is it just me or is the fact you can't actually run at anyone with the ball really starting to piss you off.
I have ronaldo right, probably the quickest player with quality ball control in the world, i'm 15 yards away but driving at richard dunne and without the slightest worry as i try to jink past him he sticks out a leg and wins the ball.
I loved 08 and I am liking 09 but i'm just not having fun. Is there something wrong with me?
What you describe is a part of the game that needs some reworking in my opinion.
The basic "problem" is that defenders always seem to have a leg available to kick the ball away when you get close enough. It seems impossible to wrongfoot an opponent, and there doesn't seem to be any system in place for calculating which leg the player has his weight on, and thus wouldn't be available to just throw out to get the ball.
When doing tricks, you can get some distance from your defender, but that seems like a pretty simplistic system where the defending player's reaction time is simply delayed, to simulate him being tricked temporarily by a feint.
I described this just earlier today in a detailed post on the EA sports forums:
http://forums.electronicarts.co.uk/5882629-post711.html
It would be great is this was reworked so that defenders cannot always get a leg out, and also it would be great to put some skill and timing into defending, so that pressing X does a stab tackle, and if you time the button press wrong when you are defending, for example if the opponent does a stepover and then moves in the other direction, the player would try and stab tackle at the stepover, so to speak, and the opponent could move past on the other side. Committing to a stabtackle as a defender should have consequences if not properly timed. You could implement a feature so that the stab tackle needs to be aimed with the analog stick in the direction it should be performed. Thus if the opponent does an elastico/flip flap, you could be fooled into reacting/committing to the initial move by the opponent, and your defender would stick the wrong leg out, and thus his bodyweight would be supported on the leg on the opposite side, where the opponent moves past the helpless defender.
In turn to balance things back, defenders need to be slightly more responsive and "defined" in their movements, so that it is easier to contain attackers using your body rather than attackers being able to move past you just because your defender is difficult to manouver into the path of the attacker.
So, defenders should be easier to react to movement, but have less success when it comes to actually intercepting the ball stab-tackle style from quick opponents. More focus would then be moved into simply trying to stay between skilled opponents and the goal, and keeping constant pressure on them.
In real life, you almost always see Ronaldo having the upper hand when 1 on 1 with an opponent. A couple of stepovers, he picked a side and moves past. The defender has almost no chance to stop him if he commits to a stab tackle, his only objective is to stay in the close proximity of Ronaldo and not give him too much space. Trying to steal the ball and committing to a tackle is extremely risky, much more so than in FIFA (because of the unrealistic ability of defenders to always snap the ball up when close to an opponent).
With less skilled opponents, they would move slower and have more predictable movements, and thus defending wouldn't always be as tricky as against Ronaldo and the like. Still stab tackling should always require timing, and not be the "hold-button" affair it is today.
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