The Flying Dutchmen (TFD) was a Rocket League team that I joined in March of this year. This post will focus mostly on how we got TFD to achieve a top 4 finish at the LAN, but in doing so will cover a lot more (including an actual RL meta!). Get ready for Paint diagrams and for weird terms, which I had to think of myself.

I joined TFD after I was unable to find a team for RLCS Season 1. All the top players were gone and all the good players that fit my playstyle were gone too. I should quickly provide some extra info here, my playstyle is very ground-based and I’m a SARPBC vet. Me playing with a player who lives on the walls/in the air/etc generally doesn’t work very well. So, after a quick deliberation with myself whether I was just going to quit the scene, I decided that would be a waste. Instead of joining a RLCS S1-worthy team, I now had a new goal, join a team that can keep my level up so that I can find a team for season 2. I ran through a bunch of names in my head and eventually settled on Dogu, a player that had been playing for a top 20-ish team in EU and someone I had given a bunch of tips early on in the life of RL (think August). I saw him playing with JessiePinkmaann — a player who almost exclusively played 1v1 and as far as I knew, had no notable results in competitive — I grabbed him too. Played a bunch of 3s, played a Gfinity with them (while in the background still desperately trying to assemble a team of RLCS S1 players mind you). We did decently in it, so I ended up joining them (turned out they were a team with PauliePaulNL). The Gfinity run was a bit better than expected. We beat an ailing KA-POW 3-0 and got to the semi’s, thus I adjusted my expectations: we might get into group stage 2.

How to play

A problem from the get-go was that while we played decent together, it wasn’t anything exceptional. Teammates clashed every now and then. We didn’t have particularly good rotation. I quickly noticed that Dogu and Jessie (he changed his name because of the copyright rule in the RLCS rules) had issues with the pace of the top tier play, especially in how to position themselves and for which ball to go. I had to teach them how to play at the top tier. Thus the system was born. First, I decided we should play very strict rotation. Basically, if player 1 hits the ball and it goes out of his reach, it’s now player 2’s turn and so on. No exceptions. This meant we were terrible in attack but it gave us a decent enough defense. This is pretty simple to learn (though rather boring) so we had it figured out quickly enough. From there on, I would slowly start adding elements to the playstyle all the way through the RLCS season, with the goal to reach perfection with this way of playing and these players around the time of the LAN. That wasn’t with the intention of actually playing at the LAN, it was more or less just an end to the current “era” of Rocket League.

As described earlier, TFD’s playstyle was fundamentally based on very strict rotation, which I started changing in certain areas. Essentially, we had a bunch of rules full of exceptions and so on added on top of the very strict model of rotation. Time to actually start showing you what these rules are.

In general, I used to summarise them as: No rotation in defense, full rotation in offense. When the opponent has the ball, it is vital to contest every move, pass, shot. When we in TFD had the ball, we wanted to keep a certain structure, thus we followed a tightly set rotation. Also, we didn’t use communication during the game. Only between games.

Defensive standard situation #1

Defensive situation #1: clearing

The arrows are cars from our team. So what we have here is red (player 1) has the ball and will be trying to clear it. There are two ways to clear it. If red has enough boost he can take it up the wall and go for e.g. an aerial dribble. That’s almost never the case though, usually red will have almost no boost. So instead, red will try to clear the ball via 50/50s. Blue(player 2) will stay very closely behind red to get control over any 50/50s that red does not win. Meanwhile brown(player 3) will follow but stay at a distance (he could consider taking the boost from the right side of our half). Any ball with significant height will be for the third to go for, since both players at the front would have to launch almost straight up, which makes getting to the ball first more difficult and hitting the ball with sufficient power harder.

Offensive standard situation #1

Offensive situation #1: continuing on from defensive #1

Once players 1 and 2 reach the halfway line, 2 will move to the mid. Player 1 now has to try set it up for 2. Once past the halfway line, strict rotation commences. 1-2-3-1-2… The person furthest back (also known as the third) should never let the ball get past them. If the opponent will likely win the contest, then the third should not contest and just go back. If the ball does get past the third, the team is often doomed. At that point we can flail about all we want to try to save the ball, but at the end of the day, we’ll get scored on.

