Short corners have to combat a negative reputation in world football. Just as a back-pass is seen as an inherently negative manoeuvre, corners which are not crossed directly into the penalty area are often met with disdain by supporters worldwide. Sadly, this opinion is shared by too many managers in the virtual universe as well; by opting against putting the ball into the danger zone you instantly forego a greater opportunity to score seems too much of a common place.
In my eyes, when a team takes a short corner it may be a wise decision in terms of goalscoring opportunities. Taking a short corner by no means gives up an opportunity, but instead creates a new and different one. Especially when your team lacks an aerial presence, a short corner offers up new avenues to scoring a goal.
We are all afraid of it, and I am fairly certain we have experienced it as well. The dying seconds of the game have started, your team is up by one goal, and the opposition is about to take a corner kick. Deep inside you are dreading this final play of the game; your gut feeling is a very negative one. ‘This is going in’. So how do you defend against these situations, especially since the AI seems awfully good at scoring from set pieces in this latest instalment of the Football Manager series.
Unfortunately, corners (and indirect free kicks) are an abundant source of conceded goals, with the default defensive routines coming up grossly inadequate to counter the AI’s routines. To balance the scales somewhat, I have decided to take a more in-depth look into corners. Last week, I posted my offensive corner setup. In this article, I will be focusing on the different defensive systems and concepts – man-marking/zonal-marking etc.
Defending corner kicks is a more fluid and irregular process, as it mostly depends on the manager’s personal style and preferences, and the level of football. For example, it is pretty tough to implement a zonal-marking system at a lower level, because this system needs to be practised every single week and demands quite a bit of spatial awareness from the players.
When we think about scoring goals, the first thought that comes to mind is hitting the ball top corner or maybe a simple tap-in from a cross, but we very rarely give thought to the throw-in. Unless you’re a Stoke fan, then you might have seen your fair share of goalscoring opportunities from the long throws over the years.
The throw-in has been part of the game since the nineteenth century when English public school boys would run amok with grassy knees. A wide variety of methods were tried and tested to return the ball to the playing field, including kick-ins and one-handed throws but eventually, the two-handed throw was accepted (having been stolen from rugby). All in all, the throw-in was not deemed to be that important or influential.
Managers, coaches, players and pundits alike; none of them are blind to the importance of set plays, which can be a crucial means to force in a goal when things don’t look good during open play. The premeditated nature of set pieces offers managers a level of relative consistency in preparation and planning. You can work out multiple routines and prepare your players for these routines during training sessions. In this blog post, I want to focus on the process of setting up a good corner routine, the variables that determine whether or not a routine is successful and my own routine. (more…)
Whether you like it or not, set pieces are becoming more and more important in modern football. They allow teams the opportunity to train for specific, premeditated conditions and these focussed training-sessions can result in a weaponized set piece that can help to break a deadlock. Even at the very highest level, a well-placed and well-delivered corner can break open a match. In this article, I will explain how I set up my corners, which process is used to create them and what I want the players in specific roles to do during the corners.
When you play FM long enough, you are bound to encounter opponents who park the bus against you. With the knowledge that they are hopelessly outclassed against your star-studded squad, they opt not to be lead to the slaughter like the proverbial lambs. Where football romantics would love to see the smaller sides go for the jugular as well, some teams choose to erect a human wall in front of their own penalty area. In some cases, even such defensive antics prove unsuccessful as the attacking side manages to penetrate anyway or get a lucky goal in early on.
In other cases, the structure and integrity of the defensive format remain intact. How do you batter down the gates in such scenarios? Is there a sure-fire way to break down these dogged defenders and their tenacious efforts? That’s what I want to focus on in this article. How do you tow away that parked bus?
As any team coached by Tony Pulis and the current champions of England have shown, set pieces can be critical and trainable means to pry open a match that is deadlocked. When you can’t break through a defensive line from open play, a corner offers you an extra chance to score that important goal. FM mimics real life in this regard, to an extreme even.
Previous versions have shown us a myriad of exploitable corner routines. Near post exploits, far post exploits, edge of the box exploits, short corner exploits, over the course of the past decade we’ve seen them all. This is the approach I am using in FM17.
In the past few weeks since the release of my first FM17 tactic, I have received a fair bit of feedback regarding the initial tactic. Most of it was regarding the defensive frailties of the tactic, the susceptibility of the tactic to quick counter-attacks down the flanks. Whilst I did not experience these problems in a manner similar to the experiences of others, I was nevertheless not entirely happy with the setup I was using.
The balance between the various lines was not quite the way I want it to be. The reason why the setup with two ball-winning midfielders worked for me was probably because I had two world-class midfielders in Kevin Strootman and Radja Nainggolan. As I progressed in the Roma save, I noticed the same defensive frailties others mentioned when one or both were absent from the line-up through injury or suspension. Some of these changes may or may not be the direct result of another SI patch, we’ll not discuss that any further in this article.
As FM17 has been released for a week, it’s time to test my earlier efforts from the Beta and see if they are still effective in the full release of the game. After all, with quite a few updates coming out during the beta phase of the game, the match engine has changed a wee bit.
The observant managers among you (and loyal readers of this blog) will recognize this setup as being one I originally promoted for FM16. That would be factually correct. In fact, all I did in this Beta was import my old FM16 set piece routines to see which ones were still effective. It turns out, this particular one is still quite effective during Beta and remains effective during the full release of FM.
Okay, first of all, this is basically an updated version of the Beta tactic I released earlier. As the game underwent several updates, the altered Match Engine forced me to tweak the tactic in a number of places. Most of the article is a re-post, with some tweaks and edits made and a few new bits and pieces.
Everyone has heard the adage “classics never really die.” After all, they became classics for a reason, they have traits and characteristics beloved by all. In reference to Strikerless, it’s a particular brand of football you can create with a strikerless tactic. That daft prick Ruud Gullit coined the phrase “sexy football” during his stint with Chelsea and despite the fact that his managerial performances and qualities are roughly on par with those of a frozen fish stick, his definition of sexy football is quite apt for my own particular brand of football.
That is the kind of football Chelsea played under Gullit and it’s quite similar to my own brand of football. I want to create a style of play that sends waves of enjoyment throughout the virtual stadium, a team of artists that dazzle and mesmerize opponents, fans and pundits alike. Whenever my team gets the ball, I want to feel the buzz of expectancy because as a manager, I know something beautiful might happen, even if it doesn’t always come off as planned. I want to generate poetry in motion, smooth and silky passes, fluid movement through the lines.
Looking at the video above, I have highlighted some moments that are typical strikerless goals. I’ll let you be the judge regarding my own brand of football and it’s degree of sexiness.
Before I start explaining what’s what and how everything functions, allow me to get in the obligatory disclaimer that this tactic is, in fact, a tactic developed and tested during the Beta stages of FM17. I have absolutely no idea if and when SI might update the game and change the match engine, rendering the entire tactic useless again. Having said that, the entire concept works brilliantly so far. The Dark Side is strong in this version of FM and I am looking to bring sexy back, Justin Timberlake style.
