The weakest part of FIFA 09 is the defence. The back line pushes up too much. They easily get overpowered and outmuscled. You get a feeling that a definite advantage is given to the attacking side over the defensive side. Everytime the defence pushes up unnecessarily and concedes a goal due to that, you get wild. ‘It’s not my fault’ is what you scream.

Now you want the defence to do what they’re expected to do - defend the goal. You want them to be in the right places at the right times. You don’t want them to leave spaces mindlessly. You want them to make it difficult for the attackers. You don’t want them to concede any cheap goals.

I’ve always said that the best way to improve FIFA 09 is tweaking - custom tactics and player attributes. The solution for a disciplined defence is also in tweaking custom tactics. The good thing about tweaking custom tactics is, it takes hardly 10 seconds, unlike player attribute editing. The other good thing is, you can use it ONLINE as well!!!

Ok, here is what you do.

In custom tactics, under BUILD-UP:

Positioning: Set this to ‘organised’. This positioning affects the movement of your players in your half of the pitch. This will have no impact on the randomness of your chance creation or in the final third. This is just for the own half positioning.

In custom tactics, under DEFENCE:

Pressure: Just bring this slider to the minimum. The least it would go to is a value of 1. What this would do is, the players won’t move up to pressure the opposition. You’ll find that your players allow the opponents to have the ball and you can nip it when it matters most. This does not mean they will stand still in their respective places. They would move forward as with the action zone but they would be more position conscious.

Aggression: This determines the tendency of the defence to commit tackles and fouls. This is more relevant for the teams where the AI controls all the players. As far as your team goes, no player would tackle unless you order them to do so. So, with this setting what happens is that the players get into a position where they only wait for your button press to tackle the opponent. By setting aggression to a low number, say between 30 and 40, your players will stay in their zones.

Team width: Set this to a low number, say, again between 30 and 40. This would mean the defensive back line would stay closer to each other in front of the goal. This is especially effective against opponents who play throughballs to the lone striker. With low team width setting, the lone striker of the opponent will be seriously hindered. The downside is that, there would be some space in the flanks which the opponents can use but still the crosses or cut backs can be managed because you have a crowded defence in the box to handle them.

Plus, always first line of defence must be the midfielders. Use the midfielders to defend and tackle. That would buy some time for the defenders to get back to their areas as per the above settings.

I tried these things today. I got to play a lot of intense, tight matches where really had to find ways to break the defence. This also meant both teams got a lot of time on the ball in the midfield. The midfielders really came into existence, orchestrating the attacks and making the killer passes to outfox the defence. Plus, play in LEGENDARY difficulty. That’s where teams play true to their strengths. The games in legendary are very challenging, random and fun.

Try this and let me know.