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Consider this:
Upon reaching the match screen for my game against Catania, I notice that not only is it not a bright sunny day - as Sian Lloyd's Italian counterpart told me it would be - but the game will be played in gale-force conditions.
Fair enough, you might think, and indeed I did. I re-arranged my starting line-up (since I'd chosen the team according to the forecast) and from the kick-off realised I would be playing the first 45 minutes against the wind. I didn't get out of my half, and they went in 2-0 ahead.
But in the second half, I changed it a bit and started having a lot more success.
However, I also noticed that while the wind was helping my goal-kicks go a lot further downfield, it wasn't having the opposite effect on my opponents, as it had for me in the first half. In fact, as several pin-point 60-yard passes showed, there didn't seem to be so much as a breeze when they passed forward.
The 75-yard through-ball their left-back made with a minute to go that went dead straight between my two centre-backs, allowing their striker to make it 3-3 would have been very impressive were I not jumping up and down screaming profanities.
How exactly do you do that? I can't say I've noticed that any of my players happen to play better when the sun is shining or are too delicate to put in a good perfomance when it's cold.
Why does this weather first eleven choosing sound so familiar?
We had a National team manager in Spain, the one that managed to loose against Cyprus IIRC, who mantained that flairy players couldn't play well in adverse conditions (mud, rain, etc...) and used to fill his midfield with DC and less flairy people whenever the weather turned bad (remember this was RL and the thing didn't do him any good: he was sacked from spain and has relegated and/or underachieved with every team he has managed since)
And yes, he's the one who was linked with a Scottish team earlier this preseason...