"Fighting Fatigue, Training Tactics and Familiarity"- Rio de la Plata #FM20

Previously on Rio de la Plata, Ángel Bastardo begun to assemble his Caporegime.

Intro

Football Manager 2020’s release day was a weird one. I didn’t expect to undertake so many house chores on my precious single day of annual leave without the wife and kids. This day is annually dedicated to Football Manager and only Football Manager. Yet I dusted [and then vacuumed] the house, ran the washing machine twice, made a fresh Arrabbiata dish [with crouton starter] and moisturised my face.

Of course, I gave it the bravado when Football Manager’s unpatched release arrived, adamant that I would be able to get past the vast majority of players having 1 for Determination. But alas, I grew hesitant of starting my new save on such a downbeat opening few hours. After all, I usually play my saves well into the life cycle of FM…so waiting a few more hours was painful but probably the right thing to do, right?

Luckily the patch did arrive (20 minutes before picking up my children from school), and I’ve soon enough ploughed 50 hours into Football Manager 2020. The save is back on, and I am loving it even more than I thought I would….for reasons that will probably become clear if you read on further.

Today I document the events of my pre-season, from kick-starting my Caporegime to the fitness and tactical setup of Bastardo’s Peñarol. Let’s begin…

Pre-Season

#YoPierreSnr

As previously mentioned last time out, I am starting FM20 with the first transfer window disabled. I figured that by starting in December 2018, I’d rather keep real-life squads together until at least mid-2019. So, this is pretty unusual for me as I often like to bring in a couple of my own guys to complement my starting tactic. My initial priority therefore is finding a Director of Football, who will be the guy responsible at Peñarol for transfers and contracts.

I was actually struggling to find a suitable DoF, until I realised that the African Scout I was recommending to AccordingtoFM would actually be a suitable appointment for my save too as a DoF. Pierre Aubame has a great judge of player ability and is also a fairly shrewd negotiator. It also fits in with the narrative too, having played in Colombia briefly in the mid-90s for Junior. Bastardo did not need any more convincing, Aubameyang Senior was the guy to work with at Peñarol.

Project Vincent

Having worked with Vincent van Raam on the FM20 South American guides, I really wanted to sign him as a Scout in my Football Manager 2020 save. However, I only wished to load South American players and did not want to specifically load Netherlands data just for him (sorry Vincent). So I opted to edit Vincent into the Peñarol setup before save creation. I gave him the cheapest wage in the club, a deal reflecting his relatively poor scouting attributes. But…the plan is to send Vincent around South America and generally increase his knowledge to reflect, what I feel, is a more accurate representation of his real-life South American scouting knowledge. I am dubbing it 'Project Vincent', please get behind it.

The early bit of FM20 deliberation was obviously the squad numbers and my fascination of the Uruguayan system. I like to reflect the numbering culture of the nation I am managing in, so I intend to keep these graphics going each season in order to chart the evolution of my squad. You’ll note a traditional South American ‘5’ at DM but also the unique Uruguayan Centre Back pairings of ‘3’ & ‘2’ with the ‘4’ pushed out wide, lovely stuff. Vamos!

Fighting Fatigue, Training Tactics and Familiarity

Fighting Fatigue

Jadedness is something you see quite often in Football Manager, especially if you have a squad playing a long run of games without pause; typical of a South American calendar. Uruguay is no different, at times there is no time to train mid-season and fighting fatigue will be a continual battle…it's a constant cycle of winding down from the last game and preparing for the next (and travelling in between). So, the vast majority of my fitness work needs to be done in the first few weeks of pre-season. Having taken control of all aspects of training throughout the three teams at Peñarol (read more here), I was able to put in an intense heavy schedule: lots of endurance, resistance & quickness conditioning.

A standard league and continental schedule.

Who fancies a game every two days? We do!

Now for an analogy: Imagine your players' fitness like a pint of beer. A full pint is a professional player with an extremely conditioned level of fitness at the start of the season, this athlete has had an intense fitness schedule. Now imagine a footballer who has had a weaker pre-season, it could be an injury that disrupted plans or simply a shorter fitness regime. This player isn't quite a full pint and even has a frothy head. Over time both players’ conditions will decline due to match days. The decline is given respite with Recovery sessions and Rest, but during a congested fixture list there will ultimately be a fitness deficit. Now imagine the 1/2 pint line on the glass as where players' fitness becomes jaded…the player who was our full pint will take longer to descend to that level, as opposed to the other player who will likely now be on or below it and become jaded.

Jadedness won't be my problem. Sure, I'll get the odd guy that may get it…but on the whole an intense month of fitness will see my guys cope well in the long-term. For Football Manager 2020, I took the base Pre-Season - Heavy schedule and tweaked it slightly for some tactical stuff bit, which we’ll come on to next:

Tactics

Those that followed my FM18 save with Estudiantes may remember the traditional flat 4141, which brought back-to-back Copa Libertadores titles to La Plata. The direct counter attacking style was really enjoyable to see play out in the match engine and I had a great sense of achievement from getting the best out of a relatively modest set of players.

I had initial plans to play the same way with Peñarol in FM20, but after a long reflection I've decided to make FM20 Bastardo-Ball more positive in a 4141 for the reasons below:

(1) Peñarol: the perennial winners of Uruguay

Peñarol are the biggest club in Uruguay. For the vast majority of domestic games I will face an opposition looking to dig in and grind out a result with a relatively low block. It will therefore be down to my side to take the initiative and hope our quality sees us through.

(2) Technical superiority

I don't necessarily think that playing short passing is technically superior over a glorious direct style, perhaps the fanfare of tiki-taka clouded people's perceptions on this. But playing a shorter game over a high tempo requires a degree of technical competency…and I think it's a skillset we boast over our rivals. We have a number of attacking players with high attributes scores in First Touch, Dribbling, Passing & Technique. So we ought to be willing to do more in possession than Bastardo’s Estudiantes.

