Cab you pick holes in my Tottenham setup?

[^Goose^]

I've only very recently started to get into creating tactics myself based on the team I have rather than downloading plug and play tactics. My next experiment is with tottenham.

The formation and Role/Duties.

Team Instructions.

Average Positions map in first game away at Fulham. We be beat them 3-1.

Player stats from above fixture.

Positions map home to Reading. We beat them 3-0.

Player stats from above game.

My initial concerns are with Adebayor and Sandro. My ass man has warned me in both games that Ade is being outnumbered by the opposition's defence so i'm worried that he's not getting enough support. I'm also not sure if he and Sigurdsson look too far apart in the positions map.

As for sandro, i cant seem to stop him from taking the ball high up the pitch and shooting from long range even when changing his BWM duty from S to D.

Thoughts?

[Edit] Dammnit. Is there anything i can do to stop the forums shrinking my screenshots?

[Cleon]

Why do you choose fluid? You have quite a few specific roles that you are asking players to do that make the role quite unique. Because you use a BPD, AP, DLP then you are asking for them to play a specific role rather than be a basic generic role. So for me I'd be more inclined to go rigid rather than fluid because you have to many roles that I would class as 'specialist'.

Your assistant will say he's outnumbered unless he plays with another striker because it'll always be classed that hes been marked by 2 DC's.

[^Goose^]

Why do you choose fluid? You have quite a few specific roles that you are asking players to do that make the role quite unique. Because you use a BPD, AP, DLP then you are asking for them to play a specific role rather than be a basic generic role. So for me I'd be more inclined to go rigid rather than fluid because you have to many roles that I would class as 'specialist'.

Your assistant will say he's outnumbered unless he plays with another striker because it'll always be classed that hes been marked by 2 DC's.

To be honest choosing a style is still something of a guessing game for me. I haven't yet fully learned how it actually effects your team on the pitch.

[Cleon]

I wrote this in the thread I did about my Spurs tactic recently;

Style – I'm a big fan of the balanced style, especially for the type of tactic that I want to create and watch play out on the field.

For most tactics, and certainly the ones I look to create, team structure is of vital importance. By using a Balanced style, I have far greater control over how my players behave and position themselves on the field.

In the Balanced style the majority of mentalities will be based upon the DUTY given to the player and not their position on the field. There are some exceptions, the playmaker roles ie DLF, DLP and Trequaristas can often have a lower mentality than their team mates on similar duties. Thus you should be able to see why these types of roles can be important if you want to play between the lines.(see picture). (Ignore the actual player roles, the screenshot is just for illustration purposes)

Some of the key benefits this allows are for very attacking Fullbacks. As you can see, they clearly sit way back on the pitch, however they approach the game with the same attacking attitude as your strike force, and in many cases, more so.

It's an important point to distinguish as many of the other styles will base mentalities on position, thus it can be hard to 'put' players where you want on the field without manually changing their mentalities, and thus causing problems when changing strategies. This is another reason I favour the Balance style. The priority for me when choosing a role is it's mentality ie where on the field and how play will approach the game. I will often change strategies throughout a game and do not want to have to change individual mentalities when I do this. By choosing a role that suites the positioning and approach I can then often just remove the odd instruction here or there to get an almost perfect setup.

The philosophies are mentality and creative freedom structures. They range from being very structured with low creative freedom, to being very unstructured with lots of creative freedom. A useful interpretation would be as follows:

Very Rigid: Each player is given a job and is supposed to stick to it (usually 5+ different roles across a team)

Rigid: Players are assigned a job that contributes to a specific element of play (Defence, defence & transition, transition & attack, attack)

Balanced: Players focus on their duty (Defend, Support, Attack)

Fluid: Players are given instructions to focus on defence or attack

Very Fluid: Players contribute to all aspects of play

As you can see, each step reduces the level of specialisation. At Very Rigid, you have five different roles, Rigid four responsibilities, Balanced three duties, Fluid two focuses, Very Fluid one method. In Very Rigid philosophies, you expect players to stick to their role, so can assign multiple specialist roles. In Very Fluid philosophies, you expect everybody to do a bit of everything, which means specialist roles are redundant.

[^Goose^]

Thanks for that, certainly makes it a bit clearer.