Tactical Travels: a tale of inverted triangles and short-term management

[noikeee]

Welcome to Tactical Travels, where armed with this:

And this:

I intend to travel the world in order to discover the charms of various different branches of footballing philosophies. The premise is pretty simple: start unemployed with lowest possible reputation, then stay no more than 1 season at every job. In case an international job opens up in the future, by “season” it is meant a qualification campaign for a major tournament + the tournament itself.

Given I’m only staying for one season at every club I need focus on short-term management. This means I cannot excel by building a squad through the transfer market over a few years, neither develop youngsters, hence to get success I can only do it through tactics. And that means developing a tactical system that fits the players I have available. Which could be wildly different depending on whether I’m managing in the Belize 5th tier or in the Premiership.

That is enough for an intro, I have a flight already scheduled. Can you guess the destination? Here’s a list of available flights:

Note: This does not mean I will stop playing my regular career, but I'll be divided between them both depending on time, patience, enjoyment, etc.

[noikeee]

Destination #1: July 2011

[SRL88]

Macau or China??

[noikeee]

Dezzolla Shimane Esporte Clube

Dezzola, based in Hamada in Japan, play in one of the sub-divisions of the Japanese 4th tier, the Chügoku League. I am not very surprised they play in a 5000 seater as Japanese football apparently has overblown stadiums all over the place, but I’m a little surprised they’re semi-professional.

Squad

My assistant manager Nobuhide Kurosawa tells me these are my finest stars (using a very loose definition of “stars”):

Yuto Mori (DC) – Knows how to tackle and is very determined.

Takuma Matsuda (AMC / AMRL) – Not sure why he’s worth 5 stars. Apparently 9/8 for acceleration/pace is above average.

Shun-ichi Morita (MC / MR) – This kid is just 15!! He’s also useless apart from flair and technique.

Expectations

Board wants me to win the league. Oh crap. I suppose our opponents may still be worse, however. I haven’t thought about the tactics yet but it’s going to be something rudimentary.

[noikeee]

Macau or China??

The boat gave it away and you still missed, sorry.

[Persiani]

Lol I like the logo of the Team haha

[noikeee]

Signings

Kim Hyun-Jin (DM / D/MC)

Ha Ki-De (ST)

Kim Dal-Woo (DC)

Atsushi Yoshimoto (ST)

Yuta Takimoto (GK)

Ri Eung-Seok (DM / D/MC)

Kyohei Nakazato (DR)

Takashi Ohkubo (ST / AMC)

Jung Koeng-Chang (AMC)

Friendly: Dezzolla-Gainare

This was my tactic for my first game in charge of Dezzolla, a friendly against a team 2 divisions above us:

Plus the shouts which I eventually used throughout the game:

Exploit the middle

Pass into space

Pump ball into box

Hit early crosses

This is a very rudimentary narrow strategy, to fit our lack of wingers, and to try to exploit the relative pace of my new strikers.

It actually worked well even if they had a couple chances. I’m particularly pleased with the way we managed to combine directness and the natural short passing game that a narrow diamond provides (which I was worried about given my team’s lack of technique).

Things to improve:

- my full-backs are awful and unwilling to cross

- Gainare’s chances comes from spilled crosses from my keeper, my keeper is good enough not to do that so my conclusion is that I’m leaving too much space on the wings.

- too many long shots, time to do my old trick of setting it to shoot rarely for every player.

Considering dropping the 2 MCs to DM spots hence a trio of DMs to spread over and cover for the attacking full-backs better. But I need to hire more DMs for that.

Note: Whilst this is a tactical thread I won’t cover every single match in this much detail, just ones I find interesting tactically.

[noikeee]

Transfers (in)

Yuki Stalph (DM)

Yu Kogure (ST / AMR)

Hiroshi Terada (DM)

Stalph is a fantastic player for this level. In this club I am following a policy of only hiring players with Japanese nationality to make this not-too-unrealistic – Stalph has Japanese as 2nd nationality as well as all the North Koreans I’ve signed.

If I hired the Brazilians that show up in player search screen we’d probably win every game 5-0.

