Well pity the guy who decided to walk the Sahara Desert this week and could not logon, cos the changes are coming thick and fast.  First up was the new training system, introduced a day before training was to run.  It looked very pretty, but resulted in a number of gripes.  Some of the skill pairings seemed a little strange.  The set piece one is a pain in the arse and I'm not sure why we should bother training that at all.  How many teams out there have more than one player with specialist skill 'set pieces'.  I've never trained it before, so I don't see why I have to train it now.

But these gripes were nothing compared to the war that erupted after training was run....

Cos in fairness there were a couple of crucial little nuggets of information that were conveniently left off any explanation of the new system.  Namely:

1. Coaches would have to achieve 90% efficiency to be the same as before

2. The 'extra' 0.2 TI for all players was deducted from their bloom to be received later in their career.

But in fairness TM did listen to a few of the complaints and introuduced faster coach searches for all those teams - most of us really - whose coaches are now not worth shit.  So to check if any of the coaches that come back from your search are any good, fire their stats into the Coach Effectiveness Calculator before you buy them.  Also have the spreadsheet version in the Tools section of the Newbie Guide.

Now it looks like B squads are imminent.  Not a fan of this idea, as I think it will give some in-game advantage, but will have to see how it goes.  It seems messy to be competing in the same competition as your main team, if in a different league.  Never got the answers about whether B teams will enter in the Cup either.  However, they seem to be quite popular so far.  I wonder if there'll be many bugs coming out of this...

Don't know about what people are finding, but one thing that bugs the hell out of me is the frequency of keeper injury.  So, I did a quick survey on Monday (before the Cup games had run) of Irish Division one - three, the English Premier League and the Danish Superligen.

Out of 216 teams surveyed there were some 51 injured keepers.  51.  Almost 25%.  That is a ridiculously high proportion and bears absolutely no resemblance to real life.  You would be seriously lucky to get 25% of keepers injured once a season, let alone that many at a time.  And it has nothing to do with injury proneness, as injury prone keepers should still have a way lower incidence of injury than outfield players.  Stands to reason.  The only good thing about it is that injured keepers cause havoc with inactive teams.  If only it was only inactives who suffered from it.

Price to go up for PRO and Diamond subs as well - ouch.  Best you get in now, if you are thinking about it.

In some great news for Irish TM, Le Sharks earned himself a place in the Quarters of the Champs league - nice.  Here's the match link - match to be played 19:00 TM time on Tuesday.  Drop in and support him, if you can.