retired_iaispuro

I got a job offer in Dec 2006 which I sanpped up. I'll be managing Stalybridge Celtic in the Nth Conf.

What I did 1st was to look at the coaches and see what I am missing in my training. Def and Att (oh and GK). I got hold of 2 coaches and left everyone on the general training for now as most of them are part time.

Then I went through the team. Not great but some ok pace for this level.

I then set up the tactics. I started by taking the standard 4-4-2 Diamond attacking as the layout was how I wanted it. I made the IM adjustements as per the instructions above and then did the same with the passing.

I changed the set pieces to how I like them. Corners to near post with my best defender set to near post flicks.

I changed the wingers to cross from byline because this makes them try and take on players and set the full backs to cross from deep to prevent them from trying to ever get to the byline and thus be out of position.

I didn't adjust anything else yet!

My 1st game was home to Lancaster and although they were favourites I still went for the attacking formation.

We totally dominated but both of my DCs back passed to the GK and once it went for a corner and the 2nd time an own goal. What should I change here?
My wingers were still dominating and getting in plenty of crosses that weren't being met. I will try and play with a targetman if I can find one.
Luckily my corner routine worked and we equlaised before from another corner Lancaster scored an og. Then a perfect free kick saw them equalise. 2-2
I changed the CF throughout the team moving the defensive players down, leaving the wingers, setting the AMC and right sided FC higher. I will be using the LS FC as a target man so left his alone.
In the next game I played away at Barrow. I played the def formation. I man marked Kyle Wilson who looked awesome at this level. We kept him away from goal but in the 2nd half he crossed twice for two headed goals.
We lost 2-0.
The football looks good but this is where I and many others struggle.

Thankfully there are some more tweaks to make after Ashys latest post. This should help.

I also have 4 strikers out injured and one of them looks great as a target man.

retired_iaispuro

One question!

The sliders, do you class them as 0 at the left end and 21 at the right end meaning the middle is 11 or as I do
class the left side as 1 middle=10 and right=20?

retired_sugarbear_sb

Hey mate, I hope your still not convinced, because I never said that TM overrides IM.. I mentioned that it is my firm belief that Individual Mentality is for positioning, Team Mentality is for the mental tendancies/play style of the team as a unit.

I may be misunderstanding you, but I just want to make sure you understood my standing on the topic. They work independently and accomplish different things.

Thanks mate! I hope I can keep "bringing food to the table" here in my posts!


Individual Sliders have 20 clicks (starting with the slider on the far left, you can click 20 times)

Team Sliders have 22 clicks (starting with the slider on the far left, you can click 21 times)

i'm not at home right now to make sure of this, and I'm trying to find a post on the forum to back this up, but I'm almost positive here.... this is why 10 is the middle for Indiv. and 11 for Team.


Hope this helps, and I'm glad to see your working on your tactics... Feel free to keep posting your findings here. and most importantly keep asking questions... it will help everyone learn

Looking at your post about your new team, make sure you are looking at the scouting report and adjusting accordingly... I saw you upped the Creative Freedom, I'll talk more on this soon, but make sure that your guys are in position defensively... that is paramount! If they are beeting you and getting behind you, drop your IM down a notch... see above in how to defend the counter attack.

Cheers mate!


Ashyr

retired_sugarbear_sb

typo... in meant Team Sliders have 21 clicks.

sorry

retired_sugarbear_sb

In my last post I discussed Tempo.

I mentioned that it can relate to shooting and I wanted to follow up with this so that you can understand what I mean here.

I have found (along with everything posted last post) that with faster tempo, your players tend to take more shots if you increase tempo, I have not found any valid proof for this. It is simply what I have observed.

how I use this is in situations that I am mounting a decent offence and creating things in and around the box, but for some reason my boys are failing to take shots when they have it. I have found that by upping the tempo by as little as one notch, I've seen their Shots increase dramatically.

An example of this is when I'm playing a posession style game and using shorter passing and a slower tempo. Things build up in the offensive end and they always seem to keep trying to pass it one xtra time before firing the shot on goal. In situations like this I will up the tempo by a notch and I will get better results... they will start firing those shots on net.