Transfers (out)

Isao Yoshida

Ryuji Morita

Kazuo Yamazaki

Takeshi Noguchi

Results

Mixed bag here, increasingly negative. We’ve flirted with a trio of DMs rather than 1 DM + 2 MCs and it didn’t really work. The game vs Vortis told us in no-uncertain terms that playing a narrow tactic against a far superior side with wingers isn’t a good idea. The extra DMs don’t really cover against the wingers.

Chügoku League: Dezzolla-Hitachi Kasado

First league match and we’re sticking to the narrow diamond to exploit our status of heavy favourites:

Starting with same shouts as the 1st friendly:

Exploit the middle

Pass into space

Pump ball into box

Hit early crosses

Two quick goals in the 1st half with our first two shouts, made me add the “retain possession” shout in hope we keep the ball for the remainder of the match. Later on a 3rd injury(!), when we had made all substitutions made me use this 10 men formation but it meant very little:

The end result of the game was brilliant:

The strategy worked perfectly with plenty of goals from combinations through the middle and the pace of our forwards used well. But it has to be said the 1st half only featured 2 shots from us (we scored from both) and I believe the fact Hitachi Kasado were a lot more tired help us score so many in the 2nd half.

Positives:

- We exploited the middle exactly as designed

- Pressing high didn’t made us tire more, instead helped us get more of the ball and in turn tire the opponents more (albeit they may have simply had worse physical preparation)

- No threat from opposition wings despite them playing wingers (classic 4-4-2), us narrow formation.

Negatives:

- Key players Yuto Mori and Takuma Matsuda pick up serious injuries. Perhaps high pressing is turning too much our football into a game of contact and our players aren’t strong enough for that.

[deltablue]

Interesting to see how this goes.

[Mikal]

I'll be following, I always enjoy a good tactical read.

[SRL88]

The boat gave it away and you still missed, sorry.

Doh!!!!

Looking forward to reading this.

[noikeee]

Interesting to see how this goes.

I'll be following, I always enjoy a good tactical read.

I can promise a tactical read, I can't promise a good tactical read.

Doh!!!!

Looking forward to reading this.

To be fair I can't tell chinese characters from japanese neither, but it was the missing asian option.

[noikeee]

Video evidence

Highlights from the Hitachi Kasado match showing how we exploit the middle of their defence:

[video=youtube;fQ39wpd_abo]

[Mikal]

I can promise a tactical read, I can't promise a good tactical read.

I'm sure it will be! Win, lose or draw it's all a learning curve and it's just as interesting seeing tactics fail (and learning from them, from an outsider view anyway!) as well as when they come off.

Have you noticed any problems with your side not having adapted to the tactics?

[Karnage94]

I'm sure it will be! Win, lose or draw it's all a learning curve and it's just as interesting seeing tactics fail (and learning from them, from an outsider view anyway!) as well as when they come off.

Have you noticed any problems with your side not having adapted to the tactics?

Well with the results he has had so far I can't see how the team haven't adapted. Very good start

[Mikal]

Well with the results he has had so far I can't see how the team haven't adapted. Very good start

When you look on the tactics screen and you can see how comfortably your team are with the formation/mentality etc. etc. I'm curious to see whether being fluent or not would make a significant impact.

[SRL88]

A nice demolition there.

[noikeee]

I'm sure it will be! Win, lose or draw it's all a learning curve and it's just as interesting seeing tactics fail (and learning from them, from an outsider view anyway!) as well as when they come off.

Have you noticed any problems with your side not having adapted to the tactics?

Well with the results he has had so far I can't see how the team haven't adapted. Very good start

When you look on the tactics screen and you can see how comfortably your team are with the formation/mentality etc. etc. I'm curious to see whether being fluent or not would make a significant impact.

I was a little worried the team seemed to be taking too long to get adapted to the tactic, but after removing one of the 3 base tactics and focusing only on 2, it seems to have helped the tactics familiarity bar increase more rapidly. Will check how high it is later.

A nice demolition there.

It was nice but it was only the 1st league game and I'm highly dubious of these add-on leagues at a lower level, let's see if this is a one-off or if this is going to be an easy season. Quite frankly I wish it isn't otherwise it's going to be very boring tactically.

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I'm gaining more momentum on my other career and have little time this weekend so this may be on hold for a little while.