
So, the first round of the competition is over. We have only one draw and 10 losses. We spend 8,000 thousand points on salaries, having only 5,000 thousand in the treasury. And there are still no guarantees that we will be able to win at least twice to cover the deficit, so in the transfer window I broke the contracts with the oldest players of the team. I managed to reduce the costs to 6,000 thousand. But we still need to cover about 800 points.
I hope that we will play at least twice in a draw in the next 11 matches. And if not, then in the summer transfer window we will have to get rid of a few more players to continue playing in the ML. These are the harsh realities of the second division.
You know, because I can only control the football part of the game, that is, use only the tools that the game provides to change something and finally win a few victories. This PES 2009 football game stuck in my head because it is really interesting and diverse. I started thinking that it could be changed. And I agreed that this is the game scheme.
For the first half of the championship, I was counting on 4-2-3-1 to score a few points somewhere from the defense. At the same time, the opponents still created many chances and eventually scored the goals they needed. And we, in turn, could not even make more than one shot per game.
An isolated lone forward in the attack is generally ineffective. There is also a lack of speed on the wings. And poor coordination makes the team static in developing attacking combinations.
So I thought, what am I losing? The AI is constantly trying to put pressure on me, often raising the defensive line high. Maybe it's worth trying a more attacking scheme?
And then I remembered the theory that in football there are five channels that need to be attacked in order to break the defensive formations. I wondered what the AI would say to that? Well, I still don't have enough strong players to play in any formation, and here's an attacking one...
Well, it's just an attempt to physically position the players so that something could be created near the opponent's goal. And so, the 3-3-4 formation with a libero in defense, who should provide timely cover for the defender and the wingbacks.
Did it work? Well, no. No — it became even harder to defend, but not harder than it was with the 4-2-3-1 formation, when 6 defenders were looking for me in front of my goalkeeper.
Yes, because we really had more chances near the opponent's goal! In one of the matches, we even had 8 shots and only poor skill prevented us from scoring. Sometimes the shot was above the goal, sometimes the opponent's goalkeeper saved the shot.
After all, I've only played three matches with this 3-3-4 formation so far. As before, we are losing and cannot score, but the main news is that we have started to get our chances to score much more.
Here's the news so far. I now have a few more options for who to put the direction arrows in the attack, but it requires considerations and testing.
The main advantage is that thanks to this arrangement of players, we got triangles that broke the opponent's defensive line between the full-back and the center. But even so, then we had space for a cross or for another combination, but the Nice defense in this case was often stronger and managed to play reliably against our forwards in the penalty area.
Here are some illustrations from the second cup match against Nice. It was in this match that we played according to the new scheme. The game did not decide anything, because we lost the first match at home 5-0. So we could take risks.