Football Italia: Season 6 – Tactical Ideas

Season Six: More tactical ideas?!

January has come and gone and I’ve been somewhat in limbo, worrying about what I want to do and how I want to do it. With that, recruitment foci got put on the backburner as I hoped to be able to cure my issues with what I already have. Whilst that might be good for the longer term cohesion of the team, I am aware that it is a gamble, given that I do need to do something to alleviate some of the issues. I did, however, make use of a recent scouting mission – where I decided to get on board with the current top academies and permanently base a scout in Spain to look at the youth leagues. Important to those leagues are a number of clubs who exist solely to participate at youth levels and have no senior sides. I purchased two players from one such club.

With Barcelona to Messina not actually being a huge trip, I spent €15k combined on Eloi Aspar and Josep Colell from CF Damm, a renowned youth side who have produced several players who played for Barca and others who have made steps at the highest level elsewhere. Whilst neither player is expected to reach absolute greatness, they are both young, academy lads who fit in with the type of players I am after and, if all else fails, could be sold for a profit further down the line.

Joining them, I slightly reshuffled my coaching team.

Simone Magrí  – the effervescent long haired Italian – becomes the new set piece coach and I’m looking at seeing the impact of his signing, given some recent thoughts about our overall set piece performance. I am only able to find percentage success rates for attacking corners, but, if I assume that 100 corners have been taken – nineteen have been successfully met at the near post, six in the middle and fifteen at the far post, giving us a 40% success rate. 8.8% of goals – 0.13 per game – have come from corners with no direct free kicks and two (5.9% at 0.08 per game) have come from indirect free kicks. I’ll look back at the end of the season and see if this madman has produced any successes – as he should, taking home 300% more than the man he replaced! Filippo Bua also joins the staff as I look to build a stronger, more experienced backroom team.

– – –

Inconsistent is very much still the word. In a matter of games, we can go from beating Lecce – away from home – to barely turning up at home. Draws with Parma and Modena, both above us, are important but I cannot write this without paying special attention to two games: our dismantling of a pretty strong Lazio side in the cup, arguably the biggest win of my career, and absolutely tearing Brescia apart in a tactical masterclass that I wanted to break down:

With injuries galore and still questions over Owusu‘s quality and performance, I wanted to mix it up. I initially felt that a F9(s) would work best here but I didn’t completely want to make my striker a link up player, so went with the DLF(s) to ensure some goalscoring output would remain. Initially, I noticed that, in early transition and build up play, Vinci was noticeably deeper than Santos. I thought that this was odd being as neither have a particular preference to drop deep so put it down to some clever off the ball movement by my academy lad. Furthermore, the depth between the attacking five, knowing that Biagioni would drop deeper and Vinci and Santos would run in behind, plus whatever ball carrying ability Bellino can add from the VOL(s) role meant that I felt less worried about having to try and coax that out of a fairly Vanilla AM(s). With Biagioni dropping off, I could spend our transition making the pitch narrow and grouping together but bursting apart. When Vinci occupied their DM, it created a 3v2 with Cubarsi playing as a L(s) – but, given his narrowness, later a WCB(s) – meant that we had even more build up options.

Again – this is an option and I like to have a team that has this variety of options. My key players – based off form – don’t play in these roles that are changeable so I can get away with this kind of rotation, I think…

That leaves the table looking like this:

Still not where we should be, according to expected goals. But, on paper, just not consistently doing it right. The next month sees a nice southern twist as we play Catania, Palermo and Taranto as well as a trip to Sardinia to face Cagliari. If the table ends like this, we’ll face an extra playoff tie against whoever finishes in eighth and then enter the rounds, something which I really do not feel confident about! But it is what it is and I’m enjoying this journey!

Forza Biancoscudati!