Tonight we start Season 20 in which we will participate in the 86 team World Wide Consolation tournament. We will play 8 qualifiers against randomly selected teams. The top 32 teams advance to a single elimination tournament. Going in we are ranked 47th in the world. If you take out the 12 teams who will play in the world championships then we are the 35th ranked team in the competition. Our ranking puts us just outside the top 32. So I think we would call it a success if we qualify for the second round.

Since the games are randomly chosen and we don’t know the last 6 games yet, it is difficult to put a prediction on the season. But I would expect us to be somewhere on the border of advancing and not advancing, with the quality of matches having some influence over that.

Our first two games will be at home against #75 Cyprus and away at #41 Srbjia. I would expect us to win the first one and have a challenging time in the second one. As everyone knows, game shape is an important factor in our performance. So let’s all work to keep those game shapes high so we can get the best results.

Let me take a minute to discuss the roster. First, I want to officially welcome top prospect, 22 year old center, Kouzo Yasujiro to the team from Swoosh (Japan). He will start as a reserve but I expect as the season progresses he will get his chances to play. As he continues to develop or as injuries and game shapes dictate, he will gain more playing time. We’ve been in need of some help inside so I’m really excited to get him on the team.

For the rest of the roster, I have retained all the players from last season’s team. This could be the last season for our two 33 year olds, SF Yuhei Suenami from Northern Kyushu Ramen Kings (Japan), and C Kaname Kouzuki from Kyoto Shogun (Japan). I haven’t seen any skill drops for either of them yet so they will continue to be useful this season. We will reassess where they stand next season. Let’s wish both players good luck this season. (Maybe their owners may want to invest in some career extension?)

We still have 2 empty roster spots. There are a number of interesting future prospects I’ve been watching and we could use two of the spots for a couple of them at some point. I’m still deciding who I want to use those spots on so stay tuned. I will post a list and stack rank of the top National Team prospects soon.

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