This I believe to be the key, but I'm absolutely dreadful at skill moves.
I'd love to see a nice tutorial that explains just a few of these "slight" skill/dribbling moves, in particular the ones that are
effective.
I'm not at all interested in the complicated stuff, no matter how effective. It's enough to micromanage 10 footballers within a tightly contested match. The last thing I can afford is to remember which FATALITY! combination will beat a defender 1v1.
What typically happens when I try to get cheeky dribbling has already been described by aarontab's post above: I smack the ball off a defender's shin, it rolls directly to one of his teammates and they go nuts on the counterattack.
Another observation worth making: The blocked shots themselves and the deflections that follow are comically absurd this year. I can't tell you how many times one of my attacking players will crank an 80% power (or higher) shot that gets blocked by the CPU and ricochets
very gently three feet safely in front of the defender or his teammate. I *rarely* see a deflection head anywhere near the CPU's goal. It's like it magically loses almost all its velocity. The ball physics are pretty terrible in that regard.