Okay, as you’re aware the staff here at SI read the forums so clearly we’re aware that some users are experiencing some issues with the way that crosses are defended. From the numbers we’ve had feeding back to us this only seems to affect a relatively small number players and largely depends on those player's tactics. Saying that, we did take a long, hard look at it and ultimately decided that given potential knock-ons and the major impact it would have had on user’s tactics that it wasn’t something we could tweak without unbalancing the match engine and worsening the user’s playing experience.
As anyone who’s played FM for a while knows, we’re constantly striving to make the match engine a 100 per cent perfect simulation of real football. While we’re still some way away from achieving this goal, we do feel that we’re getting closer and closer and this progress is helped enormously by the constructive feedback that we get here on the forums. We’re happy with the match engine which is included in version 16.3.0 and we’ve only been able to get up to this point thanks to everyone who has been involved in the game’s development, be it SI staff members, beta testers or those of you posting here on the forums.
Having spoken at length about this with the match team, there is some good news to report in that the work the team have done in trying to address this issue long-term has led to some other major improvements which, once they’re fully implemented, will make any future versions of the match engine better for everyone.
All I would add to that is that you should give the new update a thorough play-through and let us know what you think when you’ve had a chance to put it through its paces. That's what this thread is here for.
Many thanks.