One important aspect of playing this way is dealing with opposition clears. If the opposition manages to clear the ball before player 1 is done setting up a chance for 2, it should be player 3 who goes to contest it and not player 2. The way we enforce this is by having the second player go for every single chance on goal, even if it’s barely a chance. Having the second player be up so far prevents him from contesting that clear. This is to avoid one of the common pitfalls of standard rotation, where a team gets stuck trying to set up a chance by constantly hitting it into the corner with no success. Having the third contest the clear is a decent solution to this problem. The second will wait near the goal while the third tries to set it up for him, say via a direct pass. Thanks to the third’s overview of the situation giving such a direct pass is quite easy to do.

Defensive standard situation #2

Defensive situation #2: chasing

Here, the black arrow is an opponent. We are talking from the perspective of blue. Blue is almost right next to the ball and going back, but black is taking the ball towards our goal. What should blue do? His possible choices are outlined by the purple lines. Blue can:

Tap the ball against the side wall

Cut in front of red and go up the wall (and defend the ball there). From now on we will call this near corner rotation .

. Queue up behind red at the second post, thereby letting red go for the ball, we call this long corner rotation.

Option 3 is what we did. This is because if blue messed up the defense for options #1 or #2, red would essentially be doomed. Furthermore, if blue were to acquire the ball via near corner rotation and then went for a counter-attack, red wouldn’t be able to catch up in time for particularly fast plays. Over time, constant near corner rotation will in fact increase the pace of the game to such a point that it stops being a ground-based game. Players will not have enough boost to go for dribbles and aerials so instead the game resolves to the familiar ping-pong, where the two teams are just bouncing the ball back and forth. In other words, for us, a slow-paced counter-attacking team, it was vital to always go for long corner rotation. This is not in any way the best way to play, it is simply one of the ways in which you can play.

Obeying this rule at all times takes a larger effort than one might think, and indeed this is where we had by far the most issues before RLCS matches. In the days before RLCS matches I would always have to pay a lot of attention to how my teammates drove back, since it was a common occurrence to see them rotating via the near corner. The thing to note here is that I didn’t always obey this rule (which was talked about openly) because it gave us significantly more offensive power. Why? I was our best shot at getting us out of pressure. Getting good clears has generally been one of my strengths, so we had to use that. As a result, whereas Jessie and Dogu would obey this rule, I every now and then wouldn’t, I would go for the near corner rotation and try to redirect red’s clear.

Defensive standard situation #3

Defensive situation #3: switching sides

Sometimes, the ball suddenly switches sides. That may be intentional or not. I personally do it quite a lot via contests while I don’t have enough boost. Slowly drive to an opponent with the ball, make them hit it, voila the ball dissapears to the other side. This works well because generally my teammates will have more boost than me. Not to mention the opponent having to deal with such a sudden change.

The problem here then is who goes for that ball? Is it the second or the third? For us, it always had to be the second. The reason is that when you have the third turning around, he usually arrives at the ball right after it has hit the wall (usually the corner). Generally, the timing of this is such that there will be a contest for the ball with an opponent right as it comes off the wall. The third will always be in a bad position to contest this and it’s no rare occurrence to see the ball then slam into the goal. Instead, we have the second go for that contest while the the third backs him up. Since the second player is also coming from further away, he will have more speed which favours him in the contest.

Roles

The combination of these standard situations resulted in what I can only describe as roles. Most misconceptions about TFD and its members came from (and still do come from) these roles. Because of the fact I sometimes went for the near corner rotation and my good clearing skills, during RLCS group stage 1 I was almost always the one clearing the ball. Because of that, I then had to set it up for Dogu or Jessie, who would be the second player. I usually went for a backboard setup, which Dogu and Jessie then scored. I almost never got a chance to finish. Only if the third was able to contain the ball in the opposition’s half and then set it up via the backboard to the other side would I be able to set it up. Because of the way this worked in practice, Dogu was almost always the second player. Thus all his goals. Not because Jessie or me were less good at finishing. No, simply because of a role. During the break between group stage 1 and 2 we actually experimented a bit with this. I had Jessie go for near corner rotations. As a result, I usually ended up in the second position. However, the problem then was that we no longer got enough setups. Our finishing of chances was more clinical, but we had less chances. We ended up switching back.

