People In, People Out, More Tinkering - Shooting for Survival.

THE BEST LAID PLANS...

So the 2017/18 season is looming, and our chance to prove that last season's 6th place wasn't a fluke... 

Was it?

As I started to prepare for the opening of the transfer window, I got a surprise bid from Heracles for Abdoul Karim Sylla – worth around £1.4m but over a 30 month period. I’ve already noted that he’s very similar to Balde, and therefore I didn’t immediately knock back the approach. I don’t think that losing Sylla would be a huge blow, as I’m confident that we could find a suitable replacement, possibly someone who would better complement Balde’s strengths and weaknesses; I’m pretty sure, in fact, that we could do that from within our own ranks.

That being said I put the ball back in their court, suggesting that they aim higher and with more of the outlay up front if they were serious. I’d prefer to hold onto Sylla for now, but if the Dutch club are keen enough to find a decent sum then I could be tempted. Heracles backed out at that point, but of course Sylla’s agent then started making noises about a new contract. Fortunately his agent isn’t a hard-ball type, and a mutually acceptable offer was arrived at.   

I hoped that would be the end of the transfer action, we’ve not really come under a great deal of pressure for our players so far, within a matter of days things took an unwelcome turn though; if I’d not considered it before, I was faced now with the realisation that we’re going to be seen very much as a selling club until such time as we can consolidate our position in the top flight (and, realistically, the top half of it).

What triggered that realisation was the fallout of Feyenoord coming in for Luis Mata. Their offer was laughed out of the room, but I decided to try and pre-empt any agent shenanigans by offering a very significantly improved deal. We couldn’t get close though, with his agent wanting to put the 20-year-old on £17k/week – a figure which would run the risk of blowing our wage structure wide open.

I walked away, keeping my fingers crossed that things would die down, as I was trying to focus on deals I was trying to do to add depth to our squad.

The arrival of Olivier Ntcham from Sunderland has the look of a very nice deal at just over £1.3m. Man City took him to England as a 16-year-old, which is enough to reassure that my scout’s opinion of his talents is warranted. He could actually prove to be a better option than Coco in the AMC slot, although lacks some of the Spaniard’s defensive qualities which shine if we play a pressing-from-the-front game. With the ability to slot into central midfield too, that reduces my concerns about depth in the middle of the park.

Unfortunately I missed out on a potential move to add Derrick Williams to our defensive line, a player who would’ve offered depth both in the centre of the back line, and on the left. He was courted by a number of clubs before, as you can see, settling on Forest. Whilst he wouldn’t have been a big step up in quality, he looks a solid prospect and has that improved distribution that I’d like to build from the back.

On the Mata front things didn’t go quiet though, in fact several clubs came in with deals of varying levels – none of which I considered enough. Predictably things got to a point where he wanted to know why I’d turned down one particular approach, from Olympique Lyonnais. Given our performance last season, I tried to keep him sweet by playing the ‘ambition’ card and suggesting that we could aim to qualify for Europe; he wasn’t convinced, perhaps he’s more of a realist than me, and he went away somewhat sulkily.

I decided to bite the bullet and try to structure a deal that will make us a tidy profit – primarily through a sizeable up-front fee. It took a few days going through, and all the time I was second-guessing myself, but I’d rather a player like that was gone than sulking; effectively the deal was actually £2m better for us, given that we would not have to pay the additional contribution that was due in two more league appearances. FCP still get £550k, as their 10% share of the sale, but I can’t sniff at the extra funds dropping into our coffers.

The challenge now was to find a replacement.

ARRIVING AT A 'NEW' TACTICAL SHAPE

Last time I suggested that I’d begun casually considering new formations, and with Mata gone I thought about this more seriously. Employing Munch as a wingback, and playing Coco or Ntcham in the left-central AM slot, might give me a decent opportunity to see what the youngster is all about.

Having said that, and never being one with the courage to stick firmly to my convictions, I promptly used some of the Mata cash to pick up David Furnish’s long lost brother...

At a £400k transfer fee I’m not worried about the outlay, and we had a fun time getting him on board too. 

His agent wouldn’t shift from a £17k/wk wage demand (and a £2k+ appearance fee), despite his current club paying him just £6k. After seven rounds of offer and counter offer the discussion was suddenly closed when he sacked his agent; I quickly resubmitted the same bid, got permission to talk again, and was interested to see his (self-represented) initial request of just £9.5k/wk and £1.4k app – which we talked down further, and signed off, in one round of counter offers. The only minor issue I have is that he wouldn’t sign on for anything less than four years, but I’ll cross that bridge when I come to it, considering his versatility I’m prepared to give him a shot.

...anyway, that minor distraction aside, I decided to draw up something around the idea of a wingless (on the left, at least) formation.

