Picking up from where I left off last time, the plan was to draft a tactic, play a load of local whipping boys with the squad all making friends and building morale. On the surface things seemed to go OK with a number of wins and some reasonable football being played. On reflection though, I am playing very low quality sides and should be performing much better.
Before going in to too much depth here is a quick reminder of the 4-5-1 system that I drafted after having a look at the squad available to me.
I opted for this formation on the basis that most teams with have some sort of wide threat so a back four would be best suited. I put Pekovic in as an anchorman as he is comfortably the best player at the club and it is his natural postion.
The friendlies panned out as follows:
The 1-1 against Bentwisch doesn’t concern me as the team was heavily made up of youth and reserve players. Now I don’t know if I am being overly self-critical here, but I feel I should be beating these teams by more than 2-0 and 3-0.
After the first game against Sasel I delved in to the analysis tab to have a look at how things panned out.
On the face of it, not a bad showing, but nothing too spectacular. It might be down to it being my first game in charge and also the first game in preseason or it might be a problem with the tactic. One thing that I fear I will be doing is raising a lot more questions than answers, so all advice and comments will be gratefully received.
Straight from kick off it was apparent that the shape was as I expected, with the left back a little more advanced than Mendy at right back and also the CM(A) a little further forward than the CM(S).
The goals were all fairly straight forward affairs with the striker scoring after a through ball from the CM(A), a CB scoring from a corner and an own goal after a good cross from the right hand side. Speaking of crosses from the right I noticed a disparity in the number of crosses from my two wide players. Denis Weidlich operated as a winger on the right hand side as opposed to Sargis Adamyan on the left who played as an inside forward. Weidlich attempted 17 crosses of which 4 were successful as opposed to Adamyan who crossed only once in the game (although it did leave him with a 100% success rate). Is this down to the difference in the roles? Is it about the players? I presume the former but only further games will tell for sure.
I then delved in to the passing tab. One of my biggest problems in recent FM games is getting any kind of passing going. I looked at all passes then removed the completed ones to reveal passes that were intercepted (red), blocked (blue) or went out of play (yellow).
As with my Antwerp save, a common problem is the goalkeeper losing possession through long kicks. I imagine this is down to the CF being isolated against the two opposition CB’s and also both my CM players lacking height or decent heading and jumping stats. Also from this graphic it shows we didn’t complete many passes in the final third of the pitch, confirming my earlier fears that the CF may become isolated in this formation. Rather than jump ship to 4-4-2 I want to stick with this formation and fix the problems rather than admit defeat after one game. As demonstrated here (from a later game), when the CF is receiving the ball, he is increasingly isolated which leads to him either losing the ball or trying a long shot from too far out to have a realistic chance of scoring.
So that leaves me with a list of questions and targets to look in to whilst trying to resolve the issues. One issue is I fear I have made a mistake with opponent selection in preseason as I have no clue how this will work against our peers in 3.Liga.
- Is the best option asking the CF to drop deeper or should I look to get support closer to him either from a box to box midfielder or from the AMR and/or AML?
- Would dropping deeper and asking the GK to distribute shorter and to a specific player resolve the lost possession?
- Is it worth taking of direct passing in favour of shorter passing to try and retain possession and create more?
- Is ‘control’ the best option for a mid level team? Would balanced or even counter work better?
- Is it wise to have four players playing in positions that isn’t their natural best?
I am thinking that I will have to see how things pan out once the league starts and then adapt things accordingly.
With regards to the infrastructure, I have brought in two new coaches and a goalkeeping coach. I had hoped to secure a third coach but his wage demands were too high so I had to pass on that. The depth of players at the club is light at the moment with only one player in the u19 squad and six in the second team. Saying that, I do have high hopes for the Max Christiansen from the u19’s who I have just assigned to be tutored by the resolute Pekovic. He is the only really young prospect at the club so I will be able to pay close attention to his development. The 3.Liga rules state that players have to be 17 year old to play first team football, so whilst he can’t feature just yet, I envisage him getting a few games before the season is out as I don’t think Pekovic will have the legs to play every game.
FM Ramblings 
Ok, a couple of comments:
– asking your ‘keeper to “distribute to defence” seems like a sensible thing to do if you have no aerial prowess further forward to win the long punts
– the inside forward will be cutting inside allowing the CWB to overlap him, hence the lack of crosses. On support duty, he’s more about producing through balls and taking edge of the box shots.
