The Backpage | TACTICAL DEFENDING HELP

Football journalist and FIFA fan Darren Cross offers solutions for those struggling with FIFA 12’s Tactical Defending…

Welcome to the Backpage and thanks for stopping by.

It’s been a really interesting couple of weeks to be a FIFA fan because, after months of reading about FIFA 12’s new features, players have finally been able to get their teeth into the game thanks to the recent release of the demo.

It’s definitely been causing a stir among our massive community of FIFA players, and one feature in particular has been dominating the feedback from what I’ve seen so far… Tactical Defending.

On one side we seem to have a huge amount of fans saying that they love the new feature, thankful that they’re no longer being automatically hunted down and tackled by an opposition player who’s doing nothing more than holding one button, sitting back and waiting.

On the other hand there are players who are finding Tactical Defending pretty difficult to get to grips with, mostly because this pressing function has apparently gone. It hasn’t, you can still press – it’s just different and a little harder to master, but some are either finding it tough to see how or they simply don’t know they still can.

With that in mind, this week’s Backpage takes a much closer look at Tactical Defending with the aim of showing why it really is much more representative of real-world football and – most importantly – how you can find a solution to defending in FIFA 12 that suits you.

First off, the why…

In a real game of football at any level above amateur – and EA have hundreds of staff watching everything from the Blue Square Premier to the Mexican Primera – players do not abandon their positions and go charging all over the pitch in search of the ball from the first minute. If they did, two things would happen; they’d get ridiculously knackered ridiculously quickly, and team shape would be destroyed to such an extent that the opposition could repeatedly move from box to box in just three or four passes.

It doesn’t happen. And those of you who are thinking now about the way Barcelona press the opposition, I guarantee you that is nothing like the kind of pressing that goes on in games of FIFA 11. Yes Barça are masters at pressing, but it’s controlled. A Barça player will press the ball possessor if he enters his zone of the pitch, but as soon as he leaves he passes him on to a team-mate and so retains the overall shape of the formation.

In FIFA 11 pressing wasn’t really controlled, especially if a player was using secondary press, and formations would be all over the place at times because the player closest to the ball would follow it to the other side of the pitch if the button was held for long enough.

But there was a bigger problem with pressing… because it’s such an effective way to win the ball back, with almost no thought required by the defending team, it could at times make the game feel slightly unbalanced as attacks were broken down with little effort.

EA SPORTS and FIFA players wanted a solution, and in FIFA 12 that is Tactical Defending.

Instead of a single button being a kind of auto-press and auto-tackle, you now have one button that you use to contain the ball possessor, a stick to control the distance between the two of you, and another button to initiate a tackle.

I think of the contain button as being an auto-jockey function. If you’re a little unsure of where your defender should be when facing an attacker, the contain – or auto-jockey – does a really good job of taking up a sensible position and inviting you to do the rest.

The tutorial on the demo does a decent job of, erm, demonstrating what containing is. It’s all about facing the player in possession while goal-side of them, then using your positioning to either direct them away from a certain area you want to protect, send them into spaces where you have more team-mates who could win the ball, or manipulate them into a position where you can win the ball back yourself.

That is how real footballers defend, and it’s the first thing a coach tells a player when teaching the principles of defending.

The difficult part for some FIFA players, judging by some of the feedback from those struggling, is the winning the ball back bit. The first issue they have is that they’re occasionally left tackling thin air when they use the standing tackle function, and the second is that they often don’t feel close enough to the ball because of an ‘invisible wall’ between them and the player with the ball.

If you feel a bit like this, then read on because there are reasons and solutions.

Let’s start with the standing tackle. I’ve seen some comments on message boards saying things like ‘I pressed tackle and my player tried a standing tackle in completely the wrong place’. Of course, the reason for this is because they’re pressing the standing tackle button while either too far away from the player with the ball, or in the wrong position to be trying to tackle – basically they’re pressing standing tackle at the wrong time.

I think initially some players do this because they’re used to how simple tackling is in FIFA 11 – you do just have to press one button and let the AI do the work – so they’re getting as close to an opposition player as they can, pressing tackle and hoping for the best.

That’s a one-way ticket to defeatsville.

In FIFA 12 you really have to think about defending and work chuffing hard at times to get the ball back from the other team. It is tough work but FIFA 12 is a football simulation, with simulation being the key word. Real teams and real players have to work hard at defending, and so now must FIFA 12 players.

You’ve got to get goal-side of the opposing player, close the distance quickly then keep working and closing until you get a clear chance to go for the ball. The clear chance thing is really important here – you only risk going for a standing or sliding tackle when you either know the odds of getting the ball are in your favour, or because you’ve been more or less beaten by the player and it’s a last resort to stop them scoring. If you run around pressing tackle buttons without any thought to positioning or timing, you’re more than likely to tackle thin air then instinctively blame the feature rather than a mistake in defending.

The big pay off for all this hard work is that, when you do get the ball back, you really feel like you’ve earned it.

Of course, it’s your game and you should play it the way you want to, so in some game modes you have the option to switch to Legacy, which is the FIFA 11 style of defending – but this won’t be available in Head To Heads Seasons.

Now on to the issue of pressing and the feeling of not being able to get close enough quick enough because of an invisible wall.

In the main I think this is happening for similar reasons as the tackling thin air thing – because players are expecting to hold one button and have defending taken care of. Where FIFA 11 would have your player track down the ball possessor and eventually force them off the ball, FIFA 12 stops you at a slight distance away from them and asks you what you want to do next.

For some this feeling of not being close enough is what is perhaps spoiling their FIFA 12 experience a bit at the moment, and I know others are worried about having longs periods of play online where they won’t be able to get the ball back from a player who’s protecting a 1-0 lead, but there’s an easy solution to this… manual jockey.

I mentioned earlier that the contain button acts as a kind of auto-jockey function. It’s almost a guide to jockeying – something that shows players where to be and when, so that they eventually move on to doing it all themselves.

You jockey – face the player with the ball so you can react to their movements quicker – by holding LT on 360 or L2 on PS3, and you control your movement by using the left stick. If you’re manually jockeying and closing in on an opposition defender then there is no invisible wall, you control how close you get to the player and how quickly. Combine the jockey button with the sprint button and your player will obviously move even quicker, so you’ll be able to press the ball faster, but use this wisely – sprinting while jockeying means slower reactions times. Sprint for a split second too long and you won’t be able to recover if the player in possession beats you.

For extra pressure on the opposition, try using the High Pressure and Team Pressing options on the D-pad. High Pressure is a style of play and, once selected, stays on until you choose to do something else. Team Pressing is more contextual and will encourage your team-mates to get closer to the ball over a shorter period of time when the other team is in possession.

By doing these things you ARE able to press. It’s still there; it just takes a little bit more work to do it properly.

Another huge plus for manual jockeying – and not a lot of people seem to have realised this yet – is that your player will tackle automatically if the ball possessor comes close enough.

This means there is no need to commit yourself with a standing tackle unless you’re almost certain of winning the ball, and so this feeling of tackling thin air can be completely avoided. Effectively, all you need to do is close down the space and hold the ground you want to protect, which then challenges the attacker to try to beat you. Again, this is what a defender does in real life.

I hope this helps players get to grips with Tactical Defending a little quicker. I’ve been playing the game for a few months now and – after an initial period of wondering why I couldn’t stop attacks – I can now genuinely say that I really do prefer the new system.

Hopefully you will too.

Thanks for reading this week’s War and Peace-sized blog, and please come back next week for more FIFA talk.

Have a good week,
Darren
twitter: @Darren_Cross