I will also up the tempo when running a High tempo wide game and on the counter attack... if I notice my strikers getting control and then not firing shots off when in the box... I do the same thing and up the tempo a bit. It seems to help.

Again this is just a theory and a practice that I use and if anyone else has more to add to this please feel free to chime in on this.


In my next post... later this afternoon I will discuss my settings for Individual Creative Freedom and Team Creative Freedom.


Cheers!


Ashyr

retired_iaispuro

I dropped CF on all of my players apart from the wingers and 1 striker who stayed as they were and the AMC and RFC which I raised slightly as I wanted them to try things.

I dropped the others because the DCs cost me be passing back to the keeper. This may have been mentalities but at this level (nth conf) I think they were trying to do something that they can't.

I look forward to the rest of your posts and me finally being able to win titles.

retired_sugarbear_sb

Sounds like your thinking spot-on there... I will touch more on CF (writing the post right now) and you will see how CF effects your players and their positioning.

p.s. I do not guarantee titles, there are MANY other factors that go into managing a team, including player rest and rotation, team talks, news, player discipline/praise, just to name a few... I do guarantee that I will be honest in my evaluations and that if you adhere to the settings and adjustments we have discussed and will discuss you will be playing tactically sound football. =D

Cheers!

retired_sugarbear_sb

Individual Creative Freedom

From here forward will be refered to as ICF. Now that we have that out of the way, lets begin our discussion for Creative freedom.

What is creative freedom? I feel that this needs to be touched on before we get into the settings and how to adjust them. From my experience playing the game and reading different posts. Creative freedom is how much will you allow your player/team to move out of possition if they deem it necessary. Some may argue here that it has something to do with shot selection and passing, and these are valid points and CF does effect these traits to some degree you will see that there is more an effect to the players position than anything.

Try an experiment. load up a game and set your settings how you want, and then leave the ICF for all players at (6) now take one player (your midfielder for example or a wing) and slide his ICF all the way up.

hit play and watch this little dot run around like a chicken with his head cut off... its quite hilarious. at times you will say to yourself, "Dangit! if he would have been playing his position he would have been open for that pass. or if he was playing his position he would not be over in the corner jockying for the ball!"

so, as you can see, my view of creative freedom is one of this...

Play position / try to make things happen.

Now, watch a match... in today's game, you very rarely will see a striker way back at your own baseline trying to get at an attacker, nor will you see a CM sprinting down the right side of the field in attempts to make a forward run for a pass.

Okay, okay... sometimes it does happen, but you have to admit, it would look out of place.

My theory is to get your guys to play as a team. Allow them to have CF if their position deserves it and they have the ability to make good decisions. But, I prefer to use all the guys on the pitch vs. one or two SUPERSTARS going nutz all day long.

The following are my settings and reasons for ICF in the game.

Individual Creative Freedom

G: 5 <------------ self explanatory, you want him solid and ridgid
DC: 6 <------------ DCs are not creative for a purpose... they clear the ball
DR/DL: 7-8 <---------- 7 if I'm going defensive 8 for offensive
DMC: 8 <------------ he is in his position to help with defense... and begin the attack
MR/ML: 9 <------------ These guys move and create more than the others, but I still want them to remain in their relative positions
AMC: 10 <----------- again this guy is the Field General of my team... i want him creating and playing team ball.
ST: 10 <----------- Same as the AMC moving and creating along with team ball


I have and use these settings for ICF for both my attacking and defending.... my design is for my team to work together and play their positions by having lower ICF settings is how you do it.

When do I change these settings? I rarely change them or move them around, with a couple exceptions. If i'm not getting any shots on goal, and if increasing the tempo one notch does not help... i will increase the CF on my AMC and STs 2 clicks to the left. That usually gets the ball to the net. I will also increase the strikers creative freedom to 13 when I'm playing a counter attack. The reason for this is because of the large amount of balls played forward... they need to create on their own and this has worked extremely well for me.

For sake of putting this into numbers to help understand CF, This is how I view ICF:
imagine your players using this as their thinking in respects to their own creative freedom.

