Hello my dear readers!

This is some kind of guide for those who want their teams be more efficient during set pieces in Football Manager 2011.

Attacking corners

I am not going to say anything about attacking corners because I described it in the distinct article here:

Scoring from corners in Football Manager 2011

Please read it if you missed it.

Defending corners

Several advices:

- Set Mark Tall Player only to those your footballers who are good in air and have high Marking attribute value.

- Always set 2 players to mark far and near posts! It will allow to escape series of goals during corners.

- Set Man Mark or Mark Small Player to players with high Marking and poor ability to challenge in air.

I use here a special special trick giving Stay Forward instruction to 3 attacking players. Sometimes it allows to perform efficient counter-attacks after defending corners, especially if attackers are quick.

Attacking free kicks

Use players who have "Hits free kicks with power" PPM and high value of Free Kick attribute selecting Long instruction in your tactical settings. Long Shots, Finishing, Technique attributes matter as well.

Set Best Header option in case if you don't have good free kick takers who can make dangerous direct shots. Actually I use this scheme with Boston United:

As an example you can watch a recent goal scored by my defender Jonas Ivens using the Best Header scheme:

Defending free kicks

This is the way how I set up my players during defending free kicks:

Nothing really special. Defensive players mark opponents, attacking players form the wall. My team concedes goals during defending free kicks in very rare cases.

Throw Ins

I prefer Short throw ins because it's less risky to loose a ball. Here how my players take positions during left throw in:

If you have a player with high Long Throws attribute (> 18) and Long Flat Bullet Throw PPM then it resembles more attacking corners. So you can try use the same player positions as in attacking corners scheme with slight changes. Those changes is a kind of art and depend much on the players you have. I just can say that it's important to set a player at the edge of the area to prevent counter-attacks.

Penalty takers

I would say there are 2 most important player attributes:

- Penalty Taking

- Composure

One should select penalty takers looking at these two first of all.

Hope you like my article about set pieces in Football Manager 2011. If you have any questions or comments I am always glad to here them from you!

True Football Manager