First of all, congrats to the promoting teams. A fantastic crop of deserving managers, genuinely happy for all of them. Zara - Irizar is an especially impressive feat of teambuilding, following Los Pollos with back to back promotions.
On the other hand, it sucks to see the teams going down. Some great managers and intriguing team building approaches in there, too. From a regional perspective, it of course hurts to see P:A at the bottom with their all-African team.
At the same time, I'm glad that Voyagin survived and I hope valv returns. Really nice to see Trans holding on, too, a really likeable team imo and confirming their good approach to teambuilding.
As for our team ...
Fabianski wrote:
It's worse news for Bralirwa, though, who - being pretty much undisputed promotion favorites - fall out of the Top 10 on the final day of the year! They sure will be questioning some of their transfer decisions now, as they did by far not bring the success they were hoping for. Promotion is over 600 points away, though, so it's surely not just one rider not doing his job right...
I can't say with a straight face that promotion wasn't the goal - otherwise you don't buy a 34 year old for 2.6 million. That said, I was never quite as optimistic as the consensus. My preseason calculation was that Silvestre and Stallaert needed to hold their level and Madrazo basically had to reach Pluchkin levels of dominance to compensate for all the depth we lost and the expected drop for Ndayisenga and Eyob as they transitioned to domestique roles.
Stallaert held up his end of the bargain, scoring almost exactly the same amount of points as last year. But Silvestre scored 200 points less and Madrazo, well, he fell short of Pluchkin's points from last season by close to 400 points. Add fairly little luck from breakaways and small stuff like that, and that's the gap to the promotion places right there.
Evaluating the debacle (I guess you can call it that?), a part is for sure that our race planning did not include Madrazo at all. His schedule was suboptimal for sure. But even with that, he most definetely came up short on a few occasions. Looking at the reactions at the time, I still think it was a shot worth taking, and in the aftermath of the Girmay battle, quick decisions had to be made. But in hindsight, this was obviously a pretty big mistake.
The coming off-season will be very interesting. Madrazo and Silvestre both decline, Stallaert is in his final maxed year, so we need to make major decisions to set us up well for the future. Going to be tough, but should also be a lot of fun.
I feel like my team has been far too unlucky far too often... Padun's been decent, but also invisible in too many races where he should've been on the podium at least, and don't even get met started on Pluchkin, Prevar and the sprinters...
Just the fact Varga, by OVL like the 5th worst rider on the team, outscored all other riders aside from Padun is saying so much... Yes, he had an outstanding season somehow, but come on...
A rebuild is pretty much imminent with Pluchkin and Prevar on their return, and both being fairly useless from now on. In theory there should be a good amount of cash to spill on new riders, however there is a large challenge when trying to keep this team as region focused as it is now, preferably even more.
I wonder how Aniolkowski will compare next year being maxed out, and am hopeful Padun will actually be good next year, at least as good as his stats suggest he should be... And aside from that I have no idea what direction the team will be heading. Without a big pointscorer things will be difficult to say the least, and I doubt Aniolkowski and Gladysh as maxed riders will contribute much...
Time will tell
Manager of Team Popo4Ever p/b Morshynska in the PCM.Daily Man-Game
