4-2-3-1 Pescara, won the italian cup in the first season!

Hello fellow FM 2014 addicts!

I have been lurking these forums for quite some time now and have decided to finally register an account so that I can share this tactic with you. Now I know you you're all thinking: really? yet another 4-2-3-1 tactic? The reason why I decided to come up with my own version of this formation, is because the other ones out there were not working for me as well as I wanted. I decided to make my own tactic by the use of common sense. So this is what I came up with:

I have chosen to adopt the counter mentality to make sure my team doesn't move forward too much: any higher mentality would increase the risk of getting caught on the counter attack. It allows me to use this tactic both home and away. Yet, this is my no means a counter tactic: it is actually quite dominant as the team will slowly play the ball around while looking for space to exploit. I have chosen a fluid aproach as this is a rather attacking formation and need all of my players to participate in defending. I have also kept individual instruction to a minimum as this allows for more changes during a game. The tactic relies heavily upon its wingers and attacking wing backs to come up with crosses from the wing. The wingers are also often set up by both the attacking playmaker as well as the deep lying forward which does an excellent job dropping deep and setting up the players around him, he acts quite similary as the playmaker during counters. For me, Nuno Gomes has done a fantastic job in this role as he has good creativity and passing stats. His excellent aerial ability and good finishing stats allowed him to score quite a few goals himself as well.

The tactic has worked out quite brilliantly for me during my first at Pescara, a top side in the Serie B. Here is a screenshot of the final league table:

As you can see it was quite a walkover for me as I managed to win the league with 108 points and a goal ratio of +75. This was only made possible by the huge number of goals scored as I ceded quite a few: 41 to be exact. This is an issue that simply can not be solved, 4-2-3-1 is a very attacking formation and will never be as sollid as the 4-3-3 formation for example. It did not worry my all that much though as the goal scoring ability of this tactic was simply amazing. It even allowed me to win the Italian cup even though I was quite lucky to beat Juventus on penalties, apart from this game the others were all quite convincing and we even dominated against the much bigger Napoli side during the final game! I used to think these sort of results were only possible by save/reload cheating, now I have found out that these results can be achieved in a legit way as long as you have a decent tactic and the right players to back it up, along with a bit of luck obviously.

Now, let's have a look at the player performance:

As you can see, the front 4 performed extremely well with a near even distribution of goals amongst them. Most important by far though, was my playmaker. This golden oldie does not appear to have great stats a first sight, yet is excellent mental attributes allowed him to perform extremely well almost every match:

Unfortunately, I could not be bothered to think of a fancy name for the tactic, so I decided to just name it after my beloved Pescara!

Now, enough talk! if you are convinced this is the tactic for you, here is the download link: http://www.mediafire.com/download/ed1689kj8ly7fld/4-2-3-1+Pescara.tac

I do apologize for any misspellings, English is not my native language.