Quote Originally Posted by Abbas View Post
I always lose when my opponent have a red card. I wonder why it never happens to most managers. Then I came across your post. I went out of the Champs league after winning the first leg 2-0, he gat a red card in the second leg and beat me 1-4.

The same opponent beat me with a red card about 3 or 4 seasons ago. He has never beaten me with a complete team. It is what it is. I don't want to meet him again.
Regarding the RC issue, I would share my own observation for your reference. As a manager, I did lose a few matches that opponents got a red card when I first started playing the game (without understanding why that would happen). Once I somehow figured out why, all those matches are now won easily.

There are a few possibilities of scenarios of red cards being incurred:

1) Random event allocated by engine calculations in-match, such as an opposition defender fouling our player in the box then conceded by a PK and he got sent off too: Random events are the easiest to handle, as the engine ‘action’ does not imply any vulnerabilities of any player, players performance in that area or anything else. ie. just an allocation of randomly negative events to balance up the probability over a lot of matches.

2) Obvious poor performance of a certain opposition player: this can be confirmed by his exceptionally poor rating (6.5- or lower) and/or frequent occurrence of fouls by that player as illustrated by text (eg. Player X committed a foul and the referee was having none of it. He got a booking, etc.). This usually results in a RC with the expected accumulation of 2 yellow cards. Note that this poor performance is only limited to that particular player and other players in the same area would have normal or even better ratings than usual.

3) A certain area of opposition area, say opposition DC area, which performs extremely poorly: That results in repeated scoring by our players in certain areas and reconfirmed by poor ratings of all opposition players in that areas. Usually that follows with a knock-on effect of a series of yellow cards issued to players in that area and nearby areas (when nearby area players are also cautioned while they attempted to help out). RC could then be an accumulation of 2 yellows to players in that area (more often) or even to the nearby area player (less often but still would happen when we purposefully move players around to pressure them with 2v1)

Scenario 1 has the most straightforward solution: We should make use of our extra man advantage in taking up the space made available by opposition player being sent off (vs non-attending managers).

Scenario 2 & 3 are not as straightforward though.

With scenario 2, say both us and opposition plays 2 MC and 1 of opposition MC got sent off by a 2nd yellow. If his MC partner has a good rating (7.0-7.5+) and without a yellow card, then we should attempt to move 1 MC to man-mark opposition MC and move our other totally free MC into more advanced position with up-arrow to support AMC or wingers (instead of maintaining positions or attempting to sandwich him), because that other MC is more than likely to be able to hold his ground and our team would not get further advantage (card, extra possession turnover, etc.) in targeting that 2nd MC as illustrated by no card and good rating.

With scenario 3, it is obvious that we should move our players as close and packed to that opposition area, change orders to target that area and possibly change formation to put more attackers into that area where they perform poorly. That should result in a very high scoring win with attackers in that area having a field day. If we did not make these changes to take advantage, it it highly likely that the engine would allocate more events to occur in other areas of the pitch, which often means the opposition gets a far higher proportion of possession and chances than what a typical 10-men team would have. And in the balance of probabilities, engine’s random allocation of performers would means some opposition players would have been given performance boosts when 1 player of theirs suffered the worst, so in those matches when we do not change our team shape and orders after the RC, opposition would be ‘set free’ by the RC and other areas’ boosted players will perform like superman and win with 10 men.