retired_saramaskivish

I have been reading many of the tactic threads on this forum and all of them make some sort of sence to me. Can you sence the but coming.....

However, football is a reactive sport. Tactics should initially be proactive, play to your players stregnths and weaknesses. As many of the tactic gurus would say if your player can't dribble don't set him on run with the ball often.

From my personal experince with formations my team use a 4-4-2 or some variant and i have had most success (in relative terms) with direct passing, counter attacking and a hig tempo. I like to to have my passing focus as mixed. Gives my players the opportunaties to push it wide and get gound the back to hit my targetman or lob it straight up the middle (oo err mrs).

Once you have this formation work done the next step should be (imho) you react to your oppositions tactics and players. If you know your opponents have a quick pair of strikers set the defensive line deeper. Your opponents centre back is excellent in the air then ut you fast striker up against him to run onto balls. If they like to play a possession game in midfield the close them down don't give them time to settle.

Now, these are just a few examples of many that could be concidered and I seem to remember a thread on fm06 that discussed playing to your oppositions weaknesses. Inspired by Boro (I think) beating Chelski last season. Whoever it was that beat Chelski, played high balls upto a striker who was constantly against Ricardo Carvalho, the manager having decided he was the weak link in the air.

Now I havent really been trying this yet in FM2007 but I think it has merits. I would like to know if anyone tries this or do we all just blindly play our tactics and hope that the players do the business?

Now obviously, players are the be all and end all of your team. If they a rubbish then Generally speaking you will be rubbish against teams with less rubbish players. That is a fact of life. There will be occassions when weaker teams will win through shear endevour good tactics or just plain old good fortune, but these occassions are few and far between. Beleave me it pains me to say this but this is the reason that Man Utd, Chelski and Arsenal have dominated the Prem in England for the last few years.

So with this in mind should we not be buying players to fit as many tactical situations as possible rather than setting out tactics that fit around the players we have. Again I will accept that in some situations in lower leagues it's not always possible to do this, but you could have three cbs on fast one great at marking and the other a monster in the air. When I talk about these 'specialist' players i mean they can all tackle, mark and head but each one has one exceptional stat.

With this in mind would it not be worth having a st marking a cb if you are trying to exploit a weakness. Setting wide midfielders as target men with run onto the ball as supply against slower fulbacks or wingbacks to exploit space.

Anyway I am beginning to waffle now it's just that I can't help feeling that if we ignore this we are missing a good opportunaty to beat the game at...it's own game (for want of a better saying). After all the AI seams to 'crack' all our tactics after a period of time why not crack theirs first.

It's just a thought.