Building A Tactic that Exploits the Middle

[ChelseaFan]

I've been really impressed by the match engine this year and in small periods of play, I've seen a lot more attacking through the centre of the pitch. I want to try and pronounce that more and build a tactic round it, rather than rely so heavily on crosses.

I'll try and explain what I want first.

I primarily want to see one-twos played on the edge of the box with through balls played to a striker breaking the offside trap. This is what I've come up with so far. I'll try and explain my reasoning. If my logic is flawed, please correct me.

 

Defence

Fairly self explanatory. I want to encourage playing from the back. I want a wing back to provide some width on the right to overlap on the right flank. This is merely for balance. I don't want to be reliant on build up through the flanks and key passes coming from crosses. Alonso is my IWB, generally because he's a good finisher and I want someone to assist on the left flank attacking through the middle. 

Midfield

This is my my main concern. Getting the midfield right. I feel like I should have deep lying play maker here, but I often seem him mostly spray balls from flank to flank. I might have to replace him with another role. Perhaps, just a Defensive Midfielder. 

Kante is my carrilero and will focus on covering the flank space which would usually be covered by the wing back, but in this case as I have an inverted wing back, I'm hoping this will offer some more defensive solidarity on the left flank.

Mason as my centre midfield (attack). This is one of the hardest roles in my opinion. I was torn between BBM or Mezzala. The Vertical Tiki Taka has both of these roles in their setup, but I want Mason to fill that Lampard role and the CM-A seemed to fit more.

Attack

Werner as my RMD is going to look to sit narrower and offer a 'false-winger' role and act similarly to another striker. Abraham is going to stretch the pitch as an Advanced Forward and be ready to feed on through balls  (tempted to change this to DLF-A to offer more support for one-twos in the area behind the opposition midfield. )

Ziyech will come inside and release killer balls for both Werner and Abraham with Reece overlapping for width support.

 

Style

I've gone for play wide - exploit the middle. It seems to me this is the most logical way to get space in the middle of the pitch, so this is why I've opted for it. 

Lower defensive line + lower line of engagement, is purely so we have space to pass into (for the killer balls).

 

 

Let me know what you think

[Experienced Defender]

32 minutes ago, ChelseaFan said:

Lower defensive line + lower line of engagement, is purely so we have space to pass into (for the killer balls).

There is absolutely no need to go to such an extreme in order to play through balls. I mean, you want to play defensive football with a top team like Chelsea - because low LOE means defensive football, regardless of the rest of a tactic - only for the sake of through balls. Sorry, but that really makes no sense at all. 

Please remember this: how you set up roles and duties is the most important factor in creating a sensible and consistent tactic with good chances of success. In that respect, your setup of roles and duties looks fine for the most part. The only problem is the role partnership between the lone striker (AF) and AML (RMD). These two don't really go hand in hand IMHO. Because if you want to use a RMD role to the best possible effect, you need a striker role that will create as much space for him to take advantage of, rather than one that will compete for space with the RMD. Which means a role that will either drop deeper or is hard-coded to roam, irrespective of its duty (ideally CF or DLF or F9 or TQ). Of those mentioned, Abraham is probably more suited to CF or DLF than F9 or TQ. 

In terms of overall tactical balance, the flanks look okay as well as the midfield trio. You may consider a mezzala on attack instead of CM on attack in MCR and/or BWM on support instead of CAR in MCL (although in the case of the latter, the LB would make more sense as a standard WB on support than IWB, because someone still needs to provide width there).  

When it comes to instructions, it's always much better to start with just a couple of basic ones and than gradually add them as you see fit until you get what you want than the other way around. Because when you apply too many at once - as you did here - you can never know what to change/tweak if/when something goes wrong. 

[wixxi]

Just understand that playing as a team like Chelsea inherently makes it very difficult to play through the middle against most teams since they're most likely going to set up in a low block and congest space in the centre, which also kind of makes the advanced forward redundant since there will be almost no playable space behind the defensive line

As Experienced Defender said with a raumdeuter I would prefer to see a centre forward who will pull the centrebacks around and create space for Werner to move into or atleast act as a pivot for one twos with his back to goal to allow a player to burst past him, so I would use either a complete forward or DLF on support.

Otherwise seems to be okay, would prefer to see the LB providing some kind of width - I get you want to play through the middle as much as possible but pairing an IWB with a raumdeuter who wants to drift inside just goes against principles of space creation = your opponent can happily sit compact since nobody will stretch them laterally on that side of the pitch. Especially since the tactic will naturally overload the right side, you need some form of width on the left otherwise their fullback can just mark Werner as he drifts inside.

Main thing I'm trying to get at is that although you don't need to rely heavily on crosses, you still have to utilise width in attack to stretch the defence, otherwise you're forcing your team to play in a very restricted amount of space (which you might get away with sometimes with a team like Chelsea, but isn't really what you want to see)

[wixxi]

Thought I'd post this hoping it might help a bit since we have pretty much the same squad (I'm in a 1st season chelsea save in november) and want to play similar football - more so as a result of trying to design a tactic to get the most out of the squad and overperform rather than play through the middle specifically.

(that 1-0 loss in the CL slightly irks me, jorginho missed a pen and we wasted a few chances )

Also been using a 433 against 2 striker formations with a halfback since getting the right shape for ball progression in a 4231 against 2 strikers in FM can be a bit iffy

(ignore the havertz at DM in this)

I also apply opposition instructions to press wide players (fb/wb/wingers) and show them onto weaker foot + mark tighter for CMs/DMs to try and create some form of pressing trigger (ideally funnel them out wide then press)

One thing I think gets overlooked too often on this forum is squad building and player selection though - you can have a well formulated tactic but without the correct players it won't mean much

Also as you can see I don't use many TIs as a base, I prefer to normally just add them on a game-to-game basis and if I see a recurring theme then I'll consider adding it to the base tactic. I do also tweak small things most games based on what is happening in the game