It’s me, Bluchampblogger again! One more painfully long post! This time I’m gonna talk about how to play possession football in FIFA 09. Playing possession football may not guarantee you goals or success but certainly it will make you confident on the ball and confident about the game. And I assume that you have tweaked the custom tactics for realistic gameplay already!

Before I proceed, here comes my standard disclaimer. I’m not a great FIFA player and I don’t claim to be so. I don’t play ranked matches at all. I don’t even know how many skill points I have. I’m a football enthusiast. I love football and football gaming. I’m just writing what I think would be useful for some if not many. So if you’re beyond all these, I’m gonna bore you, so buzz off. Okay so if you’re still reading this, you might be either curious or you genuinely need help. Let’s resume. This post is for the players who are struggling with the game, struggling to keep the ball, tired of losing the ball or simply out of form. Before you start playing champagne football, you should be able to keep the ball. Try playing possession football for a few days and then slowly open up for stylish stuff. And yes, I play offline games mostly. All my experiments are with the offline games! But by general logic these could apply for the online games as well.

Set the tactics to your best advantage. In build up play, set passing to 30 (short passes) and set speed to 40 (slow build up). In chance creation, set passing to 20 (very safe passes), crossing to 10 (no crosses) and shooting to 60. I’m assuming that your crossing sucks just like mine. Let’s get some wins under our belt before we experiment with crossing. In defence set pressure to 20, aggression to 70 and team width to 30 and defender line to cover. For this set of tactics, you need to build up slowly. Pass and move, pass and move. Don’t be in a hurry, wait for your colleagues to move up the pitch. For you to use this tactic effectively, your players should be moving when you have the ball. For that, go to edit formation and edit the player movement arrows for the players. You might want the wingers to move ahead when you have the ball. You might want to move your attacking midfielder but you might want your holding midfielder to stay put. Also edit the work rate of the players. The defensive players to have high defensive work rate and low attacking work rate and so on. If you don’t do these tweaks, the rest may not be effective.

The formation, the player selection, the player movement arrows, the player work rate settings, the surface of the pitch etc will all decide how well you’re able to play. One basic advice is: Don’t sprint forever. Use the sprint button only when needed. Instead of chasing a player in full sprint select another player and defend. Don’t run at full speed when there is no need. With more speed you have less control. Also, the more your sprint, the fatigue sets in and by 60th minute, your players will refuse to run and only jog. If you stop your constant sprinting you’ll see how beautiful this game is.

Choose a challenging opponent who has similar attack, midfield, defence, speed attributes as your team. Having chosen the opponent, choose a contrasting jersey for him. This looks like a dumb suggestion but you won’t know what kind of impact it can make. If you’re playing in white kits and your opponent is playing in black kits, you don’t even need to see where your players are. It would be subconsciuosly recorded in your mind because of the contrasting colours. If you’re dark grey and he is light grey, it requires your conscious efforts to locate your players. This is not difficult but you’re losing some valuable micro seconds in the process, without even knowing that.

Don’t get worked up with the semi/assisted/manual thing. Just have everything on assisted. You just want play the game and enjoy, right? When you play on assisted, your football thinking is what is rewarded and not your dexterity. When you’re confident about your accuracy levels because you’ve set them on assisted, you start thinking about other constructive things like how to build up the play, how to hold the lead etc. In terms of which camera to choose, I strongly suggest wide camera angle with maximum or a bit less than maximum and fully zoomed out. This way you’d be able to see a good part of the pitch. This helps a lot in passing accuracy and in attacking moves. Close camera angles help defence but can be disastrous for attacks. A nice useful radar would have solved the problem but FIFA’s radar is still not of PES quality. In terms of stadiums, try playing in those stadiums where you’d love to play. I play most of my matches in Camp Nou dusk or San Siro dusk. It’s very important because you don’t want any distraction for whatever reason. Let all settings be to your heart’s content.

And more importantly, play 10 minutes a half. A 20-minute match gives you enough time to try out everything you can. If you’re particular about playing possession football, you should have enough time as each attack would consume a lot of time for you. Don’t play 5-minute or 6-minute halves. Play 10-minute halves and you’ll understand the impact it makes on your game.

Why do we lose possession? That’s what I’m gonna talk about, today. As we all know, the opponent won’t score if he doesn’t have the ball (’Gary Neville + Robinson’ comes to mind). So that means we need to have the ball as much as possible. In 08, we complained about all possible things for not being able to keep possession. Now that most of those things have been fixed. The players respond so quickly and if you’re on assist, the passes can be near perfect. So why do we lose the ball then? That could be because of various reasons. (a) late to react (b) trying a risky pass (c) unwilling to go backwards (d) delayed player select (e) poor vision (f) turn (g) lack of understanding of player capabilities.

