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Last night I spent the night first watching Sky Sports News, and then watching ITV's Carling Cup Review, and in that time I learned of Liverpool's transformation from 3-0 dominance to 4-3 struggle. And the talk of the town is that 'tinkerman' we all know and love, Mr. Rafa Benitez. So, yet another nervy performance, and I was forced to question Benitez; is he picking the wrong sides: is he rotating too much: is he over-complicating things? And it was the last question that stuck, so I booted up Wikipedia and decided to read a little more on the great Shankly and Paisley, two of the finest managers to grace Britain. What made them drag performance out of their players?
I decided I would start a season on FM07 with the pair as my guide if you will. I have developed a few transfer policies and fitness regimes based around their ideas too, but most interesting to me was the idea of tactically keeping it simple. Now, how does this translate into FM? Through sliders of course! Sliders are our voice to our players, and whatever we need from them on the pitch, we ask them to do through sliders. What we tell them of course is reflected in the sliders we alter, like increasing mentality to tell the players to be more attacking. The following is a rough guide to how to use sliders in a simple approach, as well as some ideas I have discovered in my season with Grimsby.
KEEP IT SIMPLE...
Tactical philosophies remind me of politics in some ways; you have left and right wing ideologies, and somewhere in between. From an FM point of view, we have intriquate tactics and simple tactics, and somewhere in between. Both ideas work, as in politics, but I feel the intriquate nature has been discussed far more than the simple side on these forums so this post aims to guide those who want to keep it simple.
As a rough basis, keeping it simple means having fairly universal slider settings in your tactics. 'Don't fix what isn't broken' is a saying that rings true here - don't give individual instructions just for the sake of it! I cannot stress the importance of that statement enough. Why give a player individual instructions when he is working fine on the Team ones? I have great difficulty understanding how giving individual mentalities to each player can be effective - the logic of it (ie. to create passing options and whatnot) makes sense, but the way of going about creating these passing options is flawed in fully individual mentalities. Once you give a player an individual mentality, you effectively assign him a 'zone' to operate in, and so he will not move out of this to make himself available, which creates stale, rigid formations. They might look good on the pitch, but they do not perform effectively.
If you give everyone team mentality (lets say 10 for argument's sake), the whole team becomes the 'zone' in which players can move, so they ae free to make themselves available over a much bigger area. That creates passing options. Of course, it goes without saying that certain players will need their own mentalities - I am particularly fond of having wingers on full mentality to get them position themselves higher up the field - but it is lethal, in my opinion, when used across the board.
Closing down is another one. Again, if each player is given a specific notch of closing down, he will be effectively designated a 'zone' that he should close down. This again if fatal. I can understand using individual closing down as an idea - you can set players to close down enough areas that you eliminate the 'danger zones' - but this isn't a good idea to put into practise. It is impossible for just 10 outfield players to individually cover all danger zones across a 110yd x 70rd field. Impossible! So the way you do this is by having the team on a singular closing down setting, and perhaps modifying one or two player's in very obvious danger zones. I am a fan of around 5 or 6 CD for my centre-mids as they stay in the centre (as opposed to chasing the ball on the wings) and massively limit the opposition midfielder's options - it becomes very difficult to play through my midfield like this.
Unfortunately, thanks to the time, I am going to have to leave it there. I understand this article is simple a statement without evidence so I'll be providing the evidence as soon as possible, as well as in depth tips on how to keep each slider simple. That's all from me for now. Remember - keep it simple.
Cant wait for the rest. It certainly makes for a different approach. An approach many newcomes especially would appreciate, I guess.
I myself am always interested
Some of the things you are saying seem to pretty much contradict what wwfan says. Would love to hear your opinion on his stuff, and his opinion on your stuff
Why exactly both think that setting team mentality a certain way creates for better passing option. (universal for you, individual for wwfan)
Personally, I largely agree with all this. I tend to keep most of my players on my team settings, with the exception of a few changes here and there. Usually it is my central defenders that ave the most changes from the team settings - as I want them to play defensive, with little creative freedom and lower closing down than the rest of the team. I usually have my full-backs with slightly lower closing down to keep the back four more as a unit.
Then it is usually just a case of altering 2 or 3 players from the rest of the team - like having one of my MCs closing down more than the rest of the team, or a creative midfielder having more freedom than the rest of the team, or a striker playing with a more attacking mentality, etc.
