Free kicks - unmentioned bug?

In the last version of the game I was victim of the goalkeeping bug, but not many people experienced this so it was ignored until a later patch fixed it. That was the bug whereby you substitute in a striker and your goalkeeper's instructions auto-defaulted to striker, so he'd always bomb up for corners even when you're drawing ot a goal up.

Anyway, I think I have another rarely-mentioned (if ever) bug that needs sorting for FM09.

When I have a free-kick taker with a 20 attribute, capable of blasting the ball into the net (eg Ronaldo), the AI has started this annoying ploy of putting some useless twerp to stand with the taker and it gets passed to him. To be fair, the opposition are now victims of this too.

I thought that maybe the reason was I'd instructed a player to disrupt the wall or challenge keeper (obviously I HADN'T instructed anyone to 'stand with taker') and the AI mixed them up, but even with no second instruction, it's still happening.

Anyone else finding this, or have a solution?

Heh, i have noticed this too. Pretty annoying. The odd thing is, anyone can stand with him even a centre back. I have seen players that are useless firing in power shots from 25-30 yards out, while my free kick expert watches on.

Odd indeed.

I think this only happens during indirect free kicks, because the taker is not allowed to shoot directly. So I feel this is an early attempt at recreating the kind of indirect free kicks that can be seen in real life where a player will touch the ball to a team-mate so that they can have a direct shot on goal.

However, as you say, the big problem is that the user has no control over who the two players involved in the indirect free kick routine are. It may be a decent feature if the user can choose who they want to touch the ball on and who they want to actually hit it.

I also notcied this and it was very irritating because 9 times out of 10 my assigned FK taker would hit the back of the net when taking a direct shot. To counteract it I checked each of my players instructions and noticed that one of them had been assigned to "stand with taker", it seemed to sort it out once I changed their instructons.

However, as Chopper99 says it still occurs with indirect freekicks. Perhaps the problem is that we need to remove the stand with taker from the player to stop it constantly happening at FK's but this means that when it comes to indirect FK's the game automatically chooses someone to stand with taker and it may not be who we want.

i've noticed this and it seems to be quite random as i've never changed my free kick tactics since i created them ages ago and sometimes they tap the ball 2 inches to the other guy who hasn't got a run up or they just smake it them selves

oh and the commentary flagged up an 'indirect freekick' once and gerrard wellied it straight over the wall as if he was taking a shot.

missed though. but there's no way it could have been a slightly over hit pass because the freekick was on the edge of the area and there was no one ahead of him.

It's been mentioned tons of times. SI have said they'll be looking at it.

I'm sure they'd welcome another PKM though if you'd like to mention it in the bugs forum. A couple of issues didn't get resolved in 8.0.2 because they didnt get enough examples.

tbh they sometimes score

it happens to often to be an interpretation of good indirect free kick

it's just simply frustrating

I've noticed this. Sometimes, also, the player I have set to take free kicks, doesn't take them, even though his is on the pitch and entirely able to take them. It frustrates me greatly.

It called a variation. It's hardly subtle if you have some player standing over the ball with your main freekicktaker. Really, who would you be expecting to take the shot, Billy the kid or Ronaldo? Billy the kid might just get them on the suprise factor, and it's worked for me.