In the last episode I introduced you to the first club of a journey person save, my hometown club, Bangor. In this episode we will go through the first team squad, take a look at my starting tactic and discuss my thoughts behind it. We will finish with a look over the first half of the season as we begin our quest for the top.
First Team Squad
Goalkeepers
At the outset I should say only seven players in my first team squad actually have a contract, the rest are on Amateur deals so could be taken on a free at anytime, so don’t get too attached to anyone. Looking first at the goalkeepers, Taylor and Gibbons, and to be honest I’m not too keen on either of them. My coaches love Taylor, rating him as one of the best players at the club which is a worry in itself. He is better than Gibbons mentally and has decent distribution but Gibbons out scores him in the goalkeeping fundamentals of Handling and Reflexes. I’ll probably trust my coaches on this one and start with Taylor, but at 38 who knows how long he will be around.
Defenders
We only have three recognised Centre Backs at the club and one of those is Ryley D’Sena who is on loan from Premiership rich boys Larne. I’m happy with Ryan Arthur, I can see him being very dominant at this level, with his aerial prowess and decent mental ability, he is also one of the players who holds a contract at the club earning £220p/m. Boyle and D’Sena will battle it out for the other spot which will probably be as a no nonsense centre back. Given their lack of technical ability I think it would be best for them to concentrate on defending our box and clearing the ball downfield. At Right Back we have another loanee, Seanna Foster from Clitonville who I rate as the best player at the club. One thing Iike to do is to play the best couple of players in their preferred positions or roles when I first join a club, to me there is less chance of mucking the whole thing up when I do that. So, although, at this level, Foster might do a lot of damage on the right wing, I will start him in his favoured position as an attacking wing back. On the left side our coaches love Reece Neale who is technically poor but mentally and physically strong, so I will be less adventurous with him, so will probably start him as a Full Back on support. Beattie can provide cover on the right or left, while Hume could play on the left or potentially as a fourth centre back looking at his jumping reach. I’m reasonably content with the defence although I can some concerns regarding pace, and first team cover could become an issue if we suffer from a lot of injuries or suspensions.
Midfielders
It is the midfield that concerns me the most, and having disabled the first transfer window there is very little I can do about it. Only three recognised Centre Midfielders are at the club and one of them is Lewis Harrison who is unbelievably listed as the club captain and has a proper contract, stealing £110p/m from the club. I can see absolutely no use for him at all apart from some aggression. Strength 2, Bravery 5, Tackling 4, there is no way I’m trusting this fella in my midfield. That leaves us with just Aaron Harris and Dylan O’Kane, both of who are ok at best. O’Kane is decent in the tackle and Harris has some technical quality so perhaps a simple CM(d) and CM(s/a) combo is the way to go. Tom Mathieson could maybe work as a CM(a) with his pace and reasonable first touch and finishing, but strength 2 really makes me soft in central positions. On the wings we have Scott McArthur on the left who I like the look of as an old fashioned winger, good pace, dribbling, and touch means he should be able to beat a man and get the ball into the danger zone for us on a regular basis. Glover is still young and looks good as a back up winger or full back on that side. On the right, we have Mathieson who my coaches like and while he is quick he lacks the technical quality of McArthur on the left. Conor Sullivan is interesting, a 6 Foot 4” winger who also has good pace but very little else at this point of his career. As mentioned, I don’t like the midfield at all and when you look at them collectively you can see we really lack strength, bravery, composure and concentration across the whole unit. They are also really small, Sullivan and Glover aside, none of them are taller than 5 Foot 10, I will need to watch all this in our early games.
Forwards
I’m more encouraged with our attacking options than I was for our midfield. We have six forwards on our books but two of them will be reserves at best so I haven’t included them. Jordan Hughes looks like he could be a great advanced forward, Finishing 13 and Composure 11 are more or less elite at this level. He also has good pace which I love for at least one of my strikers. After that things are a little less clear. In real life I have watched a bit of Bangor and have been impressed with Ben Arthurs’ hold up play so I was hoping for more physically in game than I got. I still think he could do a good job as a Target Forward linking up with Hughes. My other option is veteran Michael Halliday, who at 43 is older than me and that’s saying something. I remember him at his peak playing for Northern Ireland’s greatest team, GLENTORAN. He still has great technical ability 15 first touch, 11 Finishing and 10 Technique are all encouraging, add this to decent vision and passing I can see Halliday operating as Deep Lying Forward and linking up with Hughes, or perhaps a static role in AM strata such as an Enganche or simple Attacking Midfielder support depending how I finally set up the team. Adam Neale, brother of FB Reece Neale, will be my back up advanced forward. Once again, Arthurs aside I am concerned about a real lack of strength and jumping reach in the front line.
The Tactic
It is time to look at a formation and style of play for Bangor. Usually I start with one of the presets and adjust from there but this year I am going alone. In real life there wouldn’t be a handy preset to get a new manager started.
After reviewing the squad we learned / decided the following;
We have only 3 CBs at the club so this probably rules out playing any variation of a back 3.
Our CBs aren’t quick or that great positionally so a high line is out of the question.
Seanna Foster will start as a Wing Back on attack.
We only have three CMs who are actually very weak so we probably can’t play with any variation of a midfield 3 either. Given the state of the CMs should we bypass midfield altogether?
Scott McArthur will start as a Winger on the left.
Jordan Hughes will start up front as an Advanced Forward alongside either Ben Arthurs as a Target Forward or Michael Halliday as a Deep Lying Forward.