High ICF (16): Play my position / try to make something happen = 30%/70%
Middle ICF (10): Play my position / try to make something happen = 50%/50%
Low ICF (5): Play my position / try to make something happen = 70%/30%

I hope this is helping you to understand where and what my thinking is. now, on to Team mentality.


Team Creative Mentality

I must admit that out of everything, this one is the biggest mystery to me. do the ICF offset the Team slider? I don't think so, but thats a whole other debate. I believe that TCF is based a little on your style, a little on the flair you want to see and more on the quality of team that you have on the field. I do believe that the same rules apply to TCF as they do to ICF... in regards to playing positions and creative freedom, but this is on a more global/overall team scale.

Perhapse if you will imagine with me an experience that I witnessed here in the USA... I live in Minnesota. In minnesota we have the largest youth (soccer - I HATE THAT WE USE THIS TERM for the beautiful game) football tournament in the world... it is called the USA Cup. Literally thousands of youth teams gather here to compete in tournaments in all age brackets. I like to check out the under 17 teams play because you can sometimes see sensational football in a land where fans would rather see meat heads strap on wussy pads and run and bump into each other for 10 seconds at a time. I digress. Well, there was this youth team here in the states (i forget the club) that was taking on a team from Sweeden. Here is where Global/Team mentality is evident. The club from sweeden was sound. they had great team defense and they were very diciplined. The club from the states was also very good but there was one thing different here. The club from sweeden had the better athletes and could take more chances globaly because of this. You could see that they were smart and as a team, whern the attack was on and near the baseline the defense would move even closer to support the attack, sometimes dipping in for a passing lane etc... it was impressive, but they were never out of position, nor did they overcommit themselves. result of the match if anyone cares was sweeden 4 : 1 us club team.

This brings me to my total decision for Creative freedom. How talented is your team? are you playing conference n/s? your cf should probably be lower because you don't have the personelle to have a higher TCF. Are you playing with R.Madrid or Man U? you could most likely raise the TCF a bit higher because you have the talent and decision making of better players.

My choice for TCF = 8

again ... I believe in team ball, and 8 gives me a nice balance of what I see on the field.

If I am losing late in a game and nothing is working... I will raise this up to see if I can get anything, but usually it is counter productive and I can create better changes by upping my tempo, changing IM settings.


This concludes my ideas on Creative Freedom. Let me know what you guys think... we're rolling along nicely in this thread.... and when I am completely done, I will post my settings all in one post so that you can see how they all look when you put everything together.

Now, your turn... what do you think about Team Creative Freedom? what are your experiences/thoughts on the subject? any good threads on the topic?

Next post I will move into width and Closing Down...


Cheers!


Ashyr

retired_sugarbear_sb

Typo in the above post....

This should read "2 clicks to the right!"

I must have been drinking when I wrote this...


Ashyr

retired_iaispuro

So two more games before I read the CF post and two more defeats. The first away at Alfriston and 2-0 down in 15 minutes. I changed to try and counter how I believed they were playing and after going 3-0 down clawed back to 3-2.

After reading the CF post I made my changes. The ICF were very similar to what I had. This time I managed a 0-0 draw. I wasn't impressed. We weren't creating anything in the middle and the crosses were not finding anyone.

I haven't set target man as I don't want to upset the team balance. In previous posts Ashy mentioned that he sets the TM to play through the AMC so setting the Target man may stop this.

Anyway I quickly bought in 3 new players. A strong but quick front man to play on the left. A decent AMC who had good stats for passing, creativity and dribbling. Finally a decent DC with pace (only 9 but that's ok for this league).

Scout report says Blyth play defensive and hit on the break and like to keep possession. This is surely contradictry. They are favourite too, just.

I decide that they are playing defensive and slow. I set up to play with the attacking formation but direct and quick. I also stretch the width by 3 notches because I am at home (plus I read that playing direct needs this, playing short passes or away and maybe the width should be narrowed).

4-0 Yahoo a win and my new signings look awesome. Carew who cost £0 created chance after chance in the midfield.

I look forward to hearing how the rest of the team is set up including marking and def line.

All of my team is still on zonal marking bar the wingers who are on man. I have set closing down on 5-6 for GK and DCs, 10-11 for everyone else apart from the DMC who is set at around 12-13.