23-12-2011, 08:55 PM
Quote:Because I think there needs to be something to work towards. There needs to be a reason that you want to improve as a player and become the best of your age category. After achieving this status it's unfair to have the opportunity pulled from under your feet - just because you don't happen to be a very strong player.I know that I would personally be gutted if I had the chance to play for my country but some technicality (like grade) prevented me from doing so.
I think this is the core of the issue: I think absolute strength is more important than relative strength within an age-group when deciding who gets to go where. Isn't 'reach such-and-such a playing level' a more meaningful target for players to aim at than 'be higher rated than such-and-such-a-player'? Some age-groups are stronger than others, which means that where players are in terms of grading tells us more than where they are in terms of how highly they rank in their age category. When I was a junior, I was fairly consistently the strongest player in my age-group (those born in 1988), but there were a few players both one year younger and one year older who were stronger. If, for instance, Colin Hall and Steven Tweedie hadn't played the game, then I might have been the strongest player in age categories quite often, but that wouldn't have made me any more deserving of international selection. Had I been 300 points higher-rated, that would have been a different story.
Fundamentally, I think that whether players are selected for events like the European and World Youth should be a function of their strength, not of the strength of their peer-group. They should absolutely be targets to aim for - tangible targets where it's clear that what you have to do to achieve selection is to play at a certain level, irrespective of the results of other players.