remember me having a good old sulk about how the dearth of good UK players, and you were right, it's not really due to foreigners or anything like that... when was the last time you saw a (non-FM) 4v4 pub hosted in Britain?
It only figures that if they play 3v3 all the time, they won't have the positioning and tactical understanding of 4v4 needed to play it at a reasonable level. During my time at Cathletico I've realised that the standard for FM division 2 is much higher than any player new to the 4s format can cope with; set players fresh from Galaxy against the likes of aguero10, Maldo, Santiago, TTom... what do you think's going to happen?
The only way you can get players new to FM experience and playing time is with a lower level of competition. Obviously we don't have enough teams to create a third tier any time soon, but with our current squad sizes it doesn't seem unfeasible to re-introduce a reserve-league. There are a few players on my (and maybe one or two others') roster at the moment who I want to give playing time, but can't really as I want to stay at least somewhat competitive in Div 2.
Indeed there are about forty or so Free Agents who will almost certainly never get signed as it stands because A) they're new to FM and haven't played 4v4 seriously before and B) captains aren't really in a position to take chances on such players given what I seaid about the level of competition.
I stand by part of what I said a while back, and that is that FM represents (or should strive to represent) the UK hax community (if that's what you can call it), and one way or another it has to try to integrate new UK players, 'for the good of the game'.
Feel free to comment/flame/troll/make death threats/rolex to give some variation of tl;dr.
Think about it, I suppose you remember me having a good old sulk about how the dearth of good UK players, and you were right, it's not really due to foreigners or anything like that... when was the last time you saw a (non-FM) 4v4 pub hosted in Britain?
It only figures that if they play 3v3 all the time, they won't have the positioning and tactical understanding of 4v4 needed to play it at a reasonable level. During my time at Cathletico I've realised that the standard for FM division 2 is much higher than any player new to the 4s format can cope with; set players fresh from Galaxy against the likes of aguero10, Maldo, Santiago, TTom... what do you think's going to happen?
The only way you can get players new to FM experience and playing time is with a lower level of competition. Obviously we don't have enough teams to create a third tier any time soon, but with our current squad sizes it doesn't seem unfeasible to re-introduce a reserve-league. There are a few players on my (and maybe one or two others') roster at the moment who I want to give playing time, but can't really as I want to stay at least somewhat competitive in Div 2.
Indeed there are about forty or so Free Agents who will almost certainly never get signed as it stands because A) they're new to FM and haven't played 4v4 seriously before and B) captains aren't really in a position to take chances on such players given what I seaid about the level of competition.
I stand by part of what I said a while back, and that is that FM represents (or should strive to represent) the UK hax community (if that's what you can call it), and one way or another it has to try to integrate new UK players, 'for the good of the game'.
Feel free to comment/flame/troll/make death threats/rolex to give some variation of tl;dr.
). 