Rather than throwing positions onto the tactics board, and then shuffling them around, I started out by putting the key players into place. After the obvious, a Keeper and pair of central defenders, I put up Munch in his preferred Wingback position.

Knowing that people have had issues with controlling the lateral spacing of a back three (or a back two plus halfback) I opted for a man in front of the DC pairing – and therefore it felt logical to deploy a wingback on the right side as well.

The final ‘given’ in the first step of development was that we’d be playing with at least one striker.

That’s the easy part, now came the juggling of the remaining four men to make the best use of our attacking talent.

Whilst losing Mata was a blow, it was Laoudihi – of our wide pairing – who took the main plaudits last time around. Whilst Munch looks the complete package at wingback, nobody on our right really does (maybe Petit, but not yet). With those two factors in mind I plan to have the right wingback sit deeper, but that gives me the ability to return our right midfielder into a more advanced position.

The combination of Coco, Ntcham, and Windekilde means that someone in a more central AM position would be good. With Munch expected to maraud up the left we don’t want someone out wide on that flank, but I’d prefer to put someone over toward that side than straight through the middle; once Munch gets forward it would be useful to have someone available for shorter interplays.

The final step feels easy. With those nine in place then it’s a case of two central midfield men to link up (and break up) play through the middle.

So with the basic ‘defensive’ shape in position, the next step is to flesh out the roles. Again the basic pairing of a Keeper and the back two is simple, as is Munch’s role of Complete Wingback – the formation’s being built to see what he has to offer after all. On the opposite flank Durwael will be asked to play as a general Wingback, initially with a Support duty but that will be reviewed and tweaked as necessary.

Munch will be left largely to his own devices for now, until I can see how he plays the role. On the opposite side the right wingback will be tasked with staying out wide, and also asked to ‘hold position’ (the latter in an attempt to keep him from getting too far forward when we’re in the attacking phase). 

As I’ve hinted at above, Halfback was out of the question for the DM position. Ideally I’d like to employ Ferri here as a deep playmaker, so that’s what I put in place (with a Defend duty) although that may get switched to a less specialised Defensive Midfielder role – or even Anchor Man – depending on the player and the situation. For this slot ‘close down less’ is employed to make sure that the player keeps their place at the head of the defensive triangle. That should also mean that, when we play Ferri in a playmaker role here, he’s more likely to be open to receive the ball in transitional play.

The midfield is something that I like to consider once the two ‘ends’ are sorted, as it gives me a better idea of how to tie attack and defence together, so I move to the front next. Balde or Sylla are likely to start, and both have the physical presence to hold up the ball. I toyed with the idea of a Deep Lying Forward but I want to pressure the opposition’s back line more so Advanced Forward seems to fit the bill. I’ve not applied Player Instructions initially, but will review.

Behind the striker I’m looking at a nice variety of options. Out on the right I can play Laoudihi as an orthodox Winger, although I remain unconvinced of our ability to maximise on cross where we don’t have a pair of strikers working together. Instead I’m going with an Inside Forward role – continuing my preference for having Laoudihi cut in field and drive at the box. Pappa will work nicely from that slot too, his left foot naturally encouraging that same movement. Sit narrower’ and ‘roam from position’ have been applied to the position for all players, in addition I’ve added ‘shoot less often’ for Pappa, just to try and rein in his ‘Shoots from distance’ PPM somewhat.

In the AMC(L) slot I opt for a Trequartista. Our compact midfield and DMC area should mean that we won’t miss that extra body dropping deep to help in defence, and I really want someone to help draw the attention of one of the opposition’s central defenders (or draw in their fullback, freeing up Munch)

The only additional instruction for my Treq is ‘get forward more’ as I want him to act as the ‘second striker’. Again I’ll monitor its impact and potentially remove if it means that he’s not involved in the build-up play as much as I’d like.

The midfield pair then. I want to continue to offer plenty of threat up front, and ideally I’m hoping to create attacking movement not dissimilar to what I saw with my 4-2-3-1 formation in FM12. There I had the three AM players moving freely around and changing places – it wasn’t unusual to see all three, our striker, and one of the central midfielders all pushing onto the opposition defence.

With this formation, in attack, I’m expecting to see a line of WB(L) AMC(L) and AM(R) all pressed high up the field. The central midfielder on the right, with a gap in front of him, will therefore be set up as a Box-to-Box to begin with; he’ll be encouraged to ‘get further forward’, and also to ‘close down more’ to add to the pressure on the opposition in possession.

The last man will either be set up with a very generic Central Midfield role, or maybe Ball Winning Midfielder – depending on who occupies the slot. No additional instructions have been applied for now.

So here’s the finished article.

