With me now moving into the fourth season, the team has changed considerably and the tactic has been fine tuned to really get the best out of the players. I said in the first post that I was looking to use Liverpool 13/14 as inspiration for my tactic. I really want to be more defensively stable. If we conceded 50 goals, I’d resign. Gone are the days of me conceding 5 and scoring 6. I’m not striving for perfection at the back, just a good balance.

Casting our minds back…

The tactic started off looking like this in the first season.

As I mentioned in my last post, things got a little bit frustrating in the third season. We gave the ball away too often and were liable to concede the late goal. I needed to make adjustments to that and dropped the More Direct Passing and added Play Out Of Defence to my instructions. This helped a bit, but we were still a bit off of our best.

With season four coming up, I needed to decide what I was missing in my game. With the dropping of the More Direct Passing instruction, we were perhaps lacking some urgency, so I upped the tempo to Higher, I also thought we lacked a bit of aggression and we’d jockey players rather than stick a foot in to win the ball, so I added Get Stuck In. I think I mentioned that all of these instructions were a possibility in the first tactical post. The only other change I made to above was to change the goalkeeper to Sweeper Keeper Support. There are a couple of Player Instruction tweaks that I mentioned in the season 3 post. Just to make sure I’m clear about what we’re doing, here’s the team instructions as they are now.

There’s still the possibility that I could change the defensive line, it’s not something I’ve had much success with in this version, but it’s something I’m possibly going to implement for a couple of games to see how well it works. It’s likely something that I’ll put on as I see fit and not really a big part of the overall tactical style.

I remember reading on Cleon’s Blog that he’ll develop a tactic as time goes on. It’s not something I usually do, probably down to being a bit scared that it’ll all fall apart. However, I’m spending more time watching what’s going on and I can clearly see where things are going right and indeed wrong. It pays to really watch what’s going on in the game, especially if you’re struggling, but it can be just as helpful if you’re winning.

I’ve kept this one short as I just wanted to show the changes I’ve made from season 1 up to this point going into season 4.