NMA-11 Cup: Round 3 Results and Round 4 Draw

Game week 28 saw the much-anticipated Round 3 of the NMA F-11 Cup, where the final 64 teams were battling it out, many of them just having entered the competition. For some it was a brief experience, while for others perhaps it’s the start of a long run.

The real-life week featured blanks for six teams. Among Fantrax teams there were some very low scores, with some managers fielding only two players from clubs with a game. Clearly many teams are not being actively managed, including quite a few who’ve made it this far in the cup. If you were lucky enough to come up against one of these teams I expect you had a very easy week.

Back to real life, there were comfortable wins for Arsenal and Aston Villa, the latter being the only team to register a clean sheet. Goalkeeper scores were correspondingly low as a result. Southampton held Spurs to a 3-3 draw, and Wolves and Leeds also scored 6 between them, 4-2 in favor of Leeds. Wolves also had two players sent off. Chelsea conceded a late goal to share the spoils with Everton 2-2, and Newcastle only narrowly got past Nottingham Forest 2-1.

So there were plenty of goals, and therefore lots of points available if you picked the right players. Eighteen teams in the NMA league scored 120 points or more, but only eight of these were among the 64 cup qualifiers. Three of these scored more than 130 points, so a tip of the hat to them. Just over half of the teams scored 100 points, so that was a benchmark - over 100 points and the chances are that you’d win, under 100 and you wouldn’t. But of course with head-to-head format it doesn’t always work out like that.

Here are the Round 3 results in full:

Highest scorers here (and third overall for the entire league) was DISCO ARGYLE with an impressive 135.5 points. The key components of their team were Alexander Isak and Bukayo Saka, who notched 27.5 and 26.5 points respectively. Chilwell and James chipped in to total 90 points just for those four players alone, a score that many teams failed to reach with all their players. This is team doing very nicely in the league, having climbed to 4th place, but they really didn’t need to score as many in the cup, since their opponents, Team BlueBloodedx scored only 33 points (they included seven players who didn’t have a game). The winning margin of 102.5 points was the largest of the round.

Two other games also had huge winning margins, as actively managed teams came up against managers who aren’t paying attention to the fixture list. In both cases the winners were slightly under par, but it didn’t matter as Team Enadiz2015 thrashed Team christopherm1 by a score of 99.5 - 15. Serial league and cup winners 183168 almost matched them by beating Bilbao Baggins 98.5 - 15.5. The two losing teams here both only managed to field two players.

Four of the ties saw the teams finish within 5 points of each other, and the closest result saw last year’s cup winners The Motley Crewe defeated by Smoke & Mirrors by a mere 3 points: 108.5 - 111.5. The loser is my team, and following a lot of good fortune last year, things changed dramatically this year. Having been quite comfortably up following Saturday’s fixtures, and with each of us having two Arsenal players, I felt reasonably optimistic, but sadly for me Martinelli and Saka more than made up the difference over Trossard and Zinchenko. Particularly annoying was the double substitution of my two, followed almost immediately by Saka scoring from substitute Tierney. If it had been Zinchenko supplying the cross I would have squeezed through! So congratulations to my opponent, who has the equivalent team of Southampton this year - the team that my side carried to success last year. Omens, anyone?

The award for the most unfortunate team of the round, the with the highest losing score, goes to Blog Supremo David’s Team DavidBrian whose 117 points would have beaten most of the competition, but not NMA-legend Team stallexpress who ran up 131. This always looked a difficult draw for David, and so it proved, although David held Haaland for a zero and therefore took only 10 men into battle.

The most fortunate team of the round award goes to Team buitre who managed to get through with a score of just 77.5, thanks to their opponents ☘️Allez Allez Allez only mustering 44.5 - another team who only fielded four players.

The 32 winning teams now progress to Round 4. There is still one ‘non-league’ team going, Christian Soldiers, who have already made it through four rounds to get this far. Ten ‘Premier League’ sides have already been knocked out, so ten remain. Thirteen ‘Championship’ sides are still in contention, along with five ‘League 1’ and three ‘League 2’ sides.

Here is the Round 4 draw:

Round 4 will take place in game week 30 on April 8th and 9th. This currently looks like a single game week for all teams (quite an oddity at this time of year). The standout fixture there is Liverpool hosting Arsenal, but there are a lot of close-looking ties too. Manchester City are at Southampton, so there will be a big decision to be made for the increasing number of managers no longer holding Haaland at discount.

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Did your squad participate in Round 3, and if so how did it fare? Will you play in Round 4, and how do you rate your chances? Are you still holding on to Haaland (and others) at discount - and do you plan to carry on doing so? Please let us know in the comments. Oh, and Ken, you didn’t get a mention in the article, so perhaps you can explain in the comments how it all went wrong?

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