Yes, it may look a bit familiar. I'll get to that. 

It looks like it should offer us plenty in defence, especially against formations that aim to play between our defensive and midfield lines, and I’m hopeful that in attack we’ll have men forward in numbers. As an added bonus our compact defensive lines should encourage opposition attacks to run wider – therefore hopefully forcing more crosses, which we can deal with better than incisive passes through the middle.

IN ACTION 

After the usual summer warm-up spent pulverising local minnows, plus a couple of Portuguese sides after we were invited to play a tour there due to our popularity there*, we fielded our new shape for the season’s opener at SC Bastia. We ran out 2-3 losers at their place, but in a game where possession and chances were shared evenly. 

*(I suspect that popularity plummeted after we sold Mata about a fortnight before travelling)

We looked pretty good, and scored the best goal of the game with Munch getting ahead of Coco (in a central position) to nod on the Spaniard’s ball to Balde. Unfortunately, for everything that went well, we had a horrible time at the other end – leading to this tweet...

Inability to deal with corner + dubious pen + GK running out to corner flag to try & tackle their winger = 3-2 defeat on opening day #gutted

— flipsix3 (@flipsix3_FM) February 14, 2014

One of my favourite quotes regarding the art of football tactics is this...

“The intention is not to move the ball, rather to move the opposition”

Now I’m not suggesting that I’m anywhere close to understanding how to achieve that, but it was brought back to me when one of my old mates from my FM Stories days responded to my Tweet with a suggestion that he’d been making significant progress in terms of cutting down on goals from one particular source.

CHECK YOUR CORNERS

Jim Kavanagh (@jimbokav1971) gave me some background on what he’s been doing.

Now it may sound obvious to some, but I hadn’t really thought about how *not* deploying players in defensive positions might increase our ability to defend a corner, but it makes sense – up to a certain tipping point of course.

By leaving two or three well-spaced players in forward positions (let’s say a central midfielder and a couple of wingers – although my version differs due to formation) the opposition is forced to provide cover for fear of a quick counter attack. In my case I’m normally seeing four opposition players held back, around the halfway line, to cover my trio.

Add my playmaker, who lurks at the edge of the area, and that leaves me six plus my Keeper to face up against no more than five opponents – once you factor out their corner taker and Keeper. With three set to ‘mark tall player’, one to ‘mark small’, one ‘man mark’, and a fullback on the far post it’s looks good on paper and I ran with it for a few games to see how things shaped up.

EARLY SIGNS ARE ENCOURAGING

Last season, at the nine game mark, I noted that I’d amassed 9 points after that run of five successive draws. I’ve just hit the seven game mark this time around, and we’re sitting pretty on 13 points. It’s not been spectacular on the scoring front, but again we’re a side tipped for relegation so I’m not about to complain...

Text Bubbles Show Predicted Finish

In general statistical terms there certainly doesn’t appear to be a whole lot to worry about. Sure I could hope to restrict the opposition in terms of chances but, and I keep coming back to this, we’re a relegation-fodder side; what’s more, we’ve barely strengthened our squad again this summer. I say barely, but you will notice one strange name on the scoresheet for the latest game, here’s Mathias Jorgensen, our last signing before the window closed – and the extra cover I wanted in the heart of defence.

Anyway, back to how we’re performing with our new shape.

Picking one of the games at random, here’s some analysis for the trip to Nice which, on the surface of it, looks like a fairly well balanced encounter.

First glance at the stats throw up some concerns with the distribution of our defence, both our Keeper and our two central defenders are achieving poor results here. Immediately it looks like I’ve forgotten to set the Keeper to ‘Distribute to Defenders’ but checking that I notice that it’s not the case; either he was having a really bad day, or he was ignoring me – and if that’s the case there’s probably a reason for it.

In the past I’ve noticed that he’ll roll the ball out to our Fullbacks quite a lot, with them pushed into the Wingback position I guess that he’s seeing reduced options and choosing to play the longer ball more often.

GK : Incomplete/Out of Play Passes

His distribution chart certainly suggests that might be the case, at least there aren’t many shorter passes going astray. I watched the replay on a few of the passes and was surprised to see that my Wingbacks are actually right back in line with the back two when the kicks were taken, however the keeper is taking the kicks relatively quickly rather than waiting for the opposition’s strikers to retreat.

I’ll apply ‘shorter passes’ to the Keeper position, but beyond that I’m at something of a loss as to how to cut this behaviour down further, I guess that the team instruction for ‘Play out of Defense’ may help but I’m wary of doing that on a team-wide basis. What concerns me with that is the stats for those two central defenders, however when I interrogate their own pass-maps I see similar results – it’s long balls upfield that are mainly going astray, on shorter balls they’re a lot better. Team shout it is then.

