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Tuesday, June 27, 2006

title:{Possible Gameplan?}

Dear Slk-ians,

Dropping by to suggest a possible gameplan. Take your time to read this and hopefully you guys will like it and use it. Here it goes...

SLK grew up on the street soccer court. Hence it can be said that the more technically-gifted players are able to string reasonably good short passes and 1-2s in attack. Our major weakness on the 11-a-side field in offense has to be the collection of long passes. I'm sure many of you agree our first touch need some improvement. Hence I would like to propose the scraping of the 4-4-2 system for another plan....the 4-1-3-2. I will justify why in a few moments...

Suggested line-up:

-----Wah----------Auggy-------
---------------------------------
------Quek--Josh--Jielong------
---------------------------------
------------Chris----------------
---------------------------------
-Jo-----Ng---Tan------Farhan-
---------------------------------
------------GK-----------------

No wingers? Are you sure?
Why the need for wingers? The purpose of wingers are of course, to provide crosses. But then again, one must track back and observe the nature of our forwards - Wah and Auggy are certainly not known for their aerial prowress and being rather on the short and smaller side(for Wah) it will be best to play to their strength - their footwork. In addition, the crosses made in recent games are not exactly productive and this can be due to the fact we have not been dealing with the dynamics of crossing on the 11-a-side field as we did not have to on the street soccer courts. Only when we have successfully raised our game should we consider opting for wingers.

Hmmm..Quek on the left...Jielong on the right...
Yupp. Here's why. Since the 4-1-3-2 will be putting our 3 AMCs together, it will be easy for opponents to defend by tightening things up with 1-2 DMs in the particular area. Hence to effectively attack, we will need to create spaces by opening up. Now this is when switching Quek to the left and Jielong to the right might prove to be the surprise. During an attack, these 2 players are to dribble out far wide to pull defenders towards them and therefore open up vital spaces. As we all know Quek is right-footed/both, Jielong is mainly left footed, but both are well-known for their decent dribbling skills (thus it should be a manageable task). Now if I could lay down an instruction it would be this: Defenders will be anticipating crosses but as I mentioned...try not to cross. Use the stronger foot to cut back and lay it for Josh who should by now have enough spaces to let his creativity and technical gift do the work (In short he's almost the playmaker). Now he has 3 options: He can take potshots at goal, send through balls to our forwards or simply lay it back to the wingers...there's so much that can be done...the opponent can only, at best, guess.

Why so gung-ho?
After 4 matches, we have only scored 1 goal. We need to score...

Overall Plan:
This plan set off with us playing a high-attack mentality. For SLK, it bears truth that defending will only make us shooting ducks. However, wing-backs are expected not to overlap much since the formation leaves much work to be done on the defensive flanks. Unless you are blessed with stamina and reasonable technical abilities (E.g Farhan), it will be best to just lean back and keep the defence up. Chris will be the link-up man between defence and attack so he's gonna do a hell lot of running to support Josh and at the same time provide cover for the back 4. String short-passes to make up for our lack of first touch and accuracy, and to take advantage of how much we hon them while playing street. Finally, something cheeky - on the issue of crossing, it is not always a no-no. However it would be good to switch Josh and Auggy in their positions before employing crosses for a couple of reasons; Auggy is equally excellent in distribution of the ball so he can fit in nicely into Josh place (refer above). The catch here is that Josh would be playing in his natural position as a striker and he's probably the only attacker capable enough of threatening the opponent's goal with his head (as a forward). We can then be more hopeful crosses will bear fruit. To conclude, for a summary of gameplan, refer to the bold statements in this paragraph.

Well that's the end of my suggested gameplan...for now. Comments will be good. Its high time we set off the game knowing our individual roles. Good luck guys! =D

Tian

7:35 PM;