Given that I’m looking to make some tactical tweaks I wanted a chance to have a play with some of the concepts without having to ‘live-prove’ them in that save and risk our season; ‘what the hell’ I thought, ‘why not have a play around with one of the teams that everyone’s getting excited about’.
My first try was with Chile, picking up a handy World Cup Save from sortitoutsi to manage them in, but there’s an issue there because the save game is so close to the tournament that there’s not sufficient time to develop any familiarity with a new tactic.
Naturally my next step was FM Classic (FMC) then, where Tactical Familiarity isn’t an issue. What is an issue, however, is that international management in FMC is an ‘unlockable’ – one for the console-generation there. To unlock it you either have to win a Manager of the Year award (presumably in an FMC save? I don’t play FMC so that’s out), or you have to stump up £0.99 – it’s only a quid, but I still felt a little aggrieved doing it.
Anyway, unlock purchased and wallet lightened, I set up a new game and holidayed through to late spring of 2014 before choosing a team. The next issue, being FMC, was the limited choice of national teams that I could pick. No Chile or Colombia, which was frustrating, but I did have access to Mexico and they’d already secured World Cup qualification. The game was also at a date where I would have the chance to play a few friendlies and try to get a feel for the squad.
THE PLAN
Primarily this is about road-testing some ideas for a backup tactic in my Karlsrühe save, and there are a couple of things that I wanted to look at in particular.
- Playing with a second striker, or at least a Role that a second striker could occupy. I mentioned in my last Bundesliga update that this might be on my radar, to enable me to play Jimmy Marton more often.
- Looking at the 3-DC line that seems to have been common in the World Cup, and potentially using it to somewhat replicate the ‘Defensive Diamond’ concept that I’ve come across in my readings such as this from @MerryGuido (a Sweeper, two DCs, and a Defensive Midfielder).
A good example of the latter, using a ‘flat’ back three as opposed to a Sweeper, can be found here in one of @MrEdsFM’s tactics for his Újpest save.
Here’s what my original doodling looked like, scribbled in an idle couple of minutes during a break at work.
...and here’s how I've initially translated that into FM...
Conceptually I’m looking to create something that starts from either a Defensive or Counter mentality, the latter being something that’s proven quite successful for me in Germany.
The defensive core, as already mentioned, is the ‘diamond’ formed by three centre-backs and the Anchor Man. Setting the most central of the back line to ‘Cover’, with the others as ‘Stopper’, should see him sit that little bit deeper without going as far as employing a Sweeper. I’ll monitor the first couple of matches to see how that works out, and tweak as necessary (potentially the DC-X guys to DC-D?). The only thing I’m mindful of here is checking PPMs and Aggression on the central guy, to ensure that there’s nothing there that is likely to see him pushing out to override the default ‘Close Down Less’ instruction for the DC-C combination.
For width we’ll rely on wingbacks, but also in part on our attacking MC who I’ll be using in @JLAspey's Central Winger build – to reflect what we do at Karlsrühe. Allowing him to run wide, ideally to the left side, means that I can set the left wingback up a little more defensively; his counterpart on the right will be the full Complete Wingback package – providing crosses from out wide on the right.
Alongside our ‘Central Winger’ will be the main pivot of the team, a playmaker who will look to hold his ground and distribute balls to our attacking line.
Up front I’ve gone with a Shadow Striker and DLF combination, and again it’s something I’ll monitor and potentially tweak. The attacking plan is to have the DLF move around and create space as his marker(s) look to follow him, the Shadow Striker will look to arrive from a deeper position to capitalise on this, and the pairing of CWB (Right) and Central Winger will primarily operate as the supply lines for the final ball.
All well and good in theory, but it’ll be interesting to see if it works anything like that in practice. The first thing to do is to build the squad though, as at the point that my save kicks in the previous incumbent has only 13 players selected – two with short term injuries.
My first friendly is in a month’s time, against a side who I would have been fearful of before watching their run in the real World Cup. Even before the semi-final I thought that Neymar and Thiago Silva were largely carrying them, after the small matter of that 7-1 scoreline I was even more convinced that they’re not a team to be massively feared.
As for the group draw for the World Cup, I fancy our chances to getting through to the knock-out stages, which is the national FA’s expectation.
My first action was to fill the requisite third Goalkeeper slot, and there was only one choice there – Guillermo Ochoa clearly being the best option ion the national pool, even ignoring his real life heroics.
TEASE!
So there we have it, that’s my plan for my brief World Cup diversion, but I’ve not played anything of it yet – I just wanted to keep you updated and put a little teaser out there as things have been a little quiet on the playing front.
I’ll be looking to run through the build-up to the World Cup, and the tournament proper, over the next week or two and I’ll get an update written up when I can.
ANALYTICS
One final thing, in my last post I provided some detail on a analytics spread sheet that I’ve been working on. I’m about set to start messing around with the second version of this, pulling in some additional fields to reflect what @MrEdsFM has in his manual version...
If anyone has any further thoughts on what they’d like to see included then please let me know and I’ll see what I can do. Bear in mind that I want to keep this as manageable as possible (nobody wants to spend hours compiling and inputting every bit of data after each match), and that it needs to use data that readily is available somewhere in the standard FM2014 UI (nothing hidden that needs a specific skin to reveal it).
Drop me a note in the Comments, or catch me on Twitter at @flipsix3_FM and I’ll see what I can do.
Cheers!
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