Players shooting from stupid angles

[gearnie]

Apologies if this has been dealt with elsewhere, but searching turned up nothing...

Basically, my attacking players, esp. strikers and wingers, are shooting from stupid angles on the pitch. To define "stupid angles", imagine a line drawn from the each corner of the 18-yard box to the nearest post. The area outside that is what I would consider "stupid". Hopefully you understood that (rather poor) explanation.

I did see in SFraser's "Striker" thread that this sort of behaviour could be related to flair. Playing as Man Utd with no new strikers or wingers, I can see that most of them have relatively high flair, with the exception of Park Ji-Sung. I'll admit I haven't really been taking notice of exactly who does the shooting, so maybe he does this less that the others. Even so, the number of times my players have taken a shot from a stupid angle when there were players either waiting or streaming into the box seems way too high.

I'm playing a 4-1-3-2, with two wide (but not advanced) mids. Are there any particular settings to minimise players shooting from those areas of the pitch?

[ZdlR]

What sort of mentality are these players set to?

I often tweak my strikers' mentalities during the game depending on how I require them to play. For Torres, I can set him to have a very normal mentality (11) but with high creative freedom (17) and this will see him receive the ball and try to maintain close control and beat defenders on his way to goal. With his alternative setting - the two instructions swapped so mentality is 17 and cf is 11 - he tries to break forward from the defensive line, run onto the ball and then try to take a shot as soon as he feels he has a chance of scoring. This latter setting can lead Torres to play too direct, including shooting from awkward angles that don't seem to make too much sense. You do have to be quite prescriptive with player instructions, I find.