– my initial impression is that you may be having the same problems as Petr Uchio in our network game – your striker(s) is isolated from midfield. With an attacking role, he’s looking to pin the defensive line back. To get players closer to him you could try pushing your defensive line up or shifting one of your CM’s into the AMC zone. My preference, though, would be to try playing narrower as a team and then ask the targetman to ‘move into channels’. This should get the IF closer to him and leave more space for the CWB to overlap. The TM will also be in better positions to receive through balls from the IF. If you wanted to keep the winger wide then a personal instruction on him to do that would help but maintain a narrower team.
– you don’t really have a primary creative player and a rigid system will restrict creative freedom of the generic roles a little. This could work but I’d be tempted to switch your most suited CM to an AP role. For me, this would be best suited in the MRC role to encourage connections with both the winger and inside forward.
– it doesn’t bother me when I play people in positions they aren’t natural in but it’s a personal preference.
– if you do switch the targetman into a role which drops deep [TM(S), DLF(S) or similar] then who is going to be challenging the defensive line? I think that would require a slight re-jig of the deeper players too.
Just some ideas to throw around.
Thought I’d throw some of my own interpretations into the mix.
Firstly, with relation to the goalkeeper losing possession problem, I’d like to argue that, actually, it’s not a massive problem that he loses possession on occasion, as long as you’re set up suitably well defensively. And with an anchor man in front of four defenders, you are. Given your direct passing, I’d assume that you’re happy for the midfielders to be bypassed when the defenders pass the ball forwards, but not the goalkeeper? Why is that? However, the most important thing is that a) Kucokovic is the target (assuming he’s a suitable target man) and b) that he has someone to offload to. One common problem I find with the 4-1DM-2-2-1 is that the central midfielders are often too deep to interact with the striker, particularly if the opposition have a defensive midfielder between the lines. This means you need help from your wingers, and why I personally don’t like to use either of the wide players as a winger in my 4-1-2-2-1. What I like to do is assume the anchor man is able to take a large amount of defensive work, and send both full-backs forwards as the widest players. Then I’d set your AML and AMR *both* to Inside Forward – Attack. Your target man would then drop deep, winning possession from the direct play, and have two men making runs in behind. However, as Shrew says, it’s important to have a playmaker that is able to link up with them – a target man is unlikely to be able to pick a twenty yard pass over the top even if he has drawn the opposition central defender away from the defensive line. For this reason, I’d go with a AP-A as one of the CMs and perhaps a CM-S or potentially a B2B-s as the other. I’d also change the Anchor Man to a Half Back so the CBs split when your two full-backs go rampaging onwards.
Equally, if you really wanted to be a devil and keep one of your AMR/AML wide then you could always use an inverse wing-back, even if it is more difficult to create within FM14. This won’t work as well here though, I don’t think.
I do kind of agree with your point on the goalkeeper’s kicking but there are a couple of problems for me:
– firstly, his targetman doesn’t seem to be capable of winning the headers and then you’re relying on winning the second ball which is likely to be a lottery at best.
– secondly, ‘keepers don’t kick it far enough in FM. Too often it’ll fall well short of halfway, be headed straight back beyond your defence by the opposition and the strikers are in. It’s asking for trouble really.
Your defenders tend to lump it longer (although the fullback to the centre circle ‘clearance’ is particularly annoying) and don’t underhit it dangerously as much as the ‘keeper and, even when they do, the players react like they should unlike the return header from a goal-kick.
Anyway, that’s far too long to be talking about goal-kicks!!
Thanks for the comment. I was wondering about narrowing the play to support the target man as on examination both FBs have the potential to support up the field.
This demonstrates my misunderstanding of the styles as I didn’t see direct passing as something that would bypass the midfield, I thought it would just get the ball moving forward rather than dwelling on it so to speak. I have always liked a BBM on FM but don’t really have anyone suited to the role in the squad.
My 16 year old youth player mentioned in the post looks ideal as a potential half back so that is one possibility for the future.
As I understand it direct passing won’t *often* bypass the midfield (although, again, I play very little FM14), considering Route One is an option. So you should be fine.