Winning Start with England

Today's post is just a short one about my first two games as England manager. They were games I expected to win, and would have been disappointed if we hadn't won them. Below are the screenshot for the Azerbaijan game. As you can see we won 4-1 with a great performance from Gerrard, in particular, as well as Rooney, Walcott, Crouch and Lampard.


Here are the match stats for that game. We had an amazing amount of shots- 27! That is a good number, although 10 of them were Long Shots, so actually it was 17 chances created. We dominated in just about everything, as of course we should against a team like Azerbaijan.

The other match was against Austria, another match I expected to win, especially at home. The result suggests it was a very close match, but really it wasn't as we were always superior and more dangerous, and should have won by a bigger margin.

Here are the match stats, for the game. Although the possession was shared equally, you can see we had a lot more attempts and had double the amount of efforts on target.

Here are the tactics I used for the first two games. Rooney has been trained by Man Utd to play as an AMC, so I thought I would try him there and he played quite well. The Defence has my usual player settings. They are- DC- Central Defender-Defend and the Full backs are- Full Back- Support. In midfield I set Lampard as a Deep Lying Playmaker- Support and Gerrard as a Box- to- Box Midfielder, which is always Support. Rooney is AMC- Attack and Walcott and Young are Wingers- Attack. Crouch up front has the settings of Target Man- Attack.

I haven't completely settled on this tactic yet, and plan to try it more over the coming matches, so it may change once I see what it is like against better opponents.

That's all for this post, thanks for reading, and there will be another one soon.