It's kind of what I was getting at with the tips though, the cpu seems to be programmed in such a way that it will always have those spells where you can't get the ball and there's not too much you can do about it other than let it have possession in non dangerous areas and wait until it gets into an area where space is restricted before even thinking about trying to put tackles in, I do get a lot of tackles in but the vast majority are in my defensive third plus I play on 15 min halves so the games are quite long.
I very rarely have over 45% of the ball, I could if I wanted to but it would mean passing it around at the back and in midfield for long periods, it's very hard (almost impossible) to play a high pressing game, there are times that you can do it but then the scripting kicks in and they start playing the tiki taka stuff or switching to the opposite side so you just need to read what's going on in the background and play accordingly, don't go chasing the ball when the cpu is on one of these spells as you're not going to get it and if you do you'll almost certainly lose it straight away.
They've almost nailed it but just have this overriding influence in the background to try and keep the balance of play even, there are always surprise results in football but a lot of them are built on solid defensive performances and then nicking a goal either from a set piece, counter attack or defensive mistake, then there's the ale house team bullying the big boys who don't fancy it type of shocks, none of this seems to apply to fifa where it throws the cpu player's attributes out of the window and turns them into the 1970 Brazil team for periods of the game just to even things out, try playing with two 4th division teams (league 2 for you young ones

) on world class or legendary, my players perform like I would expect them to, shite, that's the reason they're playing 4th division football, but the cpu controlled players will at times perform like world class footballers.
There shouldn't be any need for this, set a teams style to how it plays in real life and allow adjustments according to how the game is going, for instance if an underdog gets to half time at 0-0 then allow them to grow in confidence and be harder to break down the longer the game runs while the favourites get more nervous as time starts to run out and start making mistakes, things like this would've made it the best football game ever, instead you get ale house players starting to knock the ball around like Xabi Alonso.