Meet the Team. The First Challenge.

First things first, I guess it wouldn’t hurt to have a little background on my RC Strasbourg Alsace playing squad. I’m not going to get into all sorts of narrative detail, as I might have back in my FM Stories days, but I’ll give it a quick once over.

As I mentioned in my opening post, I’m midway through the first season – just entering the winter break, in fact. As things stand my entire playing roster looks like this.

It’s not massively different to the ‘Out of the Box’ squad, should anyone decide to load them up. My budgets were fairly tight, non-existent until I sold in fact, so my early business was limited. I let Gauthier Pinaud go to CA Bastia, a bit of a gamble as he looks a decent player but he was one of a number clearly unsettled by my arrival; their offer would at least give me some cash to play with. My only other exit didn’t come until the winter window, with a teenage goalkeeper (Dylan Ruer) heading off to FC Metz.

In terms of inbound players, the image above includes them; Rolson Mayoukou, Moussa Traore, Jorris Romil, Cedric Faivre, and Dino Djiba. There’s not much to say about my rationale here, mostly they’re highly rated youngsters, although the last two were more of a case of trying to add some squad depth. All of them were free transfers, with a couple on ‘pay and play’ deals, but this isn’t a blog about building my squad (at least not yet), it’s about tactics to suit them.

These are the players around who I built my initial formation, and the subsequent changes following Lienard’s injury...

...it’s no surprise to see all of them, along with Donzelot – one of my excellent full/wingbacks – contribute to the goal I linked in the opening post.

To begin with I was running with the following formation.

The idea was to have a flat 5 in midfield when not in possession, and to transition this into something similar to the ‘classic’ 4-2-3-1 when attacking. With Lienard not ideally suited to an offensive role, and with my fullbacks regularly bombing forward, he was intended to sit a little deeper than Genghini on the right. Depending on the opposition I would sometimes tweak his duties to Defensive Winger (D). Genghini and Noro are the key offensive creators, with Sichi also offering support, although Sichi and Noro are largely interchangeable.

In  my mind’s eye, ignoring the fullbacks for now, I would end up with Noro sitting in behind Ledy and floating a little, Genghini running the right flank (he has no PPM at this time, although he certainly likes to cut inside now and then), and Sichi sitting in behind as the link-up back to the defence. Sabo (3 Assists, 1 Goal) and Donzelot (1 Assist, 2 Goals) also get forward a lot.

Looking at it purely in terms of the attacking phase, that was my plan and whilst it worked in preseason (and the early games) the heat maps and average position analysis tools showed that Sichi and Noro tended to play very close together.

As the season kicked off I started to experiment a little, and pushed a man forward into a more advanced position. Now I don’t know my Shadow Strikers from my Enganches (yet!), but around that time @Cleon was advocating the use of the former (or a pair of them) in a strikerless formation. I wasn’t confident in going with no-one up front – perhaps not fully appreciating the Shadow Striker’s threat – so I came up with this.

Again the intended supply lines were the flanks, particularly the right through Genghini. I didn’t particularly settle on this as a single formation, rather I switched between it and the 4-5-1 during matches to see how it worked out. Between those two formations we started to win games, after three straight draws to open our campaign; we were mainly playing either Noro or Sichi in the SS position, although I also began to experiment with Ledy as the SS and Perrin up front.

It was around then that we got hit by injuries, first Lienard, then Noro and then Faivre – who I’d brought in to give me a third decent AMC type player as backup for the Noro/Sichi pairing. As you can see, aside from the physicals, there’s not a whole lot between the three AMCs in terms of (the relevant) stats.

Once again, looking at what Cleon had been doing with his Sheffield United formation, I tweaked and came up with this.

That’s showing an Enganche in the hole, although I was experimenting with a Shadow Striker or an AP-S also.

Those represent the three formations that have contributed to our season so far, with the majority of the wins coming from the latter two.

STOP SHOOTING FROM RANGE, YOU MUPPETS!

That’s a 1-1 home draw against mid-table opposition, playing with the 4-5-1 Shadow Striker evolution. Seven of those shots are from outside the area, all of which were blocked or missed the target. Of those inside the area, three were corners (the three misses all on the left post), and two were from free-kicks (the goal, and the miss by #17).

That takes us down to six efforts on goal, from open play, in the area. Two of those were the same move; #7 (Genghini) has taken a corner on the left and found himself back on the ball, he sees his shot blocked and the ricochet lands at the feet of #3 (Sabo) who also gets blocked.

Also interesting is the fact that #25 (Ledy) is playing the Shadow Striker role here, and has had only two efforts on goal – both from long range.

Now I know that looking at individual aspects is maybe not the best way to start, but I’m generally happy with our defence and possession (so far). The first thing I’m setting about investigating, therefore, is which roles to adopt and which players to use in them. I want to cut down on the number of times someone just blasts the ball from 20-odd yards.

Whilst I could voice my frustration at the changes to the tactics creator (particularly the ‘long shots’ slider), I’m not going to because what I do understand is that my players are resorting to such efforts because there isn’t a better ball.

Actually there probably is, on a percentage of these occasions, but we are talking the French third tier here, and Creativity and Decisions ratings down into the low double figures (at best). 

In addition to the quality of our players, which is no doubt a factor, it’s also worth bearing in mind that we have a very sparse coaching team, and as a result it’s taking a while for my squad to get comfortable with the ‘formation’ component of my tactics. It probably doesn’t help that I’m not completely up to speed on the new training module either, but that’s for another time.

Anyway, that’s my first goal, a clearer understanding of how to prevent so many speculative efforts. I’m off to have a read of various articles/forums, and to use the winter break to play a few friendlies and examine the results. I’ll report back with my findings in due course, in the meantime feel free to drop any observations here or catch me on Twitter: @flipsix3_FM