Our ultimate man-management guide Communication & Psychological Warfare ’10 is being released on March 16th, 2010. To celebrate we will be broadcasting a LIVE WEBCAST for 10 hours on the same day!

We want to give a massive thank you to our readers - the members of the Tactical Think Tank and the administrators at FM-Britain will be on-line to answer your questions, talk about Football Manager and generally, just chat and hang out with our loyal fans. So, if you’ve got a burning question or even just need to vent your frustrations about the game, then drop by for a few minutes to say hello!

We’ll be broadcasting live from 12pm GMT through 10pm GMT - so pop along to our UStream channel and bookmark our page.

In order to type in the chat room and interact with your fellow Football Manager fanatics, you will have to register on UStream (don’t worry, it’s absolutely free!) - but if you would rather just view as a “guest”, there is no need to register to watch the show at all.

Some of you may remember our previous webcast from last month. We surely had a blast! Unfortunately, although we were able to record one side of the conversation, the server did not record the answers to the questions. So, rather than upload a video of Jordan asking questions and then sitting in silence, we have written up some of the topics that were discussed.

What did you miss on the last webcast?

How can you get DMs to close gaps in your defence made by attacking fullbacks?

This can be a tricky one, because it can be difficult to get players to cover when others go ahead to attack. The important thing is to make sure that you instruct your players (through opposition instructions) to close down and mark the opposition’s wide players. You can also try to play with a bit more width to push your players out more and therefore keep the DMs slightly closer to the touchline.

Bear in mind, though, that one of the risks in making your fullbacks attack is that you will leave gaps down the sides. Perhaps having an asymmetric strategy where one fullback attacks and the other is more cautious will allow you to minimise the potential damage.

What is the best way to counter a narrow formation?

The ME does indeed seem to struggle with combating “narrow” formations, or formations without players in the ML/R or AML/R positions.

The reason for this is that it is a little too easy right now to starve the opposition of time on the ball, and therefore possession, by flooding the centre of the field with men. Therefore, there are logically two options. Either you fight fire with fire and flood the centre of the field yourself, or you decide to play around the opposition by going wide and passing over or around the flooded midfield.

Both have their inherent weaknesses and positives. By playing very narrow and/or removing your wingers you can starve the opposition of space, but if you are not physically strong enough you could end up being smashed out of the game. However, if you are a weaker side than your opponents this seems like a logical approach seeing as it requires less technical skill to pull off.

By playing wider you introduce more space, but on a narrow pitch or without pace and technical skills it may be very difficult to hold onto the ball and bypass the opposition. In these cases, perhaps ditching the football and playing long balls to tall strikers my by-pass the packed midfield and give the team the edge by taking the midfielders out of the game.

What are effective shouts (like “take more risks”) when down by a goal?

Which shouts you use will always depend on what you’re trying to do, who you’re playing and the strengths of your own squad. But with regard to the “take more risks” or “get ball forward” shouts; these shouts are useful for trying to get the ball into the penalty area. However, they also run the risk of simply gifting possession to the opposition by lumping it to the opponents’ feet.

For more information on the shouts, you might want to check out this extract from Tactical Theorems ’10.

What important things should you be looking for using the match analysis tool?

I think the most interesting use of the analysis tool is watching player movement. The spread of dots for “passes” show, roughly, where a player moves to during a game. This gives you a lot of information about shape. If, for example, you see your holding midfielder often bombing into the opposition’s penalty area then you may have issues and will need to look at how that player acts within your set up. Similarly, you can easily tell if your full backs are getting far enough forward or what sort of movements your strikers are making to try to pick up the ball.

Beyond that, there is useful feedback to be found from where your shots are being taken from, where you tend to make most tackles or interceptions, and where you make most fouls. I think this is one element of the game which needs to be given more attention over the coming months to fully grasp the significance of how much we can learn from it.

Again, this section of Tactical Theorems 10 may help you get the basics of the system.

Do you think you can successfully recreate classic real-life tactics from yesteryear or is the match engine too advanced?

If you cannot re-create old tactics, I think that’s more an indication of the match engine not being advanced enough! But I take the general point; can old tactics work in modern football?

I think that the ME will have achieved the right level when tactics succeed and fail for the same reasons they succeed and fail in real life. Let’s take the WM, for instance. We would expect this to fail in modern football for a number of reasons. First, the midfield would get over-run. Second, one centre back can easily be swamped by two-striker formations, or any deep runs from the midfield. And third, it was designed to use the old offside law (where being level with the second-last defender was an offside position), so we would expect lots of runs down the channels between the DR/L and the DC.

I think most tactics can be recreated. The ones that the ME currently struggles with are those that rely on in-match player switching and covering, such as Totaalvoetball or Lobanovskyi’s “system”. I hope the ME can incorporate this sort of football, because in order for teams like Arsenal and Barcelona to really look like the real deal we need the game to be able to cover and swap in a more realistic fashion.

But overall, I think old tactics aren’t used nowadays because of their inherent flaws when playing modern systems. That’s a cultural issue, not the match engine.

How do I get an attacking winger to cut inside more often than just with the “inside forward” role?

There are a couple of options. First, there is the option in the advanced instructions to control the runs. Making him cut in or run into the channels will help. Second, you could play a right-footed player on the left-hand side. That will naturally make the player cut in to use their stronger foot. You can also train the relevant PPMs.

Quite a few people have commented that these players don’t cut inside enough. This may be an ME issue to a certain extent - but I think there are still a number of steps you can take to recreate it.

What defensive changes should you make when a man down and wanting to counter-attacking your opponent’s pressure?

The classic option is to move to 4-4-1 and hope to hit the opponent on the counter. In most cases, you will have to accept that the opponent will get more of the ball, and look to use your lone forward and possibly one of the midifelders (a quick winger, or a central midfielder, perhaps) to launch very quick counter attacks.

However, José Mourinho recently reacted to going a man down by moving to a 4-3-2 without a holding midfielder, and caught the opposition off guard. Frightened to attack, the team with 11 men were neutered simply because they were unwilling to come forward. That allowed Inter to attack as they normally would with very little penalty, and they went on to win the match.

So, there are a few options for you, but it will depend on who you’re playing and the story of the match.

Join us on Tuesday, March 16th from 12pm - 10pm GMT for the webcast!

Bookmark our UStream page now and we’ll see you then!