Scoring a goal: taking full advantage from this important moment.
The answer is given in this fine article written by our guest Gonçalo Cunha, author of the book ‘The winning FIFA 13 mindset: why only 5% of players win consistently on Ultimate Team’.
Scoring a goal: taking full advantage from this important moment.
You feel the adrenaline pump up, and you’re playing well. The opponent is good, but he can’t stand a chance against your superior abilities. Time will be your best ally: sooner or later, you can feel a goal will come your way.
The 67th minute arrives. Finally, you just scored a goal. The adrenaline pumps in your veins and you give yourself a pat in the back, enjoying a noisy ‘Goal’ exclamation coming out of your excited voice. But you’re professional, you’re confident and feel powerful. Oh, and there is nothing more rewarding to you than showing your dominance by scoring another goal and rubbing it off in the opponent’s face during the final score. So, you score, and you immediately jump the celebration and replays – let’s score quickly another one!
You do this once, twice, and you keep doing this, game after game, until it becomes a habit. You score, and you expect to score another. Your joy is seeing the final score with another win; just another day in the job.
I’m sorry to tell you this, but you have been making a huge mistake the whole time.
You’ve been neglecting the only part of the whole 90 minutes match where you can seriously have full control. Your opponent can’t skip it, your opponent can’t pause it, and your opponent can’t do a single thing. He just has to watch you steal the show.
Let’s analyse this. What’s the single one thing that angers you the most when playing a match of FIFA? Suffering a goal. Yes, there are other things that might make you want to kick the TV, such as stupid feints, a psychotic referee or a team which losing time seems to be the only strategy to overthrow your play. Sure, those are annoying and might have you want to kill your opponent, but think about it. Is there anything worse than having your opponent score? You’ll have to change your strategy; the opponent will be more defensive and it will be harder to score; time is running against you, not for you; and you’ll have to score the double amount of goals than you would have to without suffering a goal. There is nothing with more impact on you in a match than scoring or suffering a goal.
You can be winning 5-0 or 2-1, losing 0-1 or in any other score sheet possible. You will always feel the punch, being it positive or negative. Any goal, at any time will change everything in a match.
If that is so, don’t you feel like you’ve been wasting a valuable opportunity to take maximum advantage of scoring? Take a look at the advantages by celebrating your goal to the full:
- To you:
Celebrate any way you wish.
EA Sports gives you this unique opportunity in online gaming: the ability to take control off your opponent and make him watch your celebration to the very end. Feeling powerful? You should be. There is nothing more rewarding than thinking how angered the opponent will be while you’re doing the Robot dance.
Take full joy of the celebration! You worked really hard to get that goal. When you get to the weekend, after a tiring 5-day working week, do you go back again to work on Saturday, or do you celebrate another little win in your life? Don’t forget your core objective when playing this game: to score. When you do, celebrate like it is the last one!
Give your confidence a boost by watching the replays to the end.
Scoring a goal is a climax of your experience, ability, strategy and team. When all these elements converge to one beautiful moment, the flux of motivation and confidence in your veins will multiply significantly.
Take knowledge of your own play and the opponents’.
If you’ve been around playing FIFA for some time, you can quickly determine if you reacted well in a certain situation or not. Sometimes we score, but we got lucky; sometimes it’s a great goal. On both, look at the replays and think on what did go well and what didn’t make a positive outcome.
- Against your opponent:
He will be stripped out of control.
If that doesn’t anger you, I don’t know what will. You see, we humans are animals who like to keep everything in our grasp. We feel uncomfortable with things we can’t control. Mix that with the opponent rubbing his celebrations in your face in mockery, and you have a cocktail to explode your mind.
His anxiety will rise significantly.
Unless you play against a very experienced player (and even those suffer from this evil), it’ll be a sure bet the opponent will do everything in its reach to recover as quickly as possible from this bad situation. If it were you, would you keep crying, or you’ll want to skip the celebration and replay phase and have the ball immediately back in your feet? The more you delay this to your opponent, the more quickly he’ll want to get back. The more quickly he’ll want to get back, the more direct a precipitated his plays will be. The worse he plays, the more mistakes he makes. You win!
He will moan about your ‘unworthy’ goal.
He was making everything to score, and you just came to crash his party. Have you ever said to yourself, after suffering a goal, “Wow! That goal was phenomenal. I wish I could score goals like him.”? We both know you haven’t. In your point of view, the other guy scoring, regardless of it being a great goal or not, will always be considered by us an insult to the art of football. What should you do? Make him watch the replay of your goal from all angles!
He will think that you are being unsportive, unfair or ‘don’t know how to play’.
We can’t admit failure. It’s very hard to us to admit we didn’t succeed at something, and we humans tend to hide that fact by getting excuses. Thoughts like this will make your opponent play even worse: “He ‘should’ have skipped the replays, giving the deserved respect I deserve”; “I can see I’m playing against an unsporting guy – he doesn’t know how to win”; “What a stupid goal. Take a look at that. I can’t win against luck!”.
Everybody already lost a game in FIFA by having the opponent score twice in 5 minutes. Why? A full game might be 90 minutes, but it’s in the periods of time in which you keep your concentration down that goals happen. Those moments can be as simple as 2 minutes of in-game time or less.
So, you’re telling me you don’t have 30 seconds of real-time to celebrate your goal and watch all the replays and celebrate to the maximum?
I can’t stress this enough. If you skip this sequence, you’ll give the ball immediately to your opponent and he will get what he wants. Plus, he can’t be angered and he can’t think about what suffering a goal might do to him. Everything was so quick that, to him, little has changed – you didn’t give him time to process the full information of the situation. And you lose an excellent opportunity.
All this article talks about a small detail in a large game. Remember, though: what separates the best from the rest are the little details combined, which make a huge gap in the end.
Best regards to all and celebrate those goals to the maximum!
This article was kindly written exclusively for FIFAUTeam by Gonçalo Cunha, whom we thank.
The author discusses the influence of the mental factor in the success of our club in FIFA 13 Ultimate Team, a theme much despised by the players but of utmost importance.
His book ‘The winning FIFA 13 mindset: why only 5% of players win consistently on Ultimate Team’ explores these matters in an intelligent way.
FIFAUTem strongly recommends this book.