Counter Attacking

Can anyone let me know (or point me to the appropriate discussion), on how to use the Counter Attack team instruction successfully.

If I'm playing an attacking, short passing formation (such as 4-4-2 diamond) and take a 2 goal lead, do I just select Counter Attack or should I change Mentality to "Defensive" and opt for "Men behind the ball"?

Any tips?

Can anyone let me know (or point me to the appropriate discussion), on how to use the Counter Attack team instruction successfully.

If I'm playing an attacking, short passing formation (such as 4-4-2 diamond) and take a 2 goal lead, do I just select Counter Attack or should I change Mentality to "Defensive" and opt for "Men behind the ball"?

Any tips?

That's a good question... It would be nice to think that counter attack would kind of be a shorthand way of going defensive with men behind the ball. But the diamond formation would seem to conflict a bit with that. It would be interesting to have a little more documentation of how various tactical instructions are prioritised by the game engine.

Personally, I never use the diamond fomration. I'm from the Mike Basset school of management... "four four ----ing two".

In the PC version, they've done away with "Men behind the ball" instruction altogether and I think that's because the match engine interprets it literally as getting everyone behind the ball (well, those with good teamwork and work rate attributes anyway). In reality, that's not a very good basis for counter attacking, as most counter attacking teams prefer to leave one up and defend with 10 behind the ball, so as to have an outlet when possession is regained.

An improvement in the PC version is that you can now set the mentality of each player. If you want to play the equivalent of "Men behind the ball" instruction, then set the team's mentality to defensive or ultra defensive, but set a more attacking mentality to a pacey winger or target man so they don't drop too deep in attempting to win the ball.

As such, in the PSP version I think you should only use "Men behind the ball" instruction if you want to shut up shop in the last 10 minutes. Perhaps you can use it with counter attacking instruction, but I'm finding it too over defensive and we end up giving the ball away too often - even with short passing.

If you want to play counter attacking, I think setting the team mentality to defensive with short passing and counter attacking instruction on, is the way to go. Get your target man or DM to hold up the ball too.