With all due respect, I would disagree. I've been testing my notions out with some of the worst sides in football. When I set the team on one set of closing down instructions it always falls flat.
An example. When I played a diamond formation, and set the whole team on one set of CD's at around 13 which wasn't too bad. My MC and my MR both went to close down the same player on the flanks, this happended so much my team was letting in silly goals which came from players left free to fire in.
Different kinds of teams need different kind of instructions. You can get away with a lot when you try tactics out with good teams, but a lot is revealed when you use poor sides.
If you set a team up on one mentality, then you absolutely need to watch the game and muck about the silders...that's too much micromanagement for me. If I want to play attacking football, and I have a high mentality set for the whole team. I'll suffer from the wandering fullback.
Even the manual clearly states that you need to make adjustments to mentality and closing down. It does not go as far as saying having individual settings but it does admit grouping mentalities.
I am a "fan" of having my team work as a unit. I usually split it into 2 categories - Defensive (which includes GK, CD's, FB's, and DM) and Offensive (which includes Wingers, MCa, and ST's).
When defending my offensive 5 usually do the closing down to try to break up play high up the pitch, with the DM mopping up what the Offensive unit doesn't deal with and the CD's as the last unit. The FB's cover the wings.
Defensive unit play Direct passing (usually about 14) and a Defensive mentality (6 for FB's and DM, 4 for GK and CD's). Same for Closing Down (6 for FB's and DM and 4 GK and CD's).
Offensive unit plays short passing with Attacking mentality (14 or Normal (9) when away to BIG teams (barca for example).
Still tweaking the odd things but its been very successful so far. More testing needed though.
Originally posted by rashidi1:
With all due respect, I would disagree. I've been testing my notions out with some of the worst sides in football. When I set the team on one set of closing down instructions it always falls flat.
An example. When I played a diamond formation, and set the whole team on one set of CD's at around 13 which wasn't too bad. My MC and my MR both went to close down the same player on the flanks, this happended so much my team was letting in silly goals which came from players left free to fire in.
Different kinds of teams need different kind of instructions. You can get away with a lot when you try tactics out with good teams, but a lot is revealed when you use poor sides.
If you set a team up on one mentality, then you absolutely need to watch the game and muck about the silders...that's too much micromanagement for me. If I want to play attacking football, and I have a high mentality set for the whole team. I'll suffer from the wandering fullback.
Even the manual clearly states that you need to make adjustments to mentality and closing down. It does not go as far as saying having individual settings but it does admit grouping mentalities.
Rashidi, there needs to be a blend between individual instructions and team intructions so that you have players doing exactly what you need. If I play the entire team on one mentality, then change just the attacking mid's mentality, he will play where I want him to play while the team will have their own area of the pitch in which they play. To this end, my attacking mid will then be able to influence the game in his own space, whilst the team keep the shape around him. This can be done with a few players in any one team in my opinion, but I generally think you need a majority on team settings.
I believe that keep-it-simple method is not as global as you may perceive it to be. I could have 2 players on different mentality to team, a different 2 players on individual closing down, and do this throughout the side. This will cause players to be doing different things, but the majority of player in each instruction (mentality, CD etc..) will be on a team setting.
Another point - the only team I have tried this with so far is a poor team, Grimsby in fact. And the results were so effective that I decided to make the thread without trying it with other teams. In the past I always used to that there was one single setting that worked for, say, Defensive Line, and pretty much all teams should adopt this 'notch' on the slider, maybe tweaking it one or two places. But not every tactic is the same, and with this approach every teams tactics are likely to be different because they truly reflect on the players themselves.
Lastly, you made a point about the manual. In the little paragraph beneath the chart outlining different mentality settings, there are a few quotes that back up my idea. These being: "Typically, mentality should be balanced across the team. If your team are set to a Defensive mentality, a majority of players should be left to a Defensive mentality." The key word being 'a'. Of course it says set to A defensive mentality so theoretically this could mean the whole team on different notches of Defensive mentality... but why would one bother changing the entire team on different settings of Defensive mentality? My interpretation (and it is only my own interpretation) is that it means if Team mentality is Defensive, the majority of players should be left to that. Anyway I hope you continue reading the thread because I feel there are interesting matters to be discussed. Thanks!
As Simple as Sliders... 
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