There’s Been a Power Shift in Ice Division 13

When building my squad for this season, the aim was to be ranked fourth or fifth.

That would give us an outside chance of promotion, while still being competitive enough for the players to get good match ratings and, hopefully, maximise their progression.

Using Season 15’s team ratings as a benchmark, I put together a squad with a first XI rating of 812.

Last season, that would have given us the fifth-strongest starting lineup in the division. In Ice 27, where my Mayhem Paris team play, we’d be the 4th strongest side.

But, when the transfer- window closed, we had the second-strongest squad in Ice Division 13, behind only Odesa Waves.

Suddenly, the squad I’d built to be competitive looked like a genuine title contender. That changed everything.

We have to go all guns blazing for first place.

Failing to get promoted with the second-strongest team in the division would be a major disappointment.

A Disastrous Start

The season started in about the worst possible way.

We opened the campaign against Racing Mulhouse, a team we failed to beat last season and who spent a decent chunk of the campaign sitting at the top of the division.

Their narrow 4-1-2-1-2 had caused us problems before, but our pre-season testing gave me hope that Disciplina y Control would fare better this time.

False hope.

We were battered.

We created just 0.20 xG in a 3-0 defeat and, more worryingly, barely looked capable of hurting them.

Not exactly the start you’d expect from supposed promotion contenders.

Next up was Fafe Binks, one of the weaker teams in the division, so this was surely where we’d get things going.

Nope.

Another poor performance saw us 1-0 down until our “losing after 75 minutes” match plan kicked in at exactly the same time as their “winning after 75 minutes” plan.

Somewhere in the resulting tactical madness, our players suddenly remembered how to attack.

We scored three late goals and somehow walked away with a 3-1 victory.

Three points were three points, but it wasn’t exactly convincing.

Oh for F*ck’s Sake!

Feeling slightly more chipper, we then faced Karanovac MFC and their 4-1-3-2 — another formation that can be extremely difficult to play against.

We look ok, but they took the lead in the 46th minute. With their first shot on target of the game. Obviously.

Optimism crept in back in when their central defender was sent off after 68 minutes.

Excellent.

Twenty minutes against ten men. Time to batter them.

And batter them we did.

What followed was an absolute onslaught of shots, every bloody one of them seemingly being saved by their goalkeeper.

He finished the game with nine saves, Man of the Match and a 9.38 rating.

We lost 1-0.

FFS

By this point, I was genuinely FUMING.

A few rants and a couple of hours to calm down later, I had a realisation…

We Aren’t the Underdogs Anymore!

We were the second-strongest team in the division!

Yet tactically, I was still approaching matches with the same mentality we’d had last season:

Anything to survive.

Season 15 had conditioned me to worry about what the opposition could do to us. We were disciplined, cautious and constantly trying to minimise the opposition’s strengths.

That made sense when we were one of the weaker teams.

It didn’t anymore.

If we really were one of the best teams in the division, it was time to start behaving like one.

Instead of spending every game worrying about how to stop the opposition, I wanted them to worry about stopping us.

Disciplina… but with a little more Mayhem

I didn’t want to abandon Disciplina y Control.

The underlying idea was still sound: a disciplined 4-3-3 built around controlling matches and using clearly defined player roles.

But I’d probably taken the Disciplina part a little too literally.

So I went back into the tactical laboratory.

I ran more than 50 friendlies against several different formations, gradually making D&C more expansive and aggressive.

The changes weren’t revolutionary. We didn’t rip up the system; we changed how aggressively we used it. The team became more adventurous in possession, the shackles came off some of the players. We stopped obsessing over protecting ourselves against every possible opposition threat.

The objective was still control — but increasingly it became territorial control, rather than simply possession.

Importantly, though, I wasn’t trying to turn it into some chaotic all-out-attack system.

We still wanted control.

We just wanted to control games, just 20 yards further up the pitch.

The new philosophy became pretty simple:

Put pressure on the opposition from the start and make THEM adapt to us.

And it worked immediately.

We beat second-placed Eimsbüttel 2-0, one of the strongest teams in the division, and for the first time this season our attack looked genuinely free-flowing and dangerous.

That was followed by a 3-1 victory over Nis Dragons, a team who beat us twice last season.

Two games. Two wins. Both against strong opposition.

It finally felt like we might have cracked it.

The results kept on coming. A satisfying 2-0 win vs Munster Monarchs – the team who beat us 3-1 at the end of last season, condemning us to the relegation playoffs – then a 7-0 whooping of bottom club 18HRV84 and a 2-1 win over Atletico Cusco.

Spot the moment the tactics changed!

But then the goals stopped…

A 0-0 bore draw against Ermesinde Old Nets was followed by a 1-1 tie with top of the league Odesa Waves. On the face of it, a draw against by far the best team in the division is a good result. But we were the better team and just lacked the killer edge.

This could be put down to them having the joint best defence in the division.

But, as always, this lead me back to the tactics board to see what might be wrong…

The Castillo Conumdrum

Elver Castillo was supposed to be one of the stars of this Mayhem side. 

