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iNickStuff
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that's what i want to see...
been wondering why there is no picture in that article....
great articles you made... ^^)
Thanks mate. I appreciate the positive feedback.
Not necessarily. Effectively, it means he acts defensively, and the further you click into defensive, the more prone he is to come back to defend and play a defensive game. Mentality is based on if you were to be more attacking or defending - on and off the ball.
I made him run almost the whole length of the pitch so that he could come back defensively and attack at the same time. Watch his movement in the match I have clipped and you can see.
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iNickStuff
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Well, yes.
If it's a 4-4-2, Rooney would come deep, collect the ball from the midfield and start the attack with Berbatov/Hernandez/Macheda - whatever. I, unfortunately, cannot replicate everything Rooney does in a match because it's simply not that possible to fit it all into one.
If it's a 4-5-1, Rooney will drop across the three-man midfield and collect the ball from any of the three central midfielders and start his own attack, with the right and left wingers in an often 3 v 2 situation.
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iNickStuff
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I've only tested it for three games. It's not a solid tactic. I almost lost to Stoke.
I might after 20 games. Depends on the results.
goona4life
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good read mate, it was really interesting. keep it up
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iNickStuff
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Looking foward to the rest, lots of hard work i see gone into this
You don't know half of it.
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iNickStuff
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What? There are screenshots of my first article on the pitch, but there aren't any Photoshop pictures. They're all edited through Paint.
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iNickStuff
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'modern tactics: Villarreal C.F.
- To re-create Villarreal's recent successes from real-life into Football Manager.
- To achieve fluid, passing and attacking football with various and different player roles and duties.
Friday, 14th January 2011
Happy (late) New Year to you all and thank you for reading the second article in my 'modern series here on my thread. Since the first article, I have been inspired by a style of play endorsed by a Spanish team located not far from the city of Barcelona, or from sealing a spot in Europe next season, as Barcelona and Real Madrid look to dominate. Under the guidance of the young Juan Carlos Garrido, el Submarino Amarillo have been attracting the attention of many fans with their fluid, attacking football, and the ability of their two strikers in Guiseppe Rossi and Nilmar to create and score goals. Those who haven't realised through watching them on Sky Sports (live matches and Revista de la Liga) or popping onto the growing-in-popularity ZonalMarking.net, which provides in-depth tactical analysis of matches and showcases diagrams created by themselves and available at Guardian.co.uk.
Villarreal's success this season
This season, Villarreal have proven to be a strong-enough contender for a possible qualification to the UEFA Champions League via the group stages, rather than the usual Playoff rounds. Success domestically has proven to be a springboard for the club, whilst not having dropped out of the top three of the league for the last fifteen games. And with Guiseppe Rossi and Nilmar firing on all cylinders, propping up 19 goals combined, they are looking good as the season rolls on. It's also worth a mention how well the team as a whole is doing. Not only have Rossi and Nilmar scored goals, Santiago Cazorla, Borja Valero and Ruben Garcia have contributed.
Home form at el Madrigal has seemingly become a priority in some shape or another. Since the beginning of the season, Garrido's men have never lost at home in the league this season, including emphatic wins over Espanyol (4-0) Atletico Madrid (2-0) and Athletic Bilbao (4-1) And it has also shown, with their average attendance being 18,110 out of the 25,000-seater.
(All stats have been by the courtesy of SkySports.com/Football)
The formation
Villarreal's choice of formation this season has been called as 'questionable' when transferring it to Football Manager. With the Spanish contingent playing a 4-4-2/4-2-2-2, the tactic that they play is severely narrow, and forces the play through the middle, with the wingers tucking onto the inside and the strikers moving into channels whilst the central midfielders look for the angled pass to deliver a ruthless finish from either one of the frontmen. Such a decision has left a reliance on the team to use their passing, technical and off-ball creativity to make chances and force the opposition defenders to mark the space, rather than the man.
Taken from ZonalMarking, you can see that Garrido opted for an attacking, narrow and bottlenecked 4-4-2, pushing the wingers higher up the pitch to become almost third and fourth strikers - that can cross. The central midfielders in Senna and Bruno remain stagnant, whilst the attackers have their job to do, and that's to attack, attack, attack. So, really, it's a difficult one. We cannot really say it's a 4-2-2-2 because the wingers are not placed high enough up the pitch to actually become more advanced wingers, but we cannot also say that it's a 4-4-2 because of how high the wingers press, and the central midfielders being almost stationary. It's a difficult one.