(3) Tricky Wingers

Pushing the wingers further forward to the AML/AMR slots means I now cover all positional stratas on the football pitch. This is good for youth development because I will be channelling players into the additional roles of Inside Forward/Wingers, meaning that more naturally attacking youth have a chance of entering the Peñarol setup…instead of having to re-train to a deeper role at such an early age.

Despite this, there are elements of the FM18 Bastardo-Ball that I wish to retain. I still like the urgency that the counter/counter-press philosophy, and it sits well with my fibra recruitment ideas i.e. those that have high Aggression, Bravery, Determination, Teamwork & Work-Rate will press more effectively. So, gleaming bits of what I liked from FM18 and bits I feel we excel at, we require something like the tactical pre-set of a Fluid Counter Attack:

I have used a 4141, I simply can’t get away from the luxury that my No.5 Deep Lying Playmaker gives (in this case the wonderful bastard of Walter Gargano). He’ll hold and dictate the play from deep, providing license for the central two players to advance. Further on we have an Inverted Winger on attack, who originally was an Inside Forward but I couldn’t get the dynamism and output I wanted from the role, and on the right we have a traditional Winger on attack. There’s variety in the match highlights by having different roles around the team and it’s made viewing games really pleasing on the eye.

You will see that in possession we are Fairly Narrow, this facilitates our passing game and brings the team forward together. It’s probably worth pointing out how effective the full back positions are in this formation, notably the Complete Wing Back who offers the width to go outside of the Inverted Winger and who contributes so much to our attack. I’ve purposely chosen my left-hand side to be the more attacking due to the year-long loan of Gabriel Rojas, a 21 year-old Argentine fullback with strong Work Rate of 16 and more than adequate physicals to run up and down the length of the pitch.

In possession, our technical superiority is displayed in our instruction to Run At Defence. When possession is lost we will counter press immediately and I’m hoping our strong mentals will suit this part of our game. For longer periods without the ball, we will look to engage around the half way line and the full coverage of our formation (i.e. playing wide players at AML/AMR) suits this approach. Obviously, ‘Get Stuck In’ is a priority for any team of Bastardo.

The big change is switching the default mentality from Cautious to Positive. This doesn’t mean my players will suddenly play gung-ho, rather they will take more risks and play on a Higher Tempo (instead of Slightly Higher), will never waste time and will slightly raise our lines of defence & engagement for the press. As in-game scenarios play out, I am known to tweak back to a more cautious mentality if needed OR raise both the Defensive Line or Line of Engagement manually when feeling like I should overwhelm the opposition. But I generally don’t dilute this tactical style too much or make frequent changes.

Tactical Familiarity

Circling back to training for a moment, I should mention the efforts I made to ensure our tactic was familiar to the players in preparation for the prestigious Uruguayan Super Cup final Vs Nacional. This game arrives in pre-season so I really wanted to be ready for it, given that a trophy was on the line. I naturally trained the tactical style ‘Fluid Counter Attack’ and added extra sessions in which improved the elements of the tactical familiarity I was lacking in week-by-week. Here is what we looked like on Day 1 of the save:

40 days later, we had managed to increase it by a great deal via training and friendlies…

Tactical Familiarity on Opening Day of the Uruguayan season.

By training the things we were lacking in and keeping with the same tactic (therefore not training any secondary tactic), we were able to become fluid in all tactical aspects come the 1st Copa Libertadores Group Stage…our 6th game of the season:

Tactical Familiarity on the Opening Day of the Copa Libertadores campaign.

So, we’ve applied a heavy intense pre-season, we chose a tactical style that suits my players and we trained it very hard. How did it do? Read on to find out…

Season 2019

Domestic

It took 34 days for Ángel Bastardo to win silverware, the Super Cup success being the good reward for the heavy pre-season we trained. After this, we started the Primera División well with thirteen straight league wins. I knew we would be strong domestically, but I never envisaged that it would be this strong - a lovely run of seven straight clean-sheets culminated us winning the Opening Stage by mid-April.

Nacional will be the rivals in this save, and they proved hard opponents in my penultimate match. The loss hurt, but if you would have offered me an easy Opening Stage and the Super Cup trophy for the sake of this one loss…I’d have accepted it. Perhaps we can go one better for the Closing Stage and keep a 100% win record? Next up is the Intermedio tournament, where sixteen teams split into two groups of eight. The group winners play each other in a one-legged final to determine the mid-season Champion. Further reading on the inner workings of this is found in my South American league guide.

Continental

The real challenge to this save is on the continental scene, but the remarkable 4141 saw Peñarol win the first three games and take command of the group:

The Board wanted to be competitive and Bastardo’s continental success has seen them very pleased, which is a contributor to a B score in terms of Manager Performance. Only time will tell how far we can go in the 2019 Copa Libertadores, but I certainly feel a level of optimism given the fact we did so well against San Lorenzo of Argentina.

Bastardo 2020

I appreciate that I’ve rambled on quite a bit already, and there is still so much I have yet to say: about the Uruguay Under 20s, the Youth Development I’ve been doing or the Scouting targets I have for the second half of 2019. These will have to wait for a future post to avoid this one becoming unwieldy.

I have simply loved every second of this save so far, and I can’t wait to launch myself into the Intermedio, the Copa Libertadores Knockouts, the Uruguayan Closing Stage and the Transfer Market. The Board have quite rightly offered me a new deal, so Bastardo’s Peñarol will continue into 2020 for sure…I hope you can follow along with me :-)

Thanks for reading/sharing/caring,

FM Grasshopper