Okay, I'm trying something here and I can't get it to work... This is basically what I have in mind, tactically speaking. For the past two seasons, Barcelona have employed a formation where the deepest midfield player (either Yaya Toure or Sergio Busquets) drops into the centre of defence. The two centre-backs, Gerard Pique and Carles Puyol, will spread into extremely wide positions whilst Barcelona are in possession, almost on the touchlines. This spreading allows the wing-backs Dani Alves and Maxwell to bomb forward without fear of leaving the defence completely exposed.
The problem with attacking wing-backs is that they are never completely free to attack, they are always concerned about their defensive responsibilities. When I can create a more reliable and sturdy three-man defence, they could get to the opposition byline without leaving a huge hole at the back.
A big part in these bombing forward runs is the role of the wide players on my team. Rather than stay wide (which would hamper the ability of the wing-backs to get forward), they narrow, drifting into the box and almost a conventional front three with the central forward. This has the effect of narrowing the opposition defence, as their natural markers follow them into the centre.
Basically, I am combining the inside forward idea with more attacking wing-backs, as the inside movement of the wingers opens up a huge amount of space on the flanks, ready for the wing-backs to run into and exploit.
Apart from the regular problems the inside forwards present to any defence, the opponents wide midfield players are suddenly charged with an almost solely defensive job. When my wing-backs get to the byline and the opposing wide midfielders track them all the way, my opponent will end up with something approaching a flat back six, which means there is now space in midfield to exploit.
Intelligent movement as the key to unlocking an opponents defences. Intelligent movement, as stated earlier, implies position switching, which in turn means that players will often end up finishing an attacking move in a different position to which they started this attacking move, in an effort to exploit the gaps in defence created by other people's movement.
The only problem is that I can't get the bloody defensive midfielder to drop into or even right in front of defence. It keeps looking like a fucking pyramid with two at the back in a narrowish formation and one in front of those two.
This is a problem because the defence is too narrow, particularly if the opposing striker is or opposing strikers are faster than the defenders and able to move wide before outpacing tjheir marker to the ball. Add to that the fact that every team has at least one of these speedfreak forwards, and you can see the problem I am faced with.
Soooo... to cut a long story short, any ideas on how to bloody fix this?
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Hey G,
ReplyDeleteI do something similar in my 4-1-3-2, when my full-backs go to the attack, my DC's play wider and my DM goes back to cover the hole between the DC's.
I set my DM to Anchor-Man, give more creative freedom to my RB/LB and my entire team plays wider (although I play without wingers, sometimes my MCL/MCR makes that function). Looks like it works decently well, my DM don't get back the enough to be considerated a DC, but he can cover the centre well while my (very fast) DC's cover the sides.
The problem using this, I noticed, is that you need only very fast DC's, otherwise, you will be smashed against a pacy striker, so honestly, I still don't know what you can do to fix this problem if you got slow DC's.
Hope it helps you,
Guil