So, in FM terms ...
It would probably look like this:
I favour the 4-4-2 more than the 4-2-2-2, so I have specifically edited the Player Instructions to make them much more hard-working and tucked in. I played around with other things such as the defensive combination with Musacchio and Marchena because it's good to have a Stopper-Cover system generally. Not to mention variation in the tactic helps to balance it out, rather than having full-throttle attacking football. There is no particular reason why Borja Valero (#20) is highlighted in this screenshot, but he will become important later on. Just wait.
Like mentioned, it's always good to have some variation within the tactic, rather than have two players doing the exact same thing. They can have the same role and same duty, but edit the PI to give something different. I exercised this with a difference in the crossing of the ball to Nilmar and Guiseppe Rossi. With one being technically-efficient and the other just being a pacey winger and able to beat his man, crossing would have a good effect.
Villarreal may/may not do this in real-life, but it certainly did give me some more goals. Nilmar especially. So, Emanuelson was always going to be the hard-working winger and cover most of his flank, whilst Cazorla would be the one to cross to the target man and get past his man to cut onto his other (good) foot. Like so:
Borja Valero (and his influence)
Like Fabregas is to Arsenal and Xavi is to Barcelona, Borja Valero is Villarreal's star playmaker is the creator of some, if not many of Villarreal's goals. The central midfielder, on loan from Premier League side West Bromwich Albion, has become a mainstay figure in the team's fight for Europe this season and, according to statistics on Sky Sports, has started 21 games this season in the amarillo shirt, accompanied by three substitute appearances. I apologise for the screenshot being a little small, but Borja is a critical figure of the central midfield in Garrido's plans, and I had to replicate. It's also been speculated that Barcelona (yes, Barcelona) have wanted to sign him at the end of his spell in Spain, following a previous loan to Mallorca the year before. He was looked to as a replacement to Xavi if the pursuit for Fabregas fell through.
In the UEFA Europa League, I did face up to Manchester City during the group stages. With that, I was unfortunate to lose 1-0, courtesy of David Silva. But with that loss came the incredible passing game of Borja Valero. During the match, Borja completed a huge 74 passes in the game, with a succession rate of 88.1. I was quite stunned. Several performances later, he was able to achieve similar passing succession rates that would only go as low as 81.8. Now that his importance has been empahised, Borja has been able to:
- Complete 415 passes out of a possible 515 in his last ten games for Villarreal.
- He has averaged, over his appearances for Villarreal, a passing success rate of 86.2%
- Achieve an average 7.02 rating in his last five games of-late.
My (on-going) save as Villarreal
To test and tinker, I was always going to start a small save with Villarreal. The Spanish leagues are new ground for me, as I tend to only manage Barcelona and Real Madrid in the comfort of large sums of money to spend and a world-class squad of players. Anything out of that is wilderness to me.
Results
League performance
So before I start to get tired of writing ...
Thank you for reading. It really is a pleasure to write articles and for them to be read by all of you, but I have to say that this isn't my best article. There is still more to come. My laziness today has been compiled through work on other things and hopefully tomorrow should bring an abundance of new things, such as the tactic itself and possible training regimes. So for now, I would like to conclude my second article and hope you enjoyed reading it as much as I did writing it.
Thanks again,
iNickStuff
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yeah i recreated the villarreal tactic a few days ago. It's actually a 4-4-2 that becomes 4-2-2-2, Think I have all down to a T but not 100% happy with my midfield two, would be interested to know which settings you went with.
Excellent work though. I'm going to wait for 11.3 before i start my various tactical experiments
Excellent work though. I'm going to wait for 11.3 before i start my various tactical experiments
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iNickStuff
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Yeah, I just set Valero and Denilson/Senna/Bruno to sit in the hole with him and go up with him into attacks. Didn't want to make him a fully defensive playmaker because he might be restricted of movement into potentially-dangerous areas.
Other than that, movement into channels for the strikers and wingers was the main thing and I used these TI's:
View attachment 124719
Not a particular push into anything. Just kept the height of the defensive line below 'Push Higher Up' and narrow for obvious reasons.
Thank you as well.
My TI are almost i identical to yours so am very happy with that (only difference was the went for the aggressive closing down that was evident in the 1st half against real, but then this changes through each game anyway via Touchline shouts)
So is that DLP support and alongside central mid automatic?
looking at your stats you have got their attacking but patient play down excellently
So is that DLP support and alongside central mid automatic?
looking at your stats you have got their attacking but patient play down excellently
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