Our creative genius.

On paper, he still looks every inch of it: 81 pace, 83 dribbling and 81 passing should make him an ideal fit for our creator role on the right.

But the numbers are beginning to tell a different story.

So far this season the 78-rated winger has just 2 goals and 0 league assists in 8 games. 

Ermesinde’s back 4 were rated: 70, 69, 70, 69, but all we could muster was 0.45xG. This should’ve been a game were a 78 OVR winger was a massive threat all game…. Instead he came up blank on goals and assists and got a 5.8 rating. 

Despite his abilities, Castillo is creating just 0.3 chances per match, with no assists and an average rating of only 6.58. He’s beating players — he just isn’t turning those moments into anything particularly dangerous.

That leaves us with an interesting question: is Castillo the problem, or are his instructions preventing us from getting the best out of him?

Rather than writing off a 78-rated player whose underlying attributes appear perfect for the role, it’s back to the laboratory.

From looking at previous games, he was averaging:

• 15 pass attempts
• 12 successful passes
• 6 successful dribbles

Not only that, but he was regularly coming too deep to get the ball.

The first thing I needed to do was get him on the ball more, and higher up the pitch.

Due to his pace and dribbling abilities, my game plan so far was to stretch the pitch wide, leaving him isolated versus a fullback who he can then terrorise. Obviously, this wasn’t working, and our team became too far apart to get the ball to him.

I figured that by encouraging the right-sided full back to join in the attacks more and narrowing the field slightly, Castillo would be more connected with his teammates.

The first test of this new system was in a cup game in which he got :

• 1 assists
• 19 successful passes (much-improved)
• 7 successful dribbles

A good start!

This was followed by a frustrating 0-0 draw with Los Canarios, in which we created 1.88xG from 17 shots but were unable to find the winning goal.

Project Castillo will continue into the second half of the season, but the early signs are positive.

Disciplina y Control – How’s it going?

Having set out a system of play, with pre-defined targets to push the team to success, how are we doing against those stats?

For the first time, we can properly judge D&C against the targets it was designed around rather than simply looking at the league table.

Well, we’re doing pretty well so far:

We’re achieving all but one of the metrics, our shot quality, however I have another plan to achieve this. Other than that, we’re controlling possession (JUST!) reducing the quality of shots against us and winning the xG battle (once again, just!).

The aim is that these will all end up giving us the best chance possible to win football games.

So, the question is… is Disciplina y Control actually working?

We’re sitting in 2nd place, and just 3 points off the top spot.

Odesa Waves are much stronger than us, however they’ve recently been scraping narrow results and we should’ve beaten them. Hopefully, they’ll slip up soon and we can capitalise.

We play them in the 3rd league game after the restart, but the fixture list hasn’t been kind and we have tough games after the restart and a knock out cup game the day before. I’ll need to rotate well.

Three points separate us. They’re stronger. We’ve already shown we can go toe-to-toe with them. Now we need them to blink first.

Mid-Season Player Review

The biggest surprise of the season so far has been our Soccernomics superstar Ivo Diercks. He’s a 71 rated CM, but scored an impressive 74 Mayhem Rating in our new recruitment system, which you can read about in this article.

Costing just $11, he’s leading the team and division in assists (5) and creating an impressive 5 chances per game in his role as our deep creator. As well as this, he’s also our highest rated starter, with a very impressive 7.5 average match rating.

With Aristazabal sent out in loan in the Stone division, our striker role was given to 6’5″ Dutchman, Arnaud Hendrisken, and he’s not let us down so far, bagging 11 goals in 11 games so far.

Hendriksen and Diercjks: the creator and the poacher

There’s also a couple of honourable mentions. Firstly, Allan Ellis, our backup striker, who I’d written off as unable to play the role of a lone striker – however he’s thriving in the new system and has scored 8 goals in 6 appearances.

Secondly, Dierckx’s backup, Adnan Abdullah, has scored 1 goal and grabbed 4 assists, proving himself to be a bit of a dead-ball expert.

FC Mayhem Paris

So, how are our other Ice team doing?

Despite being our development team, they ended up in a tougher division than The Mayhem. But, they’ve made a really good account of themselves and currently sit in 8th position.

After a poor start they found their feet and have picked up some good wins as well as being painfully unlucky in a couple of games.

The star of the show has been right winger Jakob Lindner who leads the squad with 8 goal contributions (4 goals and 4 assists).

Both strikers Al Harbi (4 goals) and Maillard (3 goals) have really struggled for consistency and the team have paid the price. The midfield trio of Ondrejka, Bjornstad and Ellie have made a good account of themselves and I could really do with all three developing some more in the second half of the season.

Hopefully they can kick on and create a little more distance between themselves and the relegation places and maintain their Ice status next season.

So… Will Madero Mayhem get the best out of Castillo and let him drag them to promotion?

Will FC Mayhem Paris have enough to avoid relegation?

Will Disciplina y Control continue to be a successful MFL philosophy?