I was looking for Ferri to operate as our main pivot, sitting in the deeper (DMC) playmaker role, but analysis of his passing produces similar results – a lot of good short passing play, but anything launched forward more than 20 yards is getting picked off. I don’t imagine that it’s all his fault, more likely he’s picking out good balls that my more advanced players aren’t able to latch onto. Either way though, it’s not going according to plan.

Checking on a couple of other matches I see similar results, to varying degrees. It's not that he never pulls off longer passes, but his success rate on them is a concern. I can either revert the DM player to a more defensive role, and employ a pivot in the central midfield pair, or I can push Ferri into a central midfield three.

Looking at our general positions, and Ferri’s tackles (no more than a couple per game) I’m torn. He does form the point of our defensive triangle, but he’s putting in few challenges. Admittedly he picks up a handful of interceptions, but I’m not sure that he’s making a significant difference with his defensive play.

Initially, to encourage him to work from a slightly more advanced position, I’ll tweak him from DLP-D to DLP-S whilst still sitting him in the DM slot. If he does advance up the pitch more readily, then he should be able to find shorter passes to our attacking contingent. I’ll check on him again after a few games to see how his distribution has been impacted by the change.

The Average Positions view also makes me think that our central midfield pairing are sitting too close to the defensive unit, although when I watch games they don’t appear to be deep – it’s more that we play a high line and compress the pitch somewhat. I’ll skip on that ‘issue’ for now then.

Looking back at the tackling stats for the team overall, it looks like our opponents are trying to take advantage of our flanks, but Durwael and Munch are doing solid defensive work. Checking other matches reveals a similar bias towards tackles out wide. That’s good stuff, it shows me that neither is shirking their defensive duties. Looking at their individual analysis the majority of tackles are made in our own third, and out wide, so my initial strategy of trying to force a wide crossing game seems to be working out – the heading stats for our central pairing also points to that.

THE BAD NEWS

So where are we conceding goals from then? Running back through those first seven games I’ve categorised them as follows:

Vs SC Bastia

• Corner, header down for striker to poach. (see notes above around what we did as a result).
• Penalty.
• World’s Stupidest Keeper...

...on a serious note, if you can call it that, Kehi’s suicide run might be considered a product of the position that Durwael found himself in. Being generous to our keeper we’ll chalk that one up to ‘Wingback caught napping’ and keep an eye on that position in the future.

Vs Montpellier

• Free-kick from out wide (almost a corner), hit first time on the volley. Not the sort of goal you do much about.

Vs St Etienne

• Through-ball, striker beating back line for pace. To be fair to the Keeper he blocked it, but the rebound went straight to the striker.
• This...

...not sure where the blame lies there, but I guess our high line may be a contributory factor (for both of these).

Now obviously it’s a small sample size, and I’ll need to continue to monitor, but aside from the possibility of dropping our defensive line a little I’m not seeing too much that requires specific attention there. That’s not to say that there isn’t something in the non-goal data somewhere, but I’m really not sure about how to start digging that out.

THE GOOD NEWS

Take a look at a couple of these moves, to get a feel for what we’re seeing in the attacking phase.

Here Irvine has fulfilled the playmaker role, laying in Munch who has cut in from the flank. Munch will make a very attacking run, supported by both Coco (close by) and Balde, before smashing home from  an acute angle. With Laoudihi also arriving (late) from the right flank, I’m almost seeing the attacking line of a 4-2-3-1 right there.

What I love about this next one is the promise that I’m seeing from a couple of our younger players. Late in the Nice game, and with Rene Wildekinde given a chance, I decided to try the Dane out in a False 9 role - given his less physical stature. The work he does here in creating a void up front, and slotting a ball into it, is very nice indeed.

I’m still relying more on a traditional striker up front, but that sort of movement – which I’ve also seen when employing Nacer Nadji in a similar role late on – gives me hope that I’m working towards the sort of attacking interplay that I want.

ONWARDS...

I’m aware that this ‘new’ shape isn’t a lot different from the 4-1-2-2-1 I abandoned early in last season. Rest assured that, having identified the problems with that one, when we’re up against sides who make particular use of both wingers and attacking fullbacks I’ll be looking at something offering more to counter that – probably the 4-1-4-1/4-4-1-1 combination.

I’m sure people are picking huge holes with some of what I’m saying, or are seeing blatantly obvious things that I’m missing in my analysis. If there’s other details of any given match/player that you want to see then just yell and I’ll make it available – all you have to do is let me know what.

So I’m off to play a few more matches, and then to come back and look at how the tweaks I’ve made have helped (or otherwise), but in the meantime please please feel free to chip in with feedback through the usual channels.