For some mysterious reason all the physical laws in the world are cancelled, and the ball is pulled towards the corner flag like there is a black hole of stellar mass located somewhere near that corner of the pitch. A black hole so immense that neither light nor fun can escape. Welcome to wingplay, the formation which makes games unwatchable unless you are high on medication and find it amusing to watch a repeated pattern over and over again for 20 minutes.

No formation highlights the flaws with the simulator quite like wingplay. Ever tried overcrowding the cornerflag just to see what would happen, with the remote hope one of your defenders would actually be able to intercept the always so super accurate flying pass from opponents midfielder? If you haven't, then I will tell you what will happen. Nothing. Winger will still get the pass, and the one defender making a tackle into thin air meters away from the winger is now accompanied by 2-3 other defenders doing the very same dance. An average military guided missile will have less accuracy than a wingplay aerial pass on MZ, and we are not talking about the tinfoil junk they produce in North Korea.

I am not a fan of certain shortcuts made by the sim programmers, and the biggest shortcut is of course goalkeepers transforming themselves into a concrete wall to keep scores down, since defenders don't defend properly. The other shortcut which is highly visible is the pass that is made from the midfielder to the winger when a team is playing wingplay. It is a rare very occurance to see such a pass miss the intended receiver, even if the guy hitting the pass has 0 balls in aerial passes. This shortcut is made to keep throwins down.

Club Almirante Brown is where the disease of wingplay started, 3-4 seasons ago. There might have been some other teams also using wingplay prior to that, but CAB was the first team that started winning trophies with it. He won trophies because he actually had a good team, so he would probably have had equal amount of success without the use of wingplay.

During the early stages of wingplay luck would have it that I was in the possession of a guy with 10 in speed, stamina and ball control (hmm, winger??), and something as rare as a striker with 10 balls in heading (hmm, someone to head the crosses into the back of the net??). So I thought perhaps wingplay is something for me. I quickly found out that the 10 balls my striker had in heading made no difference. Another shortcut. Programmers knew most teams had strikers with 0-3 balls in heading, thus they made all players head the ball like they are all allmighty Falcao. So, 3 balls in heading equals 10 balls in heading. 10 balls in heading is still 10 balls in heading. With shooting you would need a large amount of data to spot a difference between 9 and 10 balls in shooting. With heading you need an even larger amount of data and some significant goodwill to spot the difference between 3 balls in heading and 10.

What are the negative effects of wingplay exept unwatchable matches? More often than with short passes you will dominate matches, yet walk away with nothing. Wingplay quite often generates chances of lesser qualities than the opponent using short passes will. A good example of that is the Champions Cup final in season 45, where 20-7 in chances in favor for the wingplaying team resulted in a 2-6 defeat. CAB and all the other wingplaying teams got knocked out one by one in that tournament, against play. Unfortunately the disease has spread so far now, so there is always a wingplaying team that makes it to the latter stages of cups in order to ruin the fun for all.

How do you beat wingplay? Unless you know the person in real and have access to a shovel, then there are two ways; either just hope wingplay does what it does best, generate chances of poor quality, so you will steal the win. Or place your players in a way so that wingplay becomes much less effective. The winger on a tactic playing wingplay will never receive a long pass from his team mates playing on the same side of the pitch. This means you should try and lean your offense to the same side as his winger is located. So if the opponent is playing with a left winger, then you would want to play with wide strikers upfront on your righthand side. The effect is that once you lose the ball upfront, then his defender need to pass it through the midfield first, giving you one more tackling opportunity before it is hit out to the winger. This also means his defenders on one side will be completely isolated, thus not getting involved in any action. I also find this tactic somewhat effective even if your guess is wrong regardring which side your opponent is going to field his winger. The key is to lose the ball in the correct places on the pitch. Too many ball losses in the middle of the pitch is going to be a killer in any case, so position your players with this in mind.

What you don't want to do is to place a defender directly on top of his winger, as the defender will just stand there like an smuck and watch pass after pass fly just over his head, while virtual seagulls start crapping on his head because they mistake him for a statue. Once the ball has been received by the winger your defender will then tackle into thin air 8 out of 10 times. Once the winger gets the ball he is pretty much invincible anyway. Just hope your defenders clears the cross ball, or that his attacker heads it over the net. You do not want to commit too much to one side in defence anyway, as many of these wingplaying douches operates with mirrorered tactics, sometimes even changing between them if they are trailing at 60 minutes for example, CAB being a brillant example of that. If you are going to place a defender wide, then make sure he has support and that he is not too close to the winger when the winger receives the ball.

Below are my cup results against the root of all evil, Club Amirante Brown.



I applied the above mentioned philosophy starting from December 2012. The 5-1 loss came when I tried to beat him at his own game, by playing wings. The matches in 2012 Club World Cup - Corinthians was in the group stages, while all the other matches are knock out phase. His first reported wingplay tactic was in the Midweek Madness I - S43. I am proud to say that I have singlehandedly killed the chief zombie on 3 seperate occations just since December last year, and all without receiving a scratch myself. As I am currently editing this article which I wrote some weeks ago, I must admit I lost to CAB in a losers match yesterday (we both got knocked out of the Semi, and met in a 3rd place match).

If you are one of these wingplaying guys and you just read this article and feel I am being out of line, then I have the following thing to say to you, and I am going to weight my words carefully here not to make it personal: You have shown a lack of character by letting yourself get infected by the virus, and you are now trying to spread that disease across to everyone. Death by flamethrower is the only fitting faith for you. Thanks for reading.

The following results are between teams that are somewhat of equal strength, so that the victory is atleast remotely due to tactics.

1-0 (12-18 chances)

2-0 (14-20 chances)

4-0 (12-12 chances)

2-1 (11-20 chances)

Allright, before you run off to your tactics screen thinking you just found the solution for beating wings, well, you didn't. But if you have previously struggled against wingplay, then any of the tactics above here is likely to increase your chance of walking away with a result, given you have a team which is within a certain reach to your opponent. Good luck in fighting these filthy zombies. If you look at these tactics thinking "hmm, thats dumb, my tactic is wastly superior in beating wings", then feel very free to contact me.

The image to the left is the first ever game created. It is called Pong. Strangely similar to how games between wingplaying smucks look like. Try staring at the animated gif for 20 minutes without absolutely losing it, I dare you! My personal best is 3 minutes and 44 seconds, upon I ended up vomiting and swearing at my parrot, and I don't even own a parrot.