Our best Forwards can’t jump
With the seven points above in mind, the most obvious starting formation for me is a flat 4-4-2.
First iteration of my 442
Roles
We’ve already discussed the player roles in the squad review so none of them should be a surprise. The one role I didn’t mention was the use of a Wide Midfielder on the right. As discussed, Foster is one of the best players at the club and I am using him as wing back on attack on the right side. I want Foster to be our main attacking outlet on the right, and to give him the required space I have opted to use a wide midfielder ahead of him who I have also instructed to sit narrower. I feel there are two advantages to this, first it gives the flank to Foster, and second, it will hopefully help bolster our central midfield where I think we are particularly weak physically and technically. The only other player instruction I am using is on Reece Neale at Left Back, who we noticed, in the squad preview, was poor technically so I have told him to take fewer risks with his passing. I want him to just give the ball to McArthur who I will rely on to break the defensive lines through his dribbling and crossing ability.
Team Instructions
If you remember the season preview from episode one Bangor are joint favourites with Moyola Park to win the Championship 2 this season. This influenced my decision to start games on a positive mentality, although I am open to drop this back to balanced if I need to get better control of the game. In possession I considered increasing the passing directness to slightly more direct but in the pre season friendlies I felt we were going long too often and without any physical presence upfront we rarely managed to build any meaningful attacks this way. I also considered focusing our play to the flanks but again I didn’t feel the need to “force” this to happen. I hoped it would happen naturally anyway, but if not I would turn it on. In the end the only in possession instruction I went for was low crosses as neither Halliday or Hughes were good in the air but both had relatively good off the ball movement.
In transition I haven’t gone for the ever popular counter press as I just don’t feel we have the physicality across the side to adequatley pull this off. It would also upset the defensive structure of the 4-4-2 and leave us open to counter attacks. Given we are going to start most games as favourites we may be playing into our oppositions hands by offering easy counter attacking opportunities. Counter is definitely an option and I have had it on sometimes but it is not something I want to start with in games, if we find ourselves pushed back or ahead early in a game I will certainly tell my players to counter more often but otherwise we will be sensible upon winning the ball. Once again I have only ticked distribute to Full Backs for our Goalkeepers. The reason for this is I really hate just spaffing the ball forward aimlessly especially to small forwards. I feel our attacks are best built through our full backs, If Neale gets it he won’t take risks and we should be able to get the ball to the talented McArthur fairly easily. If the Goalkeeper opts to use Foster, he is very attack minded and has the quality to carry us up the pitch with the help of the wide midfielder on that side.
Out of possession we have already decided we don’t want to play with a high line and this effects our line of engagement as I want the team to remain fairly compact so a mid block is perfectly fine although I do want us to press “More Often” once the opposition reach our block. A new instruction this year is the ability to ask your defensive line to step up or drop back. Initially I left this on default but after a few games I noticed we were conceding a lot of chances to balls over the top. This “issue” was later addressed by SI in a recent update but prior to that I decided to ask my defenders to “drop back” once the press was beaten. I found this largely solved the issue and didn’t impact on the rest of our tactic too much, even before the patch, so I have left it as is since. I certainly think it has helped hide the limitations of my centre backs pretty well. If you are interested in what exactly this new instruction means I recommend checking out the Cult of FM Athletico Madrid save on Youtube where Jack explains it very well. Jack’s stuff is very informative and there are no histrionics that we see from other, more popular, visual content creators, he also works for SI so knows what he is talking about. I’ve enjoyed discovering his channel this year.
Variations
442 Variation
I also set up a variation of the base tactic which I intended to use in games when I believed we were the underdogs or during games when I wanted to hit the opposition on the counter attack. The first big change is the introduction of Ben Arthurs as a Target Forward instead of Deep Lying Forward, Michael Halliday. Consequently I removed the low crosses and now told the team to hit early crosses, if this didn’t produce enough balls in behind I would turn on pass into space. We now also counter upon winning possession, everything else remains the same apart from mentality which I have dropped back to Balanced in this variation.
Results
So how have we done? Well things have been going really well, but to be honest I’m unsure how much is down to me and how much is down to the fact we are one of the favourites for the league anyway.
Imagine losing to a bunch of students
Those of you still paying attention will have noticed that the vast majority of our goals have come from Jordan Hughes. He has been absolutely fantastic for us, his relative pace in behind defences has caused problems for our opposition in almost every game. A large number of his goals have come from balls over the top of the opposition defence so it may be the case that his effectiveness will be reduced post patch but I haven’t seen any evidence of that so far. My other concern is the fact he is responsible for around 68% of our goals in the league and he could be snapped up by any other club at any time as he only holds an amateur contract with us. Behold his four goals below against Banbridge that included a perfect hat-trick (HEART EMOJI).
At the halfway point of the season Hughes has 32 Goals from 22 starts in all competitions (there are a load of them) outscoring his XG by 12 clear goals which is a fantastic return. Checking out the @FMStag benchmark stats we can see that his chance conversion of 29% is Elite level along with his shots on target per 90. Put these metrics together and you can see why his goal return is so high. My only concern is whether my tactic is capable of producing goals from elsewhere in the side should Hughes move on or get injured, I’m not so sure it does, but for now I will enjoy it while it lasts.
That’s all for now, in the next episode we will see how the season finished and discuss any transfers I manage to make during the January window. It certainly would be nice to get promotion in my first season as a manager!
In the meantime you can catch me on Twitter
Over and Out