Would be nice and also a fair solution that all members of the APAT community have a real chance to play for their country at the APAT European / World Championships. Specially out of UK / Ireland there isn"t a fair solution.
I was only thinking about this yesterday.
It"s a difficult one actually because in a way we have two sets of teams. The UK based teams where the majority of APATers are from and then the mainland European teams, whcih heavily rely on APAT having a contact in each country.
Each set of teams have a very different method in which to select their teams. I feel that the UK team captains have a certain responsibility to look at players in current APAT form etc, whereas due to the lack of APAT events that mainland European players play, it is more likely that the captains will select a group of friends/mates that will travel over together.
It"s a tough one to get the balance right, and the last thing we would ever want to happen is always have the same faces representing each country every year. That would detract from what the event is about.
Surley a fair solution would be to have "A" & "B" teams from the home nations and probably a "C" team for England. With more teams though, the format would need to be changed to enable teams to be eliminated through the comp.
This is a good idea in a lot of ways and I"m sure a lot of people who agree with Del here.
Just to play devils advocate here though does this not take away something from the people who are selected for the national team? At the moment it is a huge honour to be asked to represent your national team and if there is another team as well it just would not be the same.
Being objective, I suppose you could give england a B team due to the high numbers of players from england. Wales and Scotland do not need B teams.
The point is that it should be one country"s team v each other country"s team. By having more than one team per country (esp. the "host" country) you give that "host" an unfair advantage.
This is the same reasoning applied to the Forum Team Event like the one at the end of January. We don"t allow APAT to have more than one team...the same applies here.
The discussion was about the possible "unfairness" in the selection of the "away" nations teams...let"s try and keep it on track.
If we want to have a discussion about how the UK/England teams etc are selected then we can take that to another thread.
