Slightly surprised that people are giving particular rankings to the sheep (ie X over Y). The drafters had no role in selecting them, it's purely on the generosity of the selectors. Nobody's fault they got Ross Aloisi rather than Heskey for instance.
I wasn't expecting to be ranked very highly due to the sheep we accumulated but I am stunned to see us being ranked below teams that couldn't even be bothered to finish the sheep draft properly (formation and write-ups).
I think JamesA got penalised heavily by most (I had him last, and he finished last) for having nothing to work with in the tactics and formation section. Cevno had his formation up, so you could get an idea of how the team would work. He probably lost out on a place or 2, due to no write up. As for myself, the team was never good enough to get out of the bottom 3, and I was busy over that period. No write up was going to transform that team......plus, I did have a main tactic. As for your team, it had 2 sheep, and was always going to be scraping out at the bottom alongside mine.
Totally understand that. What annoys me though is it could look like people have thrown in the towel when their chance of winning has gone out the window. I'm not suggesting that is the case every time but if a drafter can't finish the job then I would have thought it would be more ethical say, to penalise those drafters more than others. As you say, we were always going to be way down due to our sheep which is no fault but ours. We made the selections after all. However, we still took the time to work out a formation and tactics to suit our players to the best of their ability.
Thanks. I am on vocation now. I knew that I could finish in the top 5, but number 1. I am very surprised. Ballack is the obvious weak link on my team. On the last round, I could have gone after Matthaus. Instead, I felt that Ballack's aerial attack is more useful than Matthaus' runs. It sounded crazy, right? So I aimed to replace Hagi with Platini. Oh..... I could not give up Klinsmann because of Brehme .
Me either. I personally had Excape Goat at no.1 as I thought that his overall package of players ability, tactics and how well they would gel in real life was the best on show. And Ballack was a part of that.
I agree. In his prime he was one of the 10 best players in the world, when not played in a holding role. He's not Beckenbauer, but then not many are.
Because in his prime he was overshadowed by Ronaldinho and Zizou and the beginning of Messi. Since he was never a flashy player, he gets overlooked.
I agree here, though where the sheep were located on the pitch and how they were masked, I felt was of importance. I actually thought Ross Aloisi was less of a hindrance than Heskey, as I was looking at him playing a very basic 'runner' role for the passers around him, and while Del Piero/Nedved was a good and creative partnership to help Nice/schwuppe's ultra-defensive side, I actually saw Heskey's sheer donkey-ness undoing a good deal of that (despite his size/hold up play). Also agree on Ballack - he was a quality player with some important intangibles, and a varied skillset which would have helped Goat's overall setup.
This is the Cryuff video billy referred to earlier - http://www.4dfoot.com/2013/02/17/video-cruyff-uses-a-chalkboard-to-explain-his-diamond-formation/
Yea, I didn't like that either. I like James and Cevno, and would hope they want to participate in the future, but it's not that hard to finish the draft. To build off that, I think some of you guys place far too much importance on tactical write-up. Platini is going to play like Plaitini no matter what you say he's going to do. The idea that we can somehow bend these players' styles with some confident words makes little sense. Players gonna play, boys.
Well, for one, he was a bit of an overachiever until he got to England. Two, he was the star on a oft disrespected 2002 German team that no one loved. Three, he isn't a holder, and Goat played him next to 3 other guys that played in the same basic space with no holder present. That was a killer for me.
No. It's was entirely dependent on who the players are and what they do. However, Harry was the first person to get anything out of Bale now wasn't he? There's something to be said for noticing what a player is good at and then putting them in a position to do what comes natural.
True. I think if we could understand Dutch we wouldn't have to multi-task between the sub-titles and the board! Some of the tactical advantages he suggested were interesting but I'd need to watch it a few times to fully appreciate. Basically his diamond was like this I think (a 4-3-3 with a false 9) --------------------1------------------------ 2------------4-----------5--------------3 -------------------6---------------------- ---------8------------------10----------- ------------------9--------------------- ---7------------------------------11---- and the 3-4-3 like this (used for playing against 2 striker systems like 4-4-2 mainly he said I think): --------------------1------------------------- --2----------------5----------------------3-- -------------------4------------------------- -----------6--------------8------------------- -------------------10----------------------- 7------------------9----------------------11 with a centre-forward playing as well as the number 10 which is the alternative to the false 9. It still has a diamond in midfield, and one which is more like what we traditionally think of as a diamond because it doesn't include a false centre-forward. Cruyff's diamond (or the Dutch diamond we could say) doesn't have two traditional strikers but wing forwards instead. Probably Cruyff's explanation in Dutch is easier to follow lol, but formation wise I think that was what he was describing.
But it is knowning who you have and how your tactics works with the players. On my team, I know that no matter what I did, Garrincha would not conform, so just let him play on the right where ever. I also know that Cruyff would be all over the field, but that he was tactically astute. I tried to work with my players rather than to try and bend their will.
PDG1978, if you move back the 7 & 11 to the same line as the 10 (nominally), and that would be closer to cruyff's diamond. As I said to Billy over PMs back then, a lot of his systems are just inspired by Michels' philosophy that all you needed at any point defensively was 1+the number of opposition attackers, so as you correctly inferred, playing against any variant of 4-4-2, you do not need more than 3 nominal defenders.
Yes, but you don't need to explain that. That's knowing when NOT to overcomlicate your team's tactical instruction. I don't have to tell Garrinchato be Garrincha. My team had players that played in their ideal positions with complementary people around them. It should be fairly obvious how they will play. Unless, of course, the people don't know my players - which, in that case, I provided information. I think it's a bit self-indulgent to think I'm going to explain to you how player X is going to play when it is really fairly obvious if you've seen the tape or read the reports. If someone needs 500+ words of tactics to make their team look good, then they are usually trying to make the players do something they aren't naturally capable of and are just trying to spin a thread of BS (pun intended).
Yes, but a little more than that, because the attack can be multi-layered. You have to account for midfielders that join the attack, so you either have enough back to begin with or add midfielders from your own team to the defensive block. Jonathan Wilson (which is like a psuedo-Moses to internet tacticians) did a great job of laying out the "+1 rule" with the idea of "defensive attackers and attacking defenders." Both of those concepts were very important to Michels's "total football." A third concept (briefly touched on by Wilson) was the management of an overabundant field space with a inadequate number of players to cover it - which was also a big thing for Michels, Cruyff, et al. The Dutch did well to make it a "shell game" of constantly moving players and closing/opening spaces in order to confuse the opponent and dictate the run of play. Great stuff. Ooops, way off topic. But, that's stuff fun for me. Ross, if you want to shoot me a PM on the subject, go ahead. I'm curious if you've got any good blog sites or books you can pass along.
May I have a link the any article you may have regarding these tactics? Looking for a good read and a different perspective.