Not a Footium Blog

Have you ever wondered if your tactics are off? If your right wingers would do everyone a favour by becoming right wing backs?

Look no further. For Season 5 of Footium, the Mighty Marrouck Villa will be experimenting with a new formation every single match day, and reporting the results to our wonderful Footium community.

Formation One. 3-4-3.

We start today with 3-4-3, which is a far more attacking formation than we’re used to using at Marrouck Villa. We’ve been using 4-5-1 DM but really struggled against a lot of formations and a lot of squad strengths. This resulted in our relegation from Division 6, despite having one of the strongest squads in the division. So time for change.

Our line-up:

Our weakest positions were the positions we’ve bought players into; RF, LF and CM. Our strongest positions left over from our previous squads are the wingers and GK so these remain strong in this formation.

Average squad strength: 39.2

Opponents Line-up:

This was a very interesting game, as the opponent started with this 5-2-1-2 formation, and quickly swapped formation.

They swapped the out of position striker for a higher rated out of position striker.

Average Squad Strength: 39.3

So you can see, these two squads are incredibly evenly matched.

Real Life Dynamics

We can take some lessons from real life when it comes to Footium formations. When it comes to 3-4-3, we’re looking at some interesting advantages and downsides.

Strengths:

• Width – wingbacks/wide midfielders can roam forward and create chances from wide positions.
• Balance – essentially you have 5 offensive players (forwards and wingers), and 5 defensive players (pivots and centre backs), making it numerically and incredibly balanced formation.
• Fluidity – the formation is fluid. Forwards can become inside forwards, wide midfielders can drop into a 5 if needs be. It offers a lot of variety.

Weaknesses:

• Speciality players needed – if your wingers aren’t strong and up to scratch, they will struggle.
• Midfield defensive support – due to only having two central midfielders, there is not as much defensive support as other formation coming from midfield.
• Counter attacks – due to a lack of width from the defence, and the tendency of wingers to get forward, 3-4-3 can be vulnerable itself to wide formations and counter attacks.

In a Footium context, I would keep a particular eye on the stamina of your wingers, and the quality of your centre backs.

Against our opponents formation in this fixture, I would expect them to potentially dominate midfield for some parts of the game, and also we may be at risk of counter attacks from their wing backs.

The Match

We started strong, going 1-0 up within 8 minutes.

It quickly got pulled back to 1-1 in the 29th minute.

Marrouck Villa went 2-1 up in the 32nd minute.

Our opponents equalised in the 48th minute, they then followed it up by going 3-2 up against us in the 80th minute.

Thankfully, we pulled this back to a 3-3 draw with a fantastic equaliser in the 82nd minute!

The game was end to end. I chose an attacking mentality to try and overload the opponent.

The stats are below:

We had far more shots, slightly more possession and more corners. We did have less passes and I expected this with them having more in midfield.

Great game.

On to the next one!

See you all on the pitch.