Welcome back to “No One Likes Us”, if you haven’t read Part 1 you can find it here. We’ve had a decent start to our Championship season, and we’ve almost reached the January window. In this post I’ll outline the tactic I’ve settled on, a defensive 4-4-2, and explain the instructions and roles I’ve selected.
Those of you who followed my Anti-Football posts last season will know that I’m not usually a lover of the darker side of Football. For me, football manager is a playground to experiment with wild and wacky tactics, to find new and interesting ways to play, or recreate great historic systems. This time round will be a little different. Those two seasons at Newport awoke something within me. My taster of the dark arts left me wanting more. I saw…
Offence wins matches, defence wins titles. OK, so that isnt verbatim, but we’ve all heard it. I see so many tactics that focus heavily on attack; wing backs with an attack duty, a playmaker, a mezzala on attack, inside forwards and a pressing forward. And watching those 11 dots all plough forward, hell bent on attacking, looks fantastic, doesn’t it? And if it works, great. But wouldn’t you like to understand defensive tactics and become a master in the art…
Welcome to the second post in my Anti-Football series. If you missed the first one you can check it out here. At the end of the last post we were just outside the play-offs in 8th. I made some changes, brought in some cover in January and we’ve improved significantly. In this post I’ll outline how I’ve improved my tactic, how I adapt during games, my scouting criteria and plans for next season.
After two seasons playing variations on the Allardyce 4-5-1 (4-3-3) system, I decided it was time for a change. Considering we had grossly overachieved with Red Star Wrexham and gotten into the Championship ahead of schedule, I am faced with the daunting prospect of avoiding relegation. Given that we’ve already mastered the dark arts of defensive, pragmatic, resultism football, where else could we go? How does a team of shithousers get even shithousier? After a few days of reflection, the…
In the past, I have put a lot of emphasis into playing football “the right way”. In my FM18 save, I played Total Football with Ajax, the founders of the Cruyffian way of playing. A year later, I was experimenting with Arrigo Sacchi’s variant of total football in my save with Uniao de Madeira. In my current Moneyball save I have gone with a spin on the Hungarian Golden Team’s fluid style, an attacking 4-2-4. A change was required. I…
As mentioned in my previous articles in this series, I wanted to achieve success playing pragmatic football. Considering we’ve taken Red Star Wrexham from the VNL to the Championship in just three seasons, pragmatism doesn’t quite cut it as a good description. To use a term attributed to our lord and saviour Big Sam, we can only call it one thing: Resultism. If pragmatism is the acceptance of who you are and making the best of what you’ve got, resultism…
The no-nonsense full-back might not be the player role in FM20 that get’s many plaudits but it is one that can be a complete gamechanger. I find it often will be overlooked for more attractive roles like the Anchorman or even Targetman. Here at Dictate the Game there are a few of us that worship at the altar of hoofball. You can hear us wax lyrical about it on the podcast quite often. Some of us are more inspired by…