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So I'm currently playing a new FM 2007 game as Liverpool.
Some of the mistakes being made by my players were so stupid that I've turned off highlights alltogether. I figure that if I can't see my players doing stupid stuff at least it won't annoy me as much.
Firstly, there's a huge problem with man marking. The problem being that if you tell your defender to mark a specific player and that player suddenly gets moved to the right wing for example, the defender follows him, rather than doing the smart thing and focusing on the new center forward. These are supposed to be highly paid professional defenders, not 10 year old kids who need their hands holding for the entire 90 minutes.
I find myself starting and stopping the game every 5 minutes just to make sure my players aren't doing something that they shouldn't be. It takes the fun right out of it.
They are also constantly getting balls played over the top of them because they come charging out even though I have them on high defensive with no creative freedom and I play the defensive line as deep as it can get.
At first I thought it must be their positioning attributes, but no. I use Carragher and Agger, who both have 17+ in pretty much every defensive skill. The quality of the defenders isn't an issue.
I'm tearing my hair out over this. It's annoying even when I win because I always have to score 3-4 goals to have a chance of victory.
In my last game I conceded 3 goals in the first 20 minutes to bottom of the league Charlton. I won 5-3 thanks to an inspired second half performance from Mauro Esposito, but the point is that I shouldn't have needed 4 goals to win.
Despite the impressions you may get from this post, I am actually pretty hesitant to criticise FM games, as it has been my favourite series of manager sims since CM3.
But the defending issues I'm having in FM 2007 are ruining the whole thing for me. I've never had such problems in any other FM or CM game.
It wouldn't be so bad if my defenders were just being outclassed, but they're not, they're simply not doing the basic stuff.
Is there something I'm missing or any advice you can give me?
I'm a bit confused about your original post and the comments on marking, surely if you are set to man marking then the defender should follow the guy out to the right wing if he is assigned to man mark him, if you want the defender to pick up whoever is in the central striker area then surely that constitutes zonal marking as I've always worked to the principle that man marking means mark a specific player out of the game and zonal marking means pick up the attacker currently nearest to your position.
There's a few things I've gathered from various tactical discussion threads that might help fix things.
Firstly, a deep defensive line isn't necessarily going to translate as a better defence. A deep defensive line is apparently better when used in conjunction with high closing down and direct passing. The logic to this is that the gap between defence and midfield will be larger, so the players should close down more to cover the larger area they need to defend, that's my take on it anyway. Some people have recommended a deep defensive line when using a DMC also.
I don't use man marking. I think if you assign to man mark specific players, then they'll go walkabout when the opposition changes formation. I think if you just man mark without assigning specific players, it works ok. I personally use zonal marking with tight marking for the back four.
I don't believe using defensive mentality will make your defenders defend better either. If the differences in mentality between players is too high, they get confused, supposedly. I'm not sure defensive mentality has much effect on what positions they take. It does seem to effect the sort of passes they play though. I'm in League One and have resorted to using global settings for mentality, one notch off all out attack. The defenders still stay back and defend well overall.
While it's true that zonal marking covers the position, it is also a very flawed system of marking IMO.
What happens when a midfielder charges forward and ends up in the same zone as their striker for example? Your defender then has to mark 2 people and gets overrun, because your midfielder who is on zonal will not follow their midfielder back.
I'd like to be able to say to my players "mark whoever is in this position" rather than "mark this player exclusively".
I'll try a global mentality and see what that does for me.
I have my defence sat deep because my center backs are slow (about 13 pace each) and I don't want them coming forward too much then getting balls played over the top. It happens anyway, but why encourage the problem.
I pretty much rely on Sissoko to do all my closing down from DM, because his physical stats are amazing, as is his tackling.
I'll try putting my defenders on closing down too, but I get the feeling they will just get repeatedly turned by pacey strikers.
Defensive Idiocy 
Linear Mode
