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An interview with Themongos (Part 1)

Written by enviado1

Hello, everyone!

Here you can find an interview with my friend. Themongos (7531808). who is training the U-20 Northern Ireland team.

How did Hattrick came up in your life?

I don't really know, I was looking for an online football manager game and I guess it was from a search result or something. It was a long time ago.

What are your plans in Hattrick? Have you any long-term plan or something?

Well I'm building a good first team and rebuilding my second team right now after reaching the quarter-finals of the Masters a couple of seasons ago.
Also, now that I've come back into NT management, I think that maybe I might go for one of the NT management records. Recently, I just saw that one user holds the record for U-20 management with 11 U-20 campaigns.
This is just my second U-20 campaign now I think, so I have a bit to go, but I'm confident that as long as our team performs well and I put in the effort, I can make it to 12 U-20 campaigns with Northern Ireland.

What is your opinion about NT and/or U-20 of Northern Ireland?

It's tough for us because we are a small country, but as long as the teams aren't run by idiots and we get a bit of luck, we can still qualify for WC second rounds.
Our last U-20 campaign was ruined by a foreign manager with an NI flag that actually had no idea what he was doing and quit after about 4 matches, we need to avoid these type of managers – in NI we get quite a lot of foreign managers running for election that don't have a clue how the game works, just like a lot of other small countries get these candidates too. Hopefully the NI users can keep distinguishing between proper managers that put in the work and total idiots that haven't worked for the NT at all but for some reason think they are able to manage it.

What else would you like to see in Hattrick?

The GM and Mod system is totally broken and needs to be completely reformed, and there need to be more stringent rules to stop cheating in elections.
I do like the additions to the match engine over recent seasons though, there have been some really good ideas brought in - like the fog of war for NT games, and the man-marking, for instance.

How is the weather in Northern Ireland?

I think it's been very hot this Summer, much more than usual. I like it a bit colder myself, give me 18º every day!

Do you think that the U-20 team of Northern Ireland can qualify to next WC?

We just had a very good start with a really tough draw away from home. Our team is good enough to be competitive, so with a bit of luck we can do it. Even the big teams always need a bit of luck for things to go their way in Hattrick. Managers that try and pretend luck doesn't exist in Hattrick are laughable – you can prepare all you want and even get your tactics completely correct, but you still need the match engine to like you on the day.

What would you change in U-20/NT of Northern Ireland?

We have two very good managers in charge right now, which is great, and our chief U-20 scout Rob_C has done a fantastic job in the last bunch of seasons, so we are lucky in that regard, and I hope it will continue.
What I would change of course is to have better youth pulls being trained to high levels for U-20 and NT action, but we only have 150 active teams, so unfortunately we just have to make do with what we get – not like the big countries, who will build U-20 teams off 17 year olds with 3000+ TSI when they are promoted.
We are lucky to get great training from most of our players' owners, and we need it.

How do you see HT in the future? Are there any feature you would like to have developed?

I think the specialities could be reworked a bit to make them more relevant in some respect; perhaps some more new ones could be added in. As I said before though, I think the development team has been doing a good job in general adding new features and ideas in the last year or two. The transfer market could probably use a bit more regulation in some respects, to encourage more training over trading.

Editor note - we continue here: (20703).