Oceania Champions League
How we fared
Oceania Champions League
Well, our first trip to the Champions League wound up being a bust.
We took on Vaipuna from Samoa in our opening match and wound up losing, 3-1. The highlight was undoubtedly the fact that we played in front of a crowd of 1,000, which is the largest crowd we’ve ever seen. I’m wondering if the boys weren’t a little bit spooked by how large the audience was.
We then took on Lotoha’apai from Tonga, and fought them to a 2-2 draw.
Our final attempt at qualifying for the Champions League proper was a match against Titikaveka from the Cook Islands, which we also drew, this time 1-1. And that was all we could do.
Toa Maile scored twice for us, as did new signing Chris Fa’amoana. If we could have managed wins in either of our two final games, we would have won the group. Alas, it wasn’t meant to be.
Here’s hoping for better luck next year!
New Signings
Speaking of which, we do have a number of new signings to report on.
Chris Fa’amoana, an American Samoa national team player, highlights the group. We wound up bringing in 30 new players, which is saying a lot for a team that completely dominated the league last season. I just hope I haven’t upset the balance too much.
That’s what happens when you’ve got an amateur club, of course. It cost us nothing to bring those guys in. We might as well bring in some more!
New Tactic
I also made a few small changes to the tactic.
It wasn’t much. I’ve been trying to stop our boys from lumping the ball forward all the time, and am trying to get them to focus more on building up play slowly from the back. We love to try to play a counter press offensive game, but we’re actually pretty poor at it. We’d be better off slowly working the ball into the box, dominating possession, and scoring goals the beautiful way.
I also changed our shadow striker attacking midfield role to a second forward, this time one lying deep. The idea is to allow the likes of Toa Maile to play deep, occasionally feed balls in to Chris Fa’amoana, and maybe have a chance to score a goal or two himself.
All these changes might have led to our Champions League failure. Still, it’s worth a shot. Honestly, I’m happy that we did as well as we did. It could have been a lot worse.