Asunto: National Team

Hirons managed a few dribbles when he had the defender on his side or back. You basically need divine tech to have much of a chance to dribble a back-line NT defender, Hirons isn't super-far from that, but he's unlikely to ever make it.

I didn't really understand the double-wing when borkos used it and I don't think it worked much better this time either. It feels like you're playing with 10 men. I admit it created probably our best chance on 90 minutes, and as borkos said 3 or 4 times they separated enough to pass to each other, but in general I thought it was a waste. I'd rather have seen 4th at the back, a wing on the other side, a 3rd striker just about any other position really. I'm sure you're already on the throw-ins on the double-wing side that went to a striker so I won't go into that.

Burns had a match-saving game for mine, amazing coverage job on his side of the field. His passing was poor as usual, but he closed down their wing over and over again and covered admirably in the middle when he was there as well.

I can't be all negative on what was a great result though. It was always going to be tough to create chances against them and we made them chase the ball for a large portion of the game. The selection of defensive mids was excellent as it ensured we could press them all over our defensive half. I'd love to see that 3-3 at the back (3 defs + 3 def mids) used more often as I think it can be quite effective. (Maybe I'm biased it does look a lot like my defense most Sundays)

it doesn't help if you have more mids in the centre if your strikers are unable to dribble...that's where the wings come into action :P

Sure it does, through balls can still occur, and why not play with two wings then?

Not actually directed to naphtali in particular but to the general consensus of those who believe 2 wingers was useless ;).

Yeah the double wing thing I knew would be 50-50 in opinion. In one sense it reduces down to 10 men but it can create a loose man had it executed as often as I thought it might have.

I'll admit as the game panned it out it probably didn't do what it was intended to but I still justify my decisions for selecting it based on the fact Willis wasn't in particularly great form and we were unlikely to breach through the centre of their defense with our current bunch of strikers. Hirons did it a few times, but unless they open up massive holes in defense like Uruguay did, going through the centre is almost impossible so a winger was imo needed to give us a way.

We could have had an extra in midfield but if with that shifting defense of theirs Willis on his own probably wouldn't have been sufficient to generate chances, which leaves us basically no better off except potentially more territory.

Guess it's like the striker on the same position theory, in that it can be of benefit but it can just as easily backfire. What I had hoped was that if Willis got tackled, our other player could attack and win the ball causing a 2nd defender to have to come across and open up the box for an easy tap in. Didn't happen, largely as the execution was off but a few times 3-4 (probably created 75% of our shots for the match actually) it created space in behind the defender covering we just weren't able to capitalize.

The red card made little difference really and I doubt whether even if I used the extra man in defense or midfield that it would have created any extra opportunity given the Hrvatska defense. The manager used the red card order and moved one of his 2 dm's back into a defense role, so it didn't open much up as the backline was solid and well Byers technique is hardly strong enough to withstand top quality NT defenses. Hirons got through a few times, often the last tackle before a free run was enough to knock the ball away.

Anyway defensively we were quite good. Few shifting problems here and there and the defense dropped back too much in the last square allowing them a few cracks from just outside the box or just inside. Mangos' head saved us on a number of crosses and we could have easily been a goal down from that.

At the end of the day I guess it comes down to each to their own opinion. Some people dislike using 3 at the back as it opens them up, some dislike 3 strikers as they congest the play, some don't see the need in 2 wingers on opposite sides as the strikers only receive the ball from crosses then etc. Essentially 2 wingers on the same side is the same as that of 2 wingers on opposite sides. They don't mark the wings, then 2nd winger in behind the 1st is pointless but then so is the 2nd wing on the other side since the wing is free anyway. They mark one wing, well if they mark the opposite wing to your double wing side it's the same effect as if you used 2 wingers on opposite sides as 1 gets taken out of the game. Then if both sides are marked, the 2 wingers on the same side allow the ability to bypass the winger as opposed to being taken out.

That's not to say 2 wingers on same side is more preferable to using that player elsewhere like in defense, but I feel it's genuinely better than wingers on opposite sides, with one exception in the case of passing across from one wing to the other wing, where it can stretch a defense quite badly.

Anyway could have been used as an extra defender but I was pretty certain they'd try to mark Willis from viewing the tactic they used against Brasil (appeared to be exactly the same that they used today) and noticed that due to their pace,defense and Willis' form, we were going to struggle to get around them without the additional support.

Just my 5 cents worth, it's not something you'd want to use very often but it can be effective in situations like today although it didn't execute as well as I would have liked.
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Sure it does, through balls can still occur, and why not play with two wings then?


Previous post discusses my reasoning for why a 2 sided wing can be better than 2 wingers on opposite ends.

