Greatest Of All Legends - Chapter 165

Chapter 165: New Formation Training II
The training match continued after Jason scored the free-kick and the players tried to get used to playing different roles on the pitch with different forms of support from their teammates.

By the end of the first ten minutes, Jason’s influence on the formation’s effectiveness had become quite apparent.

His evasive skills and positioning always left him as a first choice for the midfielders’ passes, and after receiving the ball, he either drove the ball down the field personally using his dribbling skills to make his way through the opposition defense before linking up with the other forwards for a pass or even taking the shot himself.

If the midfielders of his team were on top of their game, he could move closer to the opposition box and play as a shadow striker of sorts, always staying ready for any chance to burst past his marker to catch any inside balls that came his way.

This was not to say that the formation would collapse without Jason, but his presence in the formation increased the effectiveness of the team by a few dozen percent.

It was more like Jason’s high-octane playing style helped his team greatly and fit in quite well with the other players in the line-up as they all fitted each other well, which was quite surprising for both Jason and the manager who had set up the game plan which included the formation and the player line-up.

By the end of the first ten minutes, the red bib team had been able to score another goal which came from Fabio Viera who was assisted by Jason.

They had also managed to record five shots with three of them on target, while also keeping the yellow team from getting more than two shots at their own goal within that ten minutes.

It seemed that training for the formation had gotten off to a good start, and it was time to begin experimenting with the players to see how the formation could become more effective so the first thing the manager did was take Jason off the red bib team and bring on Luiz Diaz to the red team.

Jason was told to go off the field to rest along with a couple of other players while the coach rearranged both of the teams.

Soon the next ten-minute cycle began and immediately the manager noticed the difference in the momentum of the red bib team.

Luis Diaz was also a very good left winger and could match up to Jason’s capabilities, but his effectiveness wasn’t the same as Jason’s on the formation which was quite strange to the other staff members, but the manager immediately chalked it down to the differences in their playing style and habits in the game.

Jason was the type of player who would not hesitate to take on up to five players at a time, even if he couldn’t actually do it, but Luiz Diaz would at most take on two players at a time before searching for the nearest pass.

Their positioning on the pitch was also different from each other as Luiz Diaz preferred to stay forward and on the left side of the field, but probably due to Jason’s ability to play on the right, the center, and the left, he was always switching positions and took on the best position to receive the ball and to start an attack.

Ze Luis and Fabio Viera were also very versatile players, thus they easily took on the open space that Jason would have left open while running around, thus the three of them were very fluid in movement and were constantly flying around which made their attacking options completely unpredictable.

Luis Diaz was a more straightforward player, so the other forwards stayed in their roles which made predicting their movements and passing lanes a lot easier.

Jason and Luiz Diaz’s passing abilities and choices were also different from each other, not to mention their attitude towards the goal.

All these differences added up to differentiating clearly the difference in their playing style and the influence this had on the team as they played.

After the second ten-minute cycle, the manager recorded some things he had noticed and planned to address before rearranging the team once again, this time he sent Jason into the yellow bib team.

After rearranging the team until it was quite similar to the first match-up, the manager allowed the training to continue once again and noted Jason’s performance on the yellow bib team.

Noting down how Jason played on the right wing on the yellow bib team, as well as other players and things he deemed to need addressing, the manager oversaw the training for the new formation.

After two more rotations, the manager ended the new formation training and let the players go and do other drills as the formation training was very physically exhausting since they mimicked a real match and thus could lead to over-exhaustion and injuries if it went on for too long.

Leaving the assistant coaches and the other technical staff to oversee the rest of the players’ training, Sergio Conceicao left the field and headed to his office at the training ground with his aim being to work on improving the game plan for the new formation.

On reaching his office, he turned to a new page on his notepad and drew out the formation on the page, using small circles to signify the players and putting the names under the circles.

Shockingly, the names that were written down by the Portuguese manager under the circles that signified the players were the names of the players he had called out to be in the first set of the red bib team earlier.

Jason’s thoughts had been right and Sergio Conceicao had picked these players as his first choice for the next match, but he had thought that the line-up would need a lot of adjusting, yet the performance of the players had impressed him and now he was thinking of going along with the initial line-up.

He might still change some of the names in the starting line-up in the coming days after seeing how they performed during the training session, but for now, he was quite impressed with the current line-up and needed to work on the game plan to see how best to bring out the best of the players and the new formation.

With these thoughts in mind, Sergio Conceicao began devising a game plan against his team’s upcoming opponents.