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| Judging tactical decisions |
We had a relative youngster (only 3 years in the game) in the UL scribble today, smarting from losses in matches where he created more chances and had made better tactical decisions. I figured this was a good point to leave off with the team based pressers and write about probabilities and some of the bias that human's inherently have when dealing with them.
So let's start with what makes for good and bad decisions in the tactical space. Understand, this is an extremely subjective subject, but I think that over the long run, we can come up with some clearly good tactical decisions and some clearly bad tactical decisions. The rest are somewhere on a spectrum between good and bad.
How about playing tighten the wings against wing plays? Probably a good decision almost all of the time. How about offside traps with a 2,1 ref? Probably a bad decision almost all of the time. Most things are in between however. It depends upon the person you are talking to, the teams in question, and various other messy factors.
Our problem is that in judging tactical decisions, we fall into a variety of types of human bias. These cloud our ability to assess for ourselves whether a decision is a good one or a bad one. In the beginning as a successful manager, I tried to do things like gildar, rps78 or Duffster. Over time I began to realize that might not be the best choice for a manager like me, and I began to adjust slightly, arriving on a style of managing that is not quite like my role models.
If I could offer three pieces of advice, they would be these:
Recognize that all decisions in x11 are likely to be fuzzy, without a clear binary or black and white effect. Say you mark the PM, but the PM is a 5 skilled mf surrounded by 15 skilled mf's? Is marking the PM a good decision in this case? There are always going to be exceptions to the rule, or outliers in your decision making process. Try to view the tactical space as a multidimensional data cloud and not a series of yes or no answers and you will have a better grasp of what we are actually doing when we set tactics in preparation for a match.
Avoid Outcome bias. When we win, we think, those tactics must have been good. When we lose, we think, those tactics were crap. Or we feel wronged by the game. In all of these cases, we give up our ability to effectively judge what happened and to learn from the experience. Winning and losing can be surprisingly independent of tactics. If we really want to assess our tactics, the best way to do it, would be to ignore the result (somehow don't look at the top of the match page) and assess the tactics without the outcome before you see what happened. You will be surprised how your perception of things change.
Avoid fixating on the obvious. It is easy to say I got their PM, or I guessed wrong, and leave it at that. But this is just more binary thinking in a game that is not black or white. We need to pay particular attention to the less obviously right or wrong things, like playing style and formation. These tactical choices tend to be less binary but I believe that when taken with the teams playing the match they are the most critical portions of that tactical space.
This is a good place to stop. Perhaps I will write a part 2 for this, perhaps not. But for my readers who are not experts at xpert 11, I hope this helps you to keep an open mind as you try to assess what you are doing right or wrong.
/Q
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