Basically,

No mark -> makes no difference, why waste two wingers if one winger is sufficient to get past
One sided mark on other side to 2 sided winger -> no difference, backup winger is taken out of play, the other case the opposite winger is taken out of the game (both cases result in 1 man out of play)
Both side marked -> Opposite winger case both wingers taken out of game, in same sided case the 2nd winger can still break through the line forming a cross.

That's why I think 2 wings same side is better than 2 wings opposite sides, each to their own ;).

The only advantage of 2 wings opposite side that 2 wings same side doesn't do, is stretch the defense if and only if one wing passes quickly to the other wing and back again.

Might also add through balls are actually fairly easy to contain. Yeah they can still happen but how often has our NT opened up and conceded a goal from a through ball in the past season? Not too often, and our defense isn't the strongest. You just need a well structured defense a couple of midfielders blocking critical paths and then use the standard shift across and compress. When defenders are fast and high skilled in defense, this isn't too much of a problem especially if the opposition strikers aren't as highly skilled in pace and technique.
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Congrats on a nice result. Now another page in the tactics manual has to be rewritten thanks to the Australia braintrust. ;)

The adjacent wingers was a really interesting idea. "Quick recovery" (immediately tackling the tackler) works well in other places - I can see why it would be worth a try on the wing. The big problem with it (aside from the aforementioned removal of a body from midfield-defense) is that with MID orders those two players are inclined to pass the ball to each other. So instead of grabbing the ball and running down the sidelines, they will (from time to time) stand still and tic-tac-tic-tac the ball back and forth - which is far from productive. Happened a few times. Though the quick recovery was also effective on several occasions.

I was very surprised Australia did not concede with only 3 at the back - especially given the Croatia winger. This was either really good scouting ("Croatia's wingers suck"), really brave ("let the winger try ...") or really lucky ("Croatia played a winger? Oh oh."). :) In any case, it was a great decision. Holding them to 5 shots was a really good defensive effort.

Great start to the qualifying campaign! :)

it was actually a case of,

"We don't want to heavily defend wings and if we shift our outer defender and drop our central defender back into the backrow, we effectively block their winger using 1 player rather than 2"

Was just a little bit off on a few occasions by not moving Burns over quick enough, genuinely from a pass from their left side across to the winger on the right.

Yeah the passing between the two happen but that can technically happen anyway if the men up forward are boxed in like throws etc, so it was something worth trying.

Might add the adjacent winger came into play after noticing in the game against Brasil the defense looked a little vulnerable to tackles as they didn't appear to have large technique levels.
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You are fortunate to have a midfield player fast enough to drop into the back row. :) Gotta figure that a team like Croatia has at least magical pace on it's winger and strikers. If the wing pass is made clean then that midfielder has a lot of territory to cover in order to fill the gap.

But it worked good. :) Well done!

the Australia braintrust. ;)

I like it :D

One thing for everyone to consider is, Croatia are a better side and to use a "normal" tactic against them, is conceeding to the fact that, more often then not they will beat us. Sure they have weaknesses in that tactic but every tactic does have weaknesses, and based on the idea that they may have changed their tactic, we really had to discuss what they thought they could change it too, and come up with a good compromise.

The idea of have slightly weird, unusual, almost suicidal tactics in some cases is it isn't what the other manager is expecting, and the more often we show what we are prepared to try, the more unpredictable we become, because after all, look how many of the big nations Australia manages to take down or get a draw with, when normally we wouldnt get close.

I am still convinced that whether it be through skill, luck or something else, everything cometer and myself have tried (with the odd input of others who have great ideas) has come away gold, and one day (hopefully not too soon) one will severely backfire and cause us to have a huge defeat. But that is something that we have always be awake of, and Australia has had some brave managers.

To be specific with the wing tactic, cometer already explained what was meant to happen (which didn't) it still showed other uses for it, and it produced a few more chances (just would have been nice if willis got the ball more often then beauchamp).

The whole tactic also showed the depth, and flexibility of the Australian players.

Thanks for everyone with their input because suggestions in here, really do get listened too when making future tactics, and the best thing about interesting tactics that suceed, we see more international minds coming to our forum saying their two cents

I think too that you're lucky on this game : a tactic like that is like to play 10 vs 11 (hopefully there was an exclusion at 28')

Liked the tactic, guys. Good job.
The 2 wingers didn't really work as expected, but they did drastically change the flow of the game. Everything went up the left side which not only gave us some great opportunities, it also made their attacking movement quite predictable as well. We knew roughly where the ball would be coming from.

