"The Jamie Vardy Problem"
"Why don't these things happen more often on Football Manager?" "There should be some kind of dynamic potential ability!" It's been a common discussion point since Jamie Vardy's rise through the English leagues to firing Leicester to their surprise Premier League title. Few saw Andy Robertson's meteoric rise from amateur at Queen's Park to Champions League winner with Liverpool coming, certainly not Rangers while playing against him in Scotland's fourth tier.
I'm not here to offer answers to those points, you can search on Google and the SI forums for the debates on them, I'm here to show you Thomas Amang.
How many of you would look at Amang and pass on him because he's barely got any technical ability or his composure and decisions is too low for a decent striker at LaLiga level or equivalent?
This is the beauty of focusing on a set of specific attributes you're looking for in each of your players. I saw Amang as my perfect Pressing Forward, harassing opposition defences with his 14, 16 and 17 for my La Furia attributes of Aggression, Determination and Work Rate. He's also a physical specimen with 16 strength at just 5'9" tall. What a guy.
Who could have predicted when I plucked him from Gimnastic in the third tier of Spanish football for £475k that he'd fire in 16 goals across his 38 appearances this season? He was our top league scorer with 12 but he finished just behind Sergi Enrich overall who once again top scored, this time hitting 18 in total. Only 11 of those came in the league though, six fewer than last season.
The difference in the second half of the season, where Amang amassed 13 of his 16 goals, was that I moved him away from his Pressing Forward role over to the Advanced Forward role, and did away with the PF completely, swapping it out for a Deep Lying Forward. I wanted to see more linking between the midfield and attack, but keeping it on an Attack duty sees him carving out opportunities for himself along with creating them for others. Similarly to the tweaks I made previously, I had Amang and Enrich swapping positions and roles during the matches too, again creating uncertainly for opposition defences.
Amang's speed and power makes him a frightening prospect, if he could improve his finishing ability (which I'm working on) he'd take himself to that next level up. Where Enrich got 55% of his shots on target this season, only 49% of Amang's did. We saw the best and worst of him in our 3-1 win against Zaragoza where he had a whopping 11 shots.
Here he is as our DLF using his physical attributes to good effect pouncing on a good ball in behind the defence from Alvaro Tejero. Just 10 for composure and 10 for finishing and he slots it past Zaragoza's goalkeeper, not bad. I love that extra touch to the left he takes. Then he missed all of these.
There's a lot of chat at the moment around strikers, one-on-ones and clear cut chances. Amang scored one in this match, he could've had another couple at least judging by a few of these above. I do think there's a lot of improvement to be made on this at the moment, it's surely got to be toning down the number of one-on-ones or clear cut chances because I don't see them making a tweak that'll have strikers scoring hattricks every match. I'm convinced SI are on it. I'm hoping so after this miss...
