Players making lots of mistakes..

[olejosed]

Hi, im having some issues with espescially my defenders making loads of mistakes. Im first in december now, and i.ex Simon Kjær has made a total of 55 mistakes in 21 matches. My full backs on support has made around 35 each in the same amount of matches.

My central defenders have 0 creative freedom and my fullbacks have 8.. I have 2 central midfielders, 1 ball winning and 1 deep laying playmaker which has slightly less mistakes.. Im aware that no team would go error free, but the numbers are getting very high imo..

My team is capable of winning the premier league, so i win most of the matches, but im troubled about all the mistakes the team makes. I play rigid and mostly control strategy, press more, cautious tackling, zonal marking and stick to positions.

Any ideas on what to changes?

[Elhan]

It possibly means you are putting too much pressure on your defenders because the miedfield/attack does not cover properly for them. If you expose your defenders to one on one situations they will eventualy make mistakes that lead to goals. Apart from that it could be anything, from specific settings like tempo, passing range, closing down, even having a creative freedom of 0 can cause them to make irrational decisions sometimes. It would really help if you could specify what sort of mistakes are the most usual, lost interceptions/tackles, misplaced passes, getting draged out of position?

[olejosed]

well, it seems that most goals against comes from lost interceptions. Also the players seems to be quite prone to loosing the ball when in possesion.. some wrong passes goes to the opposition which they counter, but i guess that would happend. Also, the tactic im playing is using 2 high wingers, normal tempo, pretty high closing down. setting the defensive line higher if only 1 striker on top. maybe im using the players in the wrong roles?

[Elhan]

As far as wrong passes go, I would increase the pasisng range of the defenders by a few notches, (personaly even for possession tactics have it on mixed for them). If they have a low mentality they will mostly make possession passes anyway but it will give them an extra option when they are under pressure. Also, I'd give them a CF of 2-5 notches because from my experience putting them on 0 CF can sometimes cause them to become confused or make "irrational" decisions when under pressure.

As far as missed interceptions go it might be a combination of various factors. Personaly I would suggest taking a look at how your midfield and attackers are defending. Are they putting enough pressure on the opposition or are they giving them too much time and space to pick a killer pass? And, if you are trying to have your midfielders and attackers press the opposition, are they perhaps missing to many tackles and are they getting dragged out of position too often? In the first case it could mean your midfield isn't pressing enough. In the second case, wich in my opinion is very common, your midfield/attackers have excesively agrresive closing down/tackling/marking instructions. This means that they don't cover space efficiently and they miss too many tackles, wich often leads to the opposition being able to play a very good through ball. There could of course be many other things to blame as well, for example the defensive line in conjunction with the mentalities of the miedfield/defense might be leaving big gaps between the lines etc.

Generally speaking, what you are describing sounds to me like a team wich does not have a cohesive defensive function: the defenders, midfield and attack are not working together as a unit when defending. I would suggest starting from the basics: take a good look at how the tactical creator automatically gives instructions to your players to defend and make sure you understand why. Try a few matches with a standard TC tactic just to see how the team defends on various settings (counter/possession etc). I would also suggest reading one of the older versions of the Tactical Bible, (personally, '07, '08 editions have helped me a lot). If nothing works feel free to send me a link to your tactic and perhaps I could take a look it and provide an alternative point of view.

[olejosed]

Hi, thanks for a very informative answer! As you wrote, the strikers have a pretty high closing down. Also the midfielders do their share, so i'll try to downgrade my playmaker, as well as my wings who have closing down nearly all the time.. I created this tactic awhile ago following several threads and trying to understand the closing down but it has been revamped too many times now and probably lost its value.. I'll try to instruct some players to less close down ect.

[Flohrinho]

Those mistakes also start to kill me.

Usually my games at the moment look like this I have 4-5 CCCs but barely manage to get 1 or 2 goals out of and of course the only shot on goal from the opposition goes straight into my goal and usually involves a big mistake by one of my defenders.

One thing I noticed though is that young defenders (under the age of 24) seam to be more susceptible to those mistakes then older defenders even though the young defenders might even have better stats then the old ones.

The problem is these games happen all to often and really take a lot of fun out of the game.