I certainly wouldn't mind seeing a similar idea applied in the future. Another good result for our courageous management team. Sure a bit of luck, but you need luck and it was a highly calculated risk.

The defenders really did step up in this game. Some fantastic work from all 3.

Thanks for the explanation, I can at least see where you are coming from now.

I'd still say there are some other positives to two wings though.

1) When the ball goes up one wing, the other wing can move to a more central position. This is harder for the opposition to mark (your wings move laterally as well as up and down the field) and gives an alternative path to goal. Especially true for wingers with some scoring ability. This is also a lot more effective for the marked winger if they only mark one wing, as they have a different way to get into the game.

2) It makes future opponents more likely to stretch their defense to cover both wings, making the single wing or two-on-the-same-side-wing more effective.

3) In the case of neither wing being marked you can try multiple different forward setups against the same defense. So when the ball is on the left wing you could have your two strikers high close to the edge of the box, when the ball is on the right wing you could have won at the near post and one at the back post. This gives you more chance of having one of your striker-setups being open for crosses during the game.


Having thought about it some more if you are going to use two-on-the-same-wing, I'd consider having a little more separation, and probably have one a little deeper than the other. Benefits of this would be
* More open passing angles to get the ball onto the wing
* Enough separation that headers from one wing can be controlled by the other wing.
* Enough separation that the two wings don't interfere with each other's passes.
* The deeper wing will be off-side less often, allowing you to move the ball onto the wing we are trying to use more often. It seems to me that Midfielders sometimes hold the ball up, or head backwards because nobody in front of them is onside, if you make a pass to an on-side player, the off-side players have more time to get on-side but you are still moving the ball forward
* I'd think that at least in some instances you'd be better off having one of them play more centrally when the ball is in our defense. Essentially giving us a different passing option when we are trying to counter-attack.

I think if you're going to play two on the same side it makes more sense to have them holding hands. All the benefits of separating them go out the window if a defender sneaks between them. Every short pass will go to that defender and he will easily be able to win the ball and set up a counter. And if there is no defender, you're in the clear anyway (aside from the on-side/off-side element), so I'd say it's smart to plan for a defender to be there.

Assuming your wingers have PM, they won't pass to each other if a defender is between them, because its a bad pass.

If there's no defender, you may as well have had only one wing, and it won't matter how you've arranged them (unless of course they are both offside, when you could have had one onside)


if 1 and 2 are our wings, and X is the defender.

I'd rather have

X
1

2

(2 is open to receive a pass and has enough time to get off a cross, or can dribble forward to get us into the position below where the defender is between our two wings)

than

X
12

and I don't think there is much between

1
X
2

and

12
X


The problem with the last 3 positions is that ME will often determine that 1 and 2 are covered which means your mids are as likely to try putting it forward to a 1-on-1 with a striker, as put it into the wing where we have an advantage.

You are fortunate to have a midfield player fast enough to drop into the back row. :) Gotta figure that a team like Croatia has at least magical pace on it's winger and strikers. If the wing pass is made clean then that midfielder has a lot of territory to cover in order to fill the gap.

Yeah, but you can compensate that a bit by having the slower player move into a less dangerous position. For example, the case when the ball went to their wing, our central dm (Nikas) dropped back to the opposite side defense and the other central defender came across to cover the potential unmarked pass in the event the dm didn't drop back quick enough, just giving a little bit more time if they suddenly passed across the defensive line for Nikas to be in position ready to cover.

The other thing that seriously helped was Croatia basically used the same tactic against us, so I'd already seen what genuinely happened and when their winger would shift from the centre of the pitch to the wing and I tried to match that with our outer defender who is by no means slow so that it covered that player for as much of the match as possible.

There are ways that could have been countered but given we virtually were attacking the one side, they really only had the one side where they could attack from and most occasions we were able to cut it out, except for the occasional cross field pass that had their winger find some space.

End of the day we scrambled well to keep them out and the few times we didn't, Ando was able to make the save.

Didn't expect us to keep them to 5 shots either, so defensively I'd say we outperformed what my (realistic) expectations were and the tactic worked and we got rewarded somewhat for our effort :).

the only risk with that is you run the risk of having the defender make the tackle and clear it before the other makes the tackle. I thought about a

X
1
2

approach but I didn't want them to pass to Beauchamp, hence why I went with the side on approach so Willis got the ball first.

As for the previous post with the advantages from 2 wings, they're things I didn't actually think about at the time but you're quite right, problem is they then don't go to the byline enough before passing which can be a bit of a pain as opposition defenders stay on the edge of the box and don't allow crosses into the box beforehand.

Great to hear what others are thinking. This is probably the best tactical discussion I've had on sokker. Loving it.