Season 84 - Are you ready?

[pcmacdaniel]

Yeah, and I have changed my mind about this guy. He is one hour ahead of me over there and sat the game time to 02:30 AM (3.30 AM for him). I thought it was some lame attempt to screw us both and that he wouldn't show. But he showed, and had all his friends with him (this is what I call devotion!! Damn!):



And like you say, I can't fault him, its his option. But I do maybe think that -- since watching games is so important -- it shouldn't be possible to move them to the middle of the night.

But Al FC, with its modified 5-4-1 formation -- inspired by Åge Hareide's Malmö FF's approach that took them to two straight CLs -- is a tough nut to crack and my guys got the job done again:



I am not sure what happened, but I would guess at that I had a slight advantage which gave me a 2-0 lead early thanks to a lot of luck basically, then he started to pressure too hard which exposed him defensively.

I think that is a good lesson to learn in this game. Its hard to win a game, I don't know how many times I have taken a 2-0 lead in an even game, then in the end the opponent comes back and ties it, or the other way around. BUT, a game is very easy to "loose". A red card. You start to pressure to hard offensively. Stuff like that. Best approach is probably to just try to hang in there. Like even if you face an opponent a bit worse than you and the game is close, say you are only up by a goal after 45', don't start to push hard to put the game away. Most of the time it can cost you a lot.

But Al FC is a bit like this. Sure it has the odd stinker, but most of the time its a very hard team to beat and good opponents tends to fall apart against it.

I agree with you about the best approach sometimes is to just hang in there and not change anything.

Last weekend in associations I encountered a situation like this. I was up 2-1 at the 70 minute mark, when my opponent clearly changed to a more attacking setup, since he started dominating possession. At this point in time, I knew that the best case scenario for my association was a draw and we were trailing on GD -2 at that time. If GD got to 0 and they didn't score anymore goals in the matches still being played, we'd be even on away goals as well, which if I recall Nash123's earlier post correctly means we'd be headed to penalty shootout. So, since my opponent decided to open up defensively, I responded by changing from my orders from normal, mixed, low press, zonal to attacking, short, high press, m2m; I knew this favored me as well since he wasn't in an attacking formation and I had 8* players on both flanks. I also had to take risk, he didn't, because of the GD. I scored the 3rd goal while I was changing orders, then in the final 10 minutes scored two more as his defense came completely unglued and we escaped with a win on goal differential (21-20).