Defensive Styles”, “Containment Area”, “Pressuring”, and “Numbers in Defence”
.
2. defend
Team instructions
There are too many goals scored and conceded in this game. The most realistic results I get is when I have totally defensive team instructions. And, not less important, I almost always use man marking (except in home games against weakest opponents).
Man marking
Man marking won’t do you any good if you still don’t know how to play
defence (read my tutorial if you don’t). If you do, man marking will be
crucial, especially in big matches. Double-mark Messi on RWF with your
LB and LM and you’ll double the chance of stopping him. And this can’t
be repeated enough – man marking doesn’t work as a magical stopper for
opposition attackers. Top players will still leave their markers behind,
like they do in real life. It helps if your player has a Marking skill
(find it in his profile among Player skills), but doesn’t guarantee
anything
Player positions in my formation explained
Centre backs are centre backs, not much philosophy there.
The main idea behind it is to have capable full backs
who become MR and ML in the attack. But! When I play games where I
expect to have a hard time, they remain in the defence even when I
attack. In other words, when in possession, they don’t go to MR and ML
positions but remain at RB and LB.
Two central midfielders are physically capable
players with one being a strong defensive midfielder (Casemiro) and
another one more agile box-to-box player (Azeez, they call him The
General :))
Then we have AMC and SS on the
other side. These positions I change the most. If the game doesn’t go
the way I planned, I sometimes change the AMC to SS and SS to RWF (with
substitutions usually).
And the attacker. I tried many players – I have
regen Klose (OR 83), bought Iccardi (OR 84), but they aren’t what I
need. The player who started playing incredibly came from my youth
system – Josip Rukavina. He’s my first choice now. Here is his
screenshot. You’ll notice that his physical abilities are great.
No big players, nice results
You’ll notice that my players are very good, but still not at the
Barcelona or Real Madrid level. I don’t even want them to be, that’s why
I don’t buy superstars. I’ve had regens develop into great players and
even have some free transfers from the first seasons in my first 11 like
Casteldine and Blanco. I’ve bought players like Azeez along the way. He
will never get past 75-76 OR and yet, is invaluable to me. I’ve even
bought Toni Kroos this season to replace him and after a few games
decided to sell him.
This formation (and my understanding of how to play defence) enables me
to be just behind Barcelona (having defeated them in our last match).
This is not easy to achieve on Superstar, considering what I read on PES
forums. I also qualified for the knockout phase of Europe League (I
lost in Champions League qualifiers at the beginning of the season and
that’s why I started using this tactic).
