Tripoli SC – 2011/2012 – A new era begins with a royal flush.

As regular followers of my blog would know, I prefer to go through my pre-season results before showing any transfers I may have made. When I took over at the club, we lacked a lot of depth. I decided that I wanted to take a gamble and attempt to adapt Jose Mourinho’s ‘formation chameleon’ to the club. This meant that I would be using a 4-4-2 Diamond/4-3-1-2 at home and a 4-3-3 away from home which involved the man marking of the oppositions full backs. In order to do this, I required more depth in positions such as one or two defensive midfielders, wingers (AML/AMRs) and so forth. On top of that, I also had to strengthen the squad in general, so you can guarantee that there will be transfers on their way in the next post. However, for this post I will go through all of our pre-season games which as you may have guessed resulted in us being unbeaten.

Our first match was against a local rival – the semi-professional Mahabbah Tripoli. The first few matches were always going to be ‘tester’ matches where I could thoroughly watch and analyse how my tactic was performing, this allows me to make any necessary tweaks when trying to perfect how I want the team to play. I normally spend most of pre-season watching matches in “Full Match” mode. As most people I would expect do, I then move onto “Extended”. We were at home and I therefore tried out the home tactic which I employed, tweaks I made throughout the match included changes to our tempo and certain player roles. It was a good all round performance, however we would be expected to win against our opposition anyways. 3-0 was the final score, a brace from Ghosn and a goal from Fatooh secured the win for us.

Our second pre-season match was against division 1 promotion candidates Sagesse. I knew this game would be tough, however decided I would treat it as another useful second outing to test my changes made to the home tactic. I don’t think I remember ending up making too many major changes, however what I did know was that I was becoming more familiar with my players and all of their different capabilities. This would then make my life easier when adjusting the away tactic. It is also worth keeping in mind the fact that the main players I would use in my away tactic would most likely sometimes vary than those who are regularly chosen within my home tactic due to the different roles played. For example, my home tactic requires one AMC and three CMs. Whilst my away tactic requires no AMC’s but an AMR & AML are needed alongside a CDM. The performance again was a solid one which was portrayed in the score margin. Goals were scored by El Hakim, Reda & Alex.

Third up we had our third home game of pre-season up against Shabab Al Ghazieh – a division 2 side. 3-0 seemed to become a regularity since we won this game by that scoreline again. Our third goal was an absolute screamer of a goal considering the quality of players present within the team by Alexis Ngabsi. The other two goals came from Ghado & Alex.

Our fourth pre-season match was the one I had been waiting for, our first away match at Homenmen who as a matter of fact have a very nice youth academy since they bring up a lot of Lebanese-Armenian players. I switched to our away tactic and watched the match. The main changes I remember making is changing our lone striker from a DLF to a Poacher and our wingers to inside forward. Our 3-0 odessey looked to be continuing until Hussam El-Rez got a goal back for the home side late in the game with 15 minutes to go. The score then became 3-2 when Homenmen’s Nasser El-Masri pulled another back for the division 2 side to make the final score 3-2. It was dissapointing.

Next up, we were against semi-professional side Hurriya away from home again. The comfortable win we should have achieved was reached, nothing more to say! A comfortable 5-0 victory for us.

Our sixth pre-season match was another game away from home. The away tactic was improving, particularly after I figured out how to instruct y wingers/inside forwards to tightly mark the oppositions full backs – which was the main concept of this tactic in the first place. A comfortable 4-0 win. Good stuff for just pre-season.

Pre-season match number seven was another derby match against Division 1 side, Shabab Tripoli. We were at home, so I thought it would be interesting to see how we do after we switch straight back to our home tactic after a 3 game period of using our away tactic. 5-0, easy!

Our final pre-season match was against Arz in our steady preperation towards our opening game of the season against league favourites  Al Ahed away from home. We recorded a 4-0 victory, which I won’t complain about in all honesty. I was happy with the quality of the goals scored though!

and that concludes it for our pre-season. My next post will be an overview of my team, tactics and transfers. I do plan on showing images of matches, however I am on the laptop at the moment and the resolution is fairly low, so apologies for the half-shirt screenshots! Also, True, if you’re reading this… please please please get the theme uploaded haha I’d also like to thank FMTN for all of his hard work done here on FMCrowd and it’s such a shame that he is going to call it a day You can visit him… or what’s left of him… here: http://fmtacticalnewspaper.fmcrowd.com