How to Play For the Win Against a Better Team

You’re in a tournament and your team is killing it. After matches throughout the entire day, you’re in Winner’s Finals. Feeling confident and in sync with your team it’s only a matter of time until you claim the Championship. You look across the bracket to see who will be your next victim...a team consisting of all Grand Champ players who haven’t allowed a single goal all tournament long. This is a guide to help you form a solid strategy in order to increase your odds to cause the upset.

Pre-game

Before we get into the strategies you can employ, the first step is to ready yourself psychologically. If you see the matchup and immediately lose faith and confidence, you have no chance of winning. No matter who you’re up against, there’s a reason we play out the game. Even when you get into these matchups where you’ll only win about one out of every hundred times, this could be that one time. The better team doesn’t always win so don’t just roll over, show them the absolute best you’ve got.

Before moving on to the strategies, I did want to thank the Grand Champion players I talked to in order to get solid information and input for this article. Thank you so much Lafwee_xD, Fluid, and Shirtlesslamp for your amazing insight.

The Strategies

The main focus of most of these tactics is to make the other team uncomfortable. Frustrate them to the point where it draws them out of character. Once you get them off of their game that’s when you’ll start to see some mistakes form that you can ideally capitalize on in order to squeak out a winning result.

Now this is going to sound cryptic or like something out of a fortune cookie, but the first step is to be aggressive yet patient. The first step that all of my sources said should be done is to close down the space immediately whenever the other team has the ball. If you give a good player space to do what they want, that’s when the “wall carry into a ceiling shot off the backboard to themselves” stuff is going to happen. If you don’t pressure these players, you’re giving them free access to do whatever they want. Now closing space doesn’t always mean contesting right away with reckless abandon, but rather, contesting them to force them to do way more than they normally have to. When these players don’t get space it tends to lead to overaggression and gaps in their normally impeccable defense.

When you do win the ball back or get some time to clear the ball away during their frenzy of offense, as much as you want to push the ball up for a goal, take your time. The best play with the ball isn’t always pushing forward for a goal. Sometimes a deep arcing clear or holding the ball is the best scenario. In doing these things it allows you, as well as your team, to take a breath and grab boost. During these firing squad frequent shots, it’s important to take time during your clears to reset your rotations as one goal could be more than enough for a team of Grand Champ caliber players to completely gain control.

It’s late in the game and it’s still all tied up 0-0. The strategies you’ve been employing have kept the game close and you start to notice some double commits and miscues out of the other team. This is the time to start looking for a big coordinated attack. On one of the overcommits, the space will be there to move up. The most important thing in these counterattacks is to maintain control. On most teams there’s always going to be at least one member back and it’s usually a Gibbs. What I mean by that is a player who specializes in defense and can block most any shot thrown at them in a regular circumstance. Control gives you the power to combat that. As a direct shot will more often than not always be blocked by these players, the ability to quickly pass and shoot horizontally completely blows out their normally top-tier shot assessment. Try to pass quickly across field and shoot back against the grain of the direction the goalie is facing. Once again, you’ll usually only have a limited number of opportunities against these types of teams so pick your moments wisely.

Closing Thoughts

I will say this guide is just what myself as well as some other players have come up with in order to help your odds in these situations. More often than not the higher ranked team will win with their mechanics and experience. However, not to be too cliche, but anything can happen in any given game. Take the opportunity as a learning experience even if you lose to learn as much as you can. The fastest way to get better is playing those better than you. Revel in the wins, learn from the losses, and soon enough you’ll be able to handle those Grand Champ teams in no time.

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