defenders becoming strikers

I've been trawling through players in my game looking for a tall strong striker with good heading to use as my target man (as i find they make my team a goalscoring machine)..... but I havent had success in finding a talented striker over 190cm that i like.

But then as I looked at some of the defenders i already own I realised a lot of them are around 190cm, have great heading and jumping (as well as tackling marking etc) but I had a thought of retraining some of these unwanted ones as strikers. Do you think a defender could make a good striker? Their finishing is usually pretty crap (8 at the most for example) but their sheer brillance at heading would surely make up for it.... is it possible to retrain a player to a vastly different position and still have them dangerous?

I've been trawling through players in my game looking for a tall strong striker with good heading to use as my target man (as i find they make my team a goalscoring machine)..... but I havent had success in finding a talented striker over 190cm that i like.

But then as I looked at some of the defenders i already own I realised a lot of them are around 190cm, have great heading and jumping (as well as tackling marking etc) but I had a thought of retraining some of these unwanted ones as strikers. Do you think a defender could make a good striker? Their finishing is usually pretty crap (8 at the most for example) but their sheer brillance at heading would surely make up for it.... is it possible to retrain a player to a vastly different position and still have them dangerous?

Alot of people say that height is a uselss piece of data in FM, it doesn't have any effect in the match engine.

A few versions ago I remember being forced to play Traianos Dellas up front as my target man and he grabbed a hat-trick. So yes, I think it would work fairly well, though Dellas had decent finishing.

On the current version I have been lucky enough to have an awesome regen who plays DC, ST. He has awesome stats and sometimes I wonder where I should actually play him lol...

Try it and let us know.

You would need a highly versitile and very young player to try this out on. Retrain as ST and see what happens.

Danny Shittu usually does ok as a forward, Try him.

if you retrain them early enough and get them on a strikers training schedule i cant see no reason why they cant become a half decent striker in temrs of shooting ect. and lethal with thier head.

is there any official confirmation from SI that hieght plays a part in FM i asked a while ago and cant remember the answer

On FM07 when I was losing I used to throw Micah Richards up front in a 3-4-3 and set him as target man. He'd get me a good 10 goals a season in the last ten minutes. Never did well up there from the start, though.

It's a nice idea. There seems to be a tradition of that kind of DC/FC type player - Dion Dublin, Chris Sutton, Paul Warhurst, etc. But there haven't been many around lately. Maybe times have changed since the early Prem seasons.

But, like one of the above posters mentioned - height is nothing but a stat. You'd need good jumping and heading, or the height means nothing. I had a 5`6" South Korean centre back (so you'd think he'd be poor in the air), but his aerial stats were great.

I can't remember where i saw the answer, but the last official response from Si was that height was irrelevant. I am sure it is in the tactics bible in the tactics and training forum somewhere.

Jumping and heading are the stats that count, a 5 foot tall player with 20 jumping and 20 heading will have as much chance of winning the ball as a 7 foot player with the same stats.

I don't retrain defenders to play as a striker but I used to play with a defender upfront and set him as a targetman if I needed a goal as the match reaches 70mins, just so they can win flick-ons. Now I don't need to as much I have a gigantic forward.

It's actually really good to play like this in the lower leagues especially and my defenders I tried it on (Saah, Oli and Scotti) sometimes managed to chip in with a goal even though their finishing stat is poor, although composure and decisions are probably quite high.

Height is only a contributory factor towards the 'jumping' attribute. Jumping effectively represents how high a player can get his head. So maybe a player with height 6'4" will have a minimum jumping stat of 10, whereas a player with height 5'4" will have a minimum jumping stat of 1. However if the 5'4" player can jump really high he could still have a jumping stat of 18, and be able to out jump the 6'4" guy with jumping 10.