Sure sure you can play FW and go for flashy goals and most people won't notice you aim directly at the keeper to often. But being a FW and scoring is not as fun as completly taking a dump on a forward that wants to score!!

Playing a defender in this game can be very enjoyable if you ignore the forwards and MF's trying to tell you how exactly to play your defender. Everyone can have a bad game but it seems that when a FW has a clear shot and shoots literally directly at the keeper it is ok. If you miss a pass intercept and they score.. well the DF must be HORRIBLE. Or if you dare lob a pass they are not good enough to get because they don't pay attention... PASS WITH S (who the hell plays this game at any decent level using thier keyboard??).

That aside you should approach the game with a griefer mentality. You want to make the forward on the other teams life absolutly miserable. intercept every pass that gets to him and slide tackle him right before he scores over and over. Your job is to make sure thier forward can't do diddly the entire match.

Don't completely ignore all other players as you do want to win but you need to be marking thier main striker 90% of the game. You want to be humping his leg waiting for your chance to intercept or tackle him so he wants to rage quit :)

Yup.. thats the defender life!

This is for those who want to be an SW in the future or stay as a DF this does not cover how other defenders who will play a bit more on the offense side.

Stay Back
This the first rule. Unless you are behind trying to play catch up your primary goal should be a clean sheet. You don't want to be any fruther ahead then thier forward in general. If you are down a few scores you want to move up a bit just outside of the box to be able to catch anything that bounces of the keeper. If you made your character correctly your main chance of low risk scoring is on corners.


Understand your MF and FW
As and SW you will want to lob as you have high lob skills and a through lob. But you have the guage how "good" your MF or FW's are. No point in lobbing to a newb that can't get to it and honestly no point in arguing with the MF when he stands next to the goal trying to take it out instead of you. If you have good players or people you know, lob the ball and have them instantly run forward when you come out at goal. Hold the ball long enough to where maybe thier marker comes forward and then lob it to your MF or FW so they can burn them and score. If you are playing with less then stellar players just do regular passes and save yourself the stress.

Don't lob to short people covered by tall people. This will get you the ball lost most of the time, take a peek of at the matchups and abuse hight disadvantages.

It is not our job to score
have the ball at your feet as little time as possible. Look for the right pass and get it the hell off your feet.

Don't get burned
Position in key. Don't let them get behind you

When to do what tackle
Tackle is a risk / reward and you need to get very familary with it very quickly to be good. ST runs straight at you, you have green and are in front of him.. What do you? STANDING TACKLE. If you slide there and miss he scores so don't slide. Standing tacke and if you miss then you can still slide as he will be past you just slightly. Give your self the most amount of chances to stop them and slide is the LAST resort. You slide when you go "oh crap I have been beat" and if you are an SW you double slide and get the ball.

Position position position

Between the ball, a threat and the goal. You want to be between the ST waiting for a pass, the goal and the guy passing. You have to be close enough to the ST and waiting to move to try to block the shot but not so far away that you can't intercept the pass and you most certainly don't want the ST behind you closer to goal then you are. Takes practice but this is the position you need to be in.

Peel off
Your a defender. Don't worry about double teaming, you should be able to do it alone. Don't chase the ball and end up double teaming a guy. If your teammate is on someone you need to move off to whoever is not covered. Hopefully your team mate will not constantly try to defend the highest threat as that is your job for a good reason.

How agressive and when
This depends on how far up or down you are. if you are leading you really want to scare them into passing and hope to intercept. you will mainly standing tackle and by then the other team should realise how much they don't want to be close to you with the ball. If you established you will take the ball away from them consitently you will see them passing as soon as you get close. Don't worry to much and just force them to pass so you guys can intercept.

If you are behind be agressive with the standing tackle and if an SW insta follow up with the sliding. More of a risk but if you are down by two goals you have to try to turn the tide.

Ok.. so you are in a game and nobody is defending ANYTHING. You are stuck covering everybody because your team mates seem to not care about defence because they are to busy trying to dribble, not pass, and lose the ball. Or they are so focus on scoring (and they may be good at it) but the game is just a flat out shoot out like below:

Now you will lose more of these and also get exceptionally frustrated. So how do you get them to stop playing horribly and at least stand somewhat of a chance against not so good players.. Just keep reminding them to "mark thier man" and that should help you as a defender actually shut down the opponents scoring machine. Then your games will look a bit more conservative.


I'll take some more screenshots to post them. Maybe I will get lucky and have a shootout team that I turn the tides into a winning team by repeating that over and over again. In this game if you mark your man and pass the ball you will climb in ELO fairly quickly.