Double Halfbacks

In my tactic Jardel plays as a lone Centre Back, and although it’s not his natural position, I’ve set him to cover. He plays behind two half backs, who drop in when out of position to create a back five, and between two attacking fullbacks. The half backs help out in defence but also allow us to pack the midfield, helping to retain possession and stop counter attacks (something that seems to be very effective in this ME).

This is how important Jardel is to my tactic (my youth prospects have a lot to live up to):

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Playing in from of him is a rotating group of players, dependant on opponents or match fitness. I have two places for half backs and have solid choices, although Morianes is mainly a B2B destroyer who I have trained up to be a HB if necessary. Some are young and coming up whilst Fejsa is on the way out.

Half backs (Danilo [B2B CM] and Lindelof [reserve CB, first team RB] are played elsewhere). Lindelof wants to play CB but as Jardel is so good has to make do with RB hence the morale:

Rodrigues, Luis and Coelho are homegrown, and have had no issues stepping up into the first team. Danilo was on loan from Braga and became a wonderkid during his time here so was bought for £11 million. Fejsa is old guard and will probably be gone soon. He is good though. Training for the role of HB has been really effective and the HBs have great passing stats, not sure about the interceptions yet, but from watching the match engine it seems to be a large part of their effectiveness. I just wish you could create a pivot and have one HB be slightly more conservative than the other and one who is more offensively minded. Perhaps this might be achieved through players own mentalities.

Club is dominating possession and our passing is topnotch, something that I want my teams be good at as I believe the two to be key to winning games. Don’t get me wrong, I’ve tried deep counter attacking, in fact my cheeky Blackpool team play deep, defensive and narrow, but for this save I want to develop a generation of players confident in possession. But I don’t want to be a Portuguese Barcelona, I want to be incisive and quick in the final third.

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Finally, a graphic showing how my team gains possession. You can see that Jardel is a beast, but the two HBs, Perdigues (88) and Luis (32), are causing the opposition lots of problems and recycling possession for us.

Interceptions for comparison:

If you’d like to see any other stats, graphics or some such, please ask!