What has been described up till this point is what we used in group stage 1 of RLCS. We ended up beating the number one seed, We Dem Girlz, to get into that group stage in a for us amazing match. This yet again adjusted my expectations: fifth in group stage 1, probably fifth or sixth overall since SA was likely making group stage 2, and KA-POW would likely beat us out. Why the sudden change? Mostly, lack of notable teams. Both C&J and SA weren’t in group stage 1, both were better than us. Why not a larger change, you beat WDG after all? WDG wasn’t playing at their best and the match was a best of 3, which could not have been more perfect.

Up until that qualifier I saw us as the 8th team in EU. We were however still regularly struggling. It seemed like Jessie especially had issues following the strict rules when not under huge amounts of pressure. Large amounts of pressure lead to him following the rules extra carefully and so on. During the entire RLCS season, there was one time we were pretty confident in our abilities, week 1 of group stage 1. We’ve never under-performed that much in RLCS again, with a 1-4 against Precision Z being especially terrible, and we’ve never been that confident again either. Looking forward to qualifier 2, we knew we had to improve more. We finished 5th in group stage 1, and the competition in group stage 2 would only be more tough.

Offensive standard situation #1, again

First off, a quick adaption to this age old scenario. Because of the weird situation where the third player was not allowed to have the ball get past them while also having to contest the ball if it got cleared, we had the first player break rotation to go into the corner again. That took pressure off the third. In addition, it allowed for more creative plays.The first player was now coming from the side, meaning he could e.g. go up the wall and air dribble it to mid.

Defensive standard situation #4

Defensive situation #3: setting up a potential redirect

We also had an issue with clearing the ball effectively. Often, we would go for a hard clear, which would then be blocked and hit back immediately. From now on, whenever the player leading the counter-attack failed to get through and lost the ball, he had to travel to the next boost. This had a good impact on our play, since now the second player could ram it to the first and there would be a nice little redirect, usually to the backboard, which the second player could then finish off. Furthermore, to add more redirects we would now have whoever was last back in defense be a little slower to come back, so that they could redirect the ball if it came to them.

The LAN

Building up to the LAN we had some rather bad results in Rocket Royales and the likes. Almost all of those results were caused by one of us not following the above rules properly because of the lack of pressure on us in these smaller tournaments. Thus my confidence that we would beat Kings of Urban even with those bad results, they did not truly represent us. Under the right amount of pressure, we would follow the rules and thus perform. The LAN, from the outside, was a good result for us. However, I saw some huge flaws in our team play and in our decision making in both of the 0-3s we had during the LAN. In my opinion at the time, these problems were keeping us from being a true top tier team (fighting for the #1 spot).

Try to spot us applying the rules of the system

Our playstyle was simply not top-tier worthy, I saw no more room to improve it. This is something that can be applied to most counter-attacking teams. When these teams are able to defend, they’re at their best. Yet put them against an even more defensive team, such as a lower ranked team, and you’ll suddenly see them have difficulties. So we did try changing it all up, but it was apparent very quickly that we had no real synergy, our team play was built entirely by the system we had employed. Especially Jessie was just playing a completely different game than me and Dogu (not necessarily bad). It felt as if to get to the LAN in season 2, we would need another miracle. Competition in the EU top 10 had stepped up hugely, so the chances of us doing as well again were marginal at best. I personally find it a huge pity that we couldn’t make it work, especially given our team identity, but the time frame before season 2 was simply too short. If you weren’t already playing well at that point (and we weren’t), you weren’t going to fix it, I know that from experience. Hence, we decided to disband.