As you remember after the failure with Bosnia & Herzegovina national team I started to manage Northern Ireland. It was one season ago when all World Cup qualification matches were over. And I should just wait for the start till this season. Therefore I am reporting about my first success with the new nation team just right now.

Northern Ireland tactics

Northern Ireland doesn't have available many good players. There are only few high-quality players in defence (Cathcart, Evans) and fine central midfielder Davis. The others are below the level. That's the challenge I needed! For me it was important to have strong defenders and this is enough.

So I decided to use tactical formation with 5 defenders in line, 3 central midfielders and 2 forwards with the following team instructions:

Rigid philosophy (instead of Fluid I use in Leeds), disciplined creative freedom, aggressive tackling, closing down and Control match strategy. Very important tactics setting is focusing passing through the middle. Of course, only half of these settings were enabled before the match. Most of them were added only after first games.

Therefore it's significant to spend you time organizing and watching friendly matches (HINT! ).

I will give you this tactics after some tunings and when I will see that it's really effective and useful for you.

Matches

The start of European Championship qualification was almost perfect for my team. Only poor draw with weak Azerbaijan spoiled my mood. But that fail can easily overlapped by victories over Georgia and especially Denmark.

My thoughts of match against certainly more strong Denmark were: "Guys! Let's try to be accurate in defence and don't concede goals. And then may be we can score from corner or something like that". I was feeling myself as New Zealand against Italiy in yesterday's World Cup game Fortunately my pretty smart tactics gave 2:0 win. Ye, the second goal was scored from corner by Cathcart. But the first one is the result of excellent combination with finishing effort by striker Paterson. Here are more statistical information regarding this match:

Group A

Northern Ireland is on the second position after 3 fixtures! This is what I have been dreaming of. Hopefully we will be able to dictate terms to our opponents and stay on this position in the end. It would be also fantastic to make two draws with Portugal (it's hard to think of winning games against them)– absolute favourite in my group by squad strength .

True Football Manager