Free Kicks/Long Shots

Quick question

I've signed Neal Eardley in the first season for Leeds, and I'm wondering what to do with my free kicks.

Technically he has the best free kick attribute in the team (15)

He also has 15 for long shots (although 10 for finishing), crossing, 13 for technique, 11 for composure.

Not too shoddy considering he's a RB.

But he just cannot score a free kick - he seems to always shoot them over the bar (narrowly mind, but even so). He can cross it well, but he just can't score from them. My backroom staff even recommended that I remove him from FK taker?

Any ideas? Because I don't understand it at all. Seems to have good attributes, with no return.

Any ideas from anybody?

It's happening to me aswell in my Wycombe save. I have a player who has free kick attribute of 16, long shots 15 and technique 13 and most of the time he blasts his free kicks high and wide or straight into the wall. What i would say though is how many actual free kicks do you see scored every week in english football most of the time there are none and on occasions you may only see a couple. I know that my team Wycombe have scored no free kicks this season even though we have 2 good free kick takers in the team and my other team Spurs have scored none either, even though Rafa VDV is known to be a very good free kick taker. So you may be able to see that Fm12 is true to life in some regards.

One thing you could try is putting Neal Eardley on a individual training scheduel for free kicks and see if there is any improvement.

There seems to be very little return from direct free kicks. I'm in April 2nd season in the Premier League, 32 games in, and so far 13 free kicks have been converted into goals, from what I calculate is a total of 318 matches. 804 goals have been scored in total, which means 1.6% of goals is from free kicks.

IRL 2010/11 season had 2.6% of goals coming from direct free kicks.

mattant250, you might wanna check your players in game motivation. If he's "playing nervously" or something like it, it might be best to change free kick taker. Also, I think a high flair rating might boost a players chance to score a direct free kick. The staff, I've noticed, generally advices on not using a low CA player relative to the league and team leave on free kicks and penalties. This is just my impression and I don't know if it's correct.

The "Shoots free-kick with power" PPM was almost a requirement to score from direct free kicks in FM11. It is likely still a good thing to have. I have seen some new animations of free-kicks from shorter range being curled into the upper corner, though, so maybe the "curls ball" PPM is good too. It is rare, though. The important attributes for free-kick taking are Free-Kick Taking (obv), Determination, Decisions, Technique and Flair. I believe Long Shots are for open play situations and Composure for situations where the player is put under pressure in the penalty areas.

Direct free kicks are inherently broken since fm2011. Its a matter of needing to completely rewrite some ball physics.

SI have vaguely said it will be looked at for a future game. They said that last year, but they didn't get round to fixing for fm2012. So we will just have to hope they manage to fix it by FM2013.

I think it is a fair bit of work that needs to be done that is why it didn't make it into fm2012.

Me to PaulC > "I remember SI saying last year that the free kicks in FM2011 were in fact broken, but they could not change anything in FM2011 because of the way the match engine ball physics works or something. But I remember seeing that they said they would be able to fix it for the next game i.e FM2012.

It seems they have not been able to fix it. So we are stuck with it. It cannot be fixed with patches is what we were told last year. So i assume the same is true now...."

PaulC's Reply "What we said was that we will be able to simulate ball trajectory better in the future which would allow us to increase them if needed a lot easier. But that physics stuff didnt transpire for FM2012 so its moot. Its definitely pencilled in for a future version though."