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You start a Football Manager season, things are going well for the first couple of months. Your side scores for fun and your goalkeeper looks unbeatable game after game. But then it happens, your players are over confident and a few tough fixtures really bring them back down to the ground with a bump. This now becomes the hardest moment within a season when you have to drag your team out of a bad run of form. Reacting to this as quick as you can could make or break your season so getting out of it is vital.
After shooting up to the top of the table, and playing with confidence and style against all sides I looked unbeatable. My keeper was gaining record amount of clean sheets and my striker topped the goalscoring charts. So therefore in a Danny Baker style moment, I thought “What could go wrong now?”. But when the competition started coming thick and fast and I was faced with tough opposition over a series of 5 or 6 games, I lost games against better opposition, FA Cup ties and reply’s took their toll. The poor results killed morale, results became a struggle we tumbled down the play-off positions and my job looked to likely to come to an end. In a search to kill the rot, I learned a few things and I am here now to share with you from my own experience.
Raise moral
Do you take the Alex Ferguson approach to dealing with the media and totally ignore them? This takes away any control you have on what is said to the media and in affect it feed to your players, this can affect the dressing room dramatically, take them yourself and at least then you will have much more control of your teams views. They may be tiring and they may ask you the same questions, but they can also be a small part of the puzzle. Morale plays a big part in how your teams approaches a game, the confidence they play with and bad morale breeds more bad morale, figure out which players deal with praise and criticism the best and make sure you use that to your advantage. Any player interaction be that to the players themselves or via the media can have a major impact on the dressing room, dealt with well you can lift key players and even a team that can drag you through tough games as confidence can reduce complacency and make your striker more clinical.
But confidence does not come overnight, start slowly, gain those valuable draws, play more cautiously to ensure you are tight at the back and keep it simple so that your players give away less mistakes. Games will be hard to win so look to start with a draw and build up confidence that way before your team goes out looking for the more attacking approach and back to winning ways. Remember a season is played over a many games, its a marathon not a sprint.
Look for personality
Skill isn’t everything, especially in the depths of the leagues, determination is an important characteristic to have from your players, especially those charged with leading them into battle, if your captain and vice captain are strong characters then you will stand more of a chance at lifting the rest of your players, look after these and they will look after you. Take the their real life counterparts, during Avram Grant was blessed with a great team but it was being held together by a strong leader on the pitch, without John Terry in the dressing room I debate whether Grant would have been as good as his record showed, even if he did end up getting the sack in the end.
Don’t neglect the fact that you should have a balance young players as well as a experienced heads to get you through. I found that one of the best moves I did was replace some of the personnel, those who were good on paper but were lacking when their head dropped. Instead I stuck in hungry youngsters and fringe players. They made the real difference, swapping a left winger and took risky decision to stick a young lad in the middle of defense, but both played outstandingly well as they were hungry and because they hadn’t been in the losing side came with a little bit of raised morale. The balance between hungry players and those with experience to guide those players can be a potent mix when you are looking for a change of form.
But the best advice I can give, is not to give up. Don’t just not save and restart, don’t start a new game. Don’t let Football Manager win and if you do this you will become a better manager because of it and enjoy the games much more. I wanted to restart everything all over again after 12 games of misery, but once I was through the worse of it I had the best season of Football Manager I have had in a long time even if it did cost me my play off place. I did change my tactics, but my main advice wouldn’t be to look at overhauling your tactics entirely, a few tweaks maybe until you get down to the root of the problem, because lets face it that tactic must have been useful at some point in the season, can’t be too much up with it.
Have you got any of your own tips you would like to share on getting out of a bad run of form? Please leave your comments below or join the conversation on Twitter @fmpundit. Finally don’t forget to join our Facebook Fans page!
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