(a) Late to react: This happens most of the time, especially when you’re new to the game. If you have not come to terms with the pace and responsiveness in the game, you wouldn’t know the exact timing to release the ball. Or you wouldn’t expect the opponent to close you down so soon. What happens here is you have the ball but you’re thinking what to do now because you have multiple options including your own pre-determined ones. Just when you’re about to pass (everytime it’s like that), the opponent steals the ball. How do we prevent this? You can obviously try to hold, shield and trap the ball. Otherwise, draw an imaginary circle around the player with a radius of about a yard. The moment an opponent threatens to break into that circle, pass the ball quickly to the nearest option. Don’t have to see if that would help you in the attack and all. Now you’re just trying to keep the ball. For you to make that quick pass, you should have options available around you. Safe and short passing sliders in custom tactics would help you there. This looks like a simple solution but it can be hard because you need to have that discipline. It’s much more difficult that it sounds. When you play like this you’ll even be worried how to set up your attack. This worry would make you deliver another incorrect pass and that’s it. So just maintain this 1-yard radius discipline and as the players make their movements, there would be spaces to exploit. You’ll be fine. Remember, one-twos are a great way to keep the ball.

(b) trying a risky pass: Because the game is so fluid and possible, we tend to play that hollywood pass every now and then. I’ve tried them many times. Those were the kind of passes, if you pull them off, would be very decisive ones. If you’re keen on keeping possession, there are the types of passes that are most easily avoidable. If you’re not fully confident that the ball would be received by your player, just simply don’t pass. Wait for a better opportunity. So every time, a second before you hit the pass button you should quickly answer this question - ‘am I 100% confident that my player will receive the ball’. Make the pass only if you think the answer is yes. Never pass to a marked player.

(c) unwillingness to go backwards: This is a very common mindset. Once we’ve started an attack, we don’t want to go backwards. Somehow, we’ll try to go forward and forward. That’s a psychological thing. There is nothing wrong in going backwards. Sending the ball backwards is much better than delivering a hurried nonsense pass. How many times we have delivered a useless cross because we were being closed down by the full back? What we should do is to have that maturity to pass it around even from the most delicious positions. Sometimes, certain passes and shots are too hard to resist, but if you do that you’ll feel that you’re completely in control of the game which improves your confidence.

(d) delayed player select: Not every unsuccessful pass is caused by the passer. The receiver might always mess up. So what you do is make the pass and quickly change the selected player and control the receiver and receive the pass carefully. Player select is a very important tool in football games. The one who performs timely and correct player selections, will have that additional amount of time on the ball than his opponent. Some of us ignore the importance of player select and pay less attention to it. I’ve set my player select to manual because I want to time my player selection myself. That might help for you too.

(e) Poor vision: The game is dynamic. The players are constantly moving. That’s why, the space that you saw is now gone by the time you hit the pass button. Every second that you delay your pass, the players keep moving and the existing gaps are being closed and new ones are being created. As you’re gearing to make the pass, look how players are moving and try to extrapolate to see how the field would be in a couple of seconds later. That’s vision. Being able to see what’s not there already. You should be able to guess and anticipate the spaces and gaps as the game moves along. Because the game is dynamic, what should have been a good pass could be a wasted possession and even the otherwise is possible. So, before you pass, ensure that the pass would be a successful one considering that the players are constantly moving.

(f) Turn: In the final third or in midfield, once you receive the ball, your natural next step is to turn the other side with the ball to face the goal. This is instinctive. You get the ball, you turn. You have an option to turn the right side or left side. You’ll have your marker to your right or left. If you receive your ball on your left, it is natural that you’d turn on the left side, so the AI would anticipate and nick the ball as soon as you turn. So what you need to do is, when the ball is travelling to you, see which side the marker is and turn on the other side. If you find this too difficult to do, there is a simple solution. When you receive the ball, don’t turn immediately. Just hold for a second or even go towards the direction from where the ball came, instead of turning. This whold e turn thing might look little and silly but in the game, it makes a big difference on how you handle it.

(g) lack of understanding of player capabilities: Sometimes how much ever you try to make an accurate short or long pass, you can still go wrong because the player you control may have poor passing abilities. You need to find out who’s the best passer in your team and use him for the special passes.

If you practice the above thoroughly, you might end up with 60% or more possession with a goal dry game. You may or may not score. And your opponent may score with just one corner. Don’t lose hope. Keep playing this way. What this will do is to make you very familiar with the player movements and reactions, their capabilities, ball physics, AI behaviour and a general feel of the game. Over a period of time, you’re going to be very confident on the ball. You would no longer be worried about the defenders that pressurise you, in fact you would welcome them because defenders applying pressure means lots of space to exploit!

The above is just to get you back in form. You don’t have to follow these always. Once you start winning and once you become confident of your capabilities, you can play the way you want..