General questions about the game. Feel free to give any tips.

I am only playing my 3rd WL in FC24. Not quite there with understanding the game yet. I win DR more often than not. About to reach Div 3 soon. Have also won a draft. But having a real hard time in WL. Reached 9 wins in the previous two, but felt like I could easily reach 11 or higher in both. So I'd like to know a few things especially with whats meta and what's not. I had decided not to care about meta this year but it looks like FC24 is either meta or nothing. Been losing to really poor player with zero footballing sense owing to some rebounds or sticky football or whatsoever.

So I'd like to know a few things:

  1. Is lobbed pass or lobbed through ball a meta? People seem to be trying to do that every now and then and no matter how I easily i can anticipate, I can't seem to win the ball cleanly? I don't have the best of players but still I'd imagine CBs can head the ball easily.

  2. Is it better to defend with your CDM and let your backline be controlled by AI until its a last ditch tackle? I usually do otherwise, by controlling the nearest player and trying to either cut passing lanes or win the ball 1v1. But manual defending definitely was never consistently rewarding, but I cannot seem to intercept the passes even though I have positioned my player correctly. I see opponents marker on the CDM but their defenders just easily take the ball or intercept the passes. I somehow never trusted this but i guess FC24 has been built with stronger AIs to reduce skill gap. Any notes on this would be nice.

  3. What's with the final through balls? Like after opening up the whole defence and even after going into a 2v1 3v1 situations that one final through ball more often than not gets cut out by the final defender? Like there's ample of space to pass it to but it goes straight to the defender and ofc the ball sticks to it. Its like my players are passing directly to him. Are grounded through balls not as effective as it should be?

  4. Any ways to defend R1 dribbling? Ball keeps bouncing off.

Thank you in advance.