There are several reasons for playing counter attack. In many cases the primary reason for a coach thinking about using counter attack in a big game would include his team’s ability to win the midfield. This is of course due to a number of factors such as skill, form and team spirit. It might be that the opponent is just superior overall, and by trying to reduce the number of chances for the opponent by using an “all out defense” mentality - one counter attack chance might just be enough to get away with a point - or all three if you’re lucky or skillful enough.

The biggest discussion regarding counter attack (apart from the formula to actually calculate how good your tactical rating for CA will be) has always been “what should my midfield rating be in comparison to my opponent for the counter attacking to work optimally?”. There are several different schools for this, some argue that you should try to keep possession as high as you can, while others has gotten good results from just having less than 5% of the possession. There’s probably no real statistical answer to this question, the only thing that has been proven statistically is that the midfield needs to be weaker before calculating the penalties in order for normal counter attacking to actually work at all. What’s your take on this? An important thing to have in mind here is that your midfield rating is automatically cut by another 7% from just choosing to play counter attacks. This might be one of the reasons why it has been so tough to statistically find the optimum.

The calculation for calculating your counter attacking skill level for your team is often referred to as: [(Defending of all defenders) + (2 * Passing of all defenders)} / 10 = Your counter attacking rating.

This means that if you have five solid defenders with inadequate passing, your CA team skill would be:
[(7*5) + (2*5*5)] / 10 = (35 + 50) / 10 = 8.5 or mid level excellent.

There are several tools for calculating this if you do not wish to make your own, one of the most popular being the tool provided by IntroHT in which you simply enter the skill of your defenders defending, passing and form and get an output.

Okay, so now that I know I need to lose the midfield, what would be the optimal formation to use? This is of course very much up to how your opponent plays, but as you’re already “focusing on losing the midfield”, and since the basic concept of counter attacking builds upon outclassing your opponents attacks; you need to be focused on strengthening your defense AND also get good attack ratings. With this and the fact that your opponent has a stronger midfield in mind, we can quickly exclude all formations (more or less) that uses five midfielders as we don’t want to win the midfield. And, as we also need to have really high defense ratings, we really need to focus on four or five defenders.

This leaves us with 4-3-3, 5-3-2, 5-4-1, and the traditional 4-4-2 (5-2-3 has also been seen). In most cases counter attacking teams that always play CA opt for 4-3-3 or 5-3-2 to get a high rating mid forward and on one of the wings using an offensive winger. In other cases, teams trying to surprise their opponent by using CA in the occasional game, might often turn to the classical 4-4-2 as experience on this formation is always maximized.

Whatever way you might go about using this tactic, make sure you know what you’re getting yourself into and how you’re supposed to play it. Playing counter attacking the wrong way might see your team utterly useless in attack and unable to score. Plus, if your defense is not strong enough, this might not even give you a 0-0 point - but instead see you outclassed in many games to come.

Other common sources: Effective counter attacking by Bobymoore, Tactic: Counter-Attacking (CA) by Resak @ IntroHT.