Tactics Again

I generally start with a simple 4-4-2 with Counter Attack and try to keep things tight and take it from there. It's taken a long long painful time of experimenting mostly at youth level to have a feel for what works against what. The dreaded narrow formation I finally have a kind of counter to. Actually it's not a counter as such but it at least brings the game back to something resembling football.

Normally in a 4-4-2 one of the midfielders will push forward and one stay back, the narrow formation involves literally six players all coming at you from the middle of the pitch. In proper football this would get battered with wingers but sadly doesn't quite work in the default 4-4-2. My efforts to counter have been to keep both midfielders back to deal with attacks better and to allow the full backs to push forward.

It's not a killer fix as what tends to happen is that you drag the opponents players out to mark the attacks from the wings but at least it turns back into a game of football. Counter attack needs to be off. I'm debating that I should push the wingers further forward and turn a MR into a AMR as width in narrow is normally offered by their full backs pushing up.

This combined with playing a high line and offside really seems to kill narrow dead but you are prone to accurate balls over the top and quick strikers. 4-4-2 is better than diamond at coping with narrow however I myself now struggle against diamond sometimes so further experiments are needed to fix this. In fact with further tweaking I'm fairly sure I could actually turn playing against narrow to my advantage.

The other one is 4-3-3 and counter attack needs to be off for that as you don't want to be sitting coping with three strikers, you've a man extra further up the field so you need to take the game there...

The entire tactical thing is not really my bag but it's a must if your going to really push on. My tactical tweaking really is done in effort to negate the opponents tactical advantage. We're still a young side and there are still a number of teams that simply have a better line up. However over the past two seasons we've closed the gap and have steadily climbed the rankings.

Slightly controversial is the certain teams have made a play for the top spots by going for big names. One of the these is Rafalation, last seasons NFA Premier League winners. The team is mostly 28-31 year old big names, he clearly hasn't got a massive surplus to cover the squad ageing so unless he gets some lucky trades then over the next few seasons their going backwards. Admittedly their falling from the very top but they are falling none the less.