TTB vs Crossing

[Jedi5diah]

i saw quite a few posting on "...ttb's instead of crossballs..."

my own understanding

TTB is a passing that opens up a defence, usually a long telling ball to your strikers.

Crossing is a "pass" that go across the box (low/high) for your central players to convert into goals.

If setting your wingers to TTB often and crossing rarely does a better job, then they are no longer call wingers. Because they are suppose to cross.

Anyone has a better understanding or explaination of TTB works better than Crossing? Thx!

[phnompenhandy]

Does it matter what you call them? For me, if I have a target man with good heading ability and the weather is good, I'll instruct my wingers/wingbacks to cross. However, if the weather is windy or my strikers are not going to win headers against the oppo DCs, I'll put crossing to rare and keep the ball on the ground.

Whilst crosses can be low and through balls high, in general crosses are aimed at the head and through balls the feet.

What I'm suggesting that your decision to go for crosses or through balls should depend on your players (who play and who receive the ball), the opposition, the weather and indeed the pitch.

[Jedi5diah]

Thx for replying, i totally agree with what you have posted, it makes sense. It is just that there are many posts that don't make sense stating TTB works better regardless of what you have said. I guess this is the match engine or maybe a flaw to exploit?

[phnompenhandy]

There's no ME flaw or exploit here. I'd say the better tacticians on this forum do take the opposition, weather etc into account. They generally promote an 'all-being-well' or 'all-else-being-equal' set of instructions which have to be tweaked before and in-match taking into account circumstances.

Also, in my experience, there tend to be far more speedy strikers than big strong target men, so you're more likely to have forwards that benefit from TTBs rather than crosses.