Why do players completely ignore where I want to kick the ball?

My players are constantly passing to the wrong person, or into the path of an opposition player. It's REALLY ANNOYING.

An example from yesterday: Eboue took a throw in, threw it to Hleb, just like I wanted him to. Hleb then laid it off to Ibrahimovic who, instead of passing back to Hleb like I wanted played in completely the opposite direction to Gilberto Silva who also passed it the wrong way. It took me four or five passes to eventually get it to Hleb who, by this point had gone too wide to really do anything with it.

Another passing issue that often arises is with through balls, especially when I play a through ball with a winger. Rather than playing a defence splitting pass through to my forwards, they'll just boot it as hard as they can towards the goal line, so it ends up going out for a goal kick about 20 yards wide. what's that about?

FIFA 08 is basically broken, completely. It's just not much fun to play at all. EA really need to pull their collective fingers out in future. I mean, how can they take a pile-of-crap sport like Gridiron and make a game as brilliant as Madden while at the same time turning the beautiful game into something really rather ugly?

dude it happens to every one sometimes but it might be your settings. There are settings which decided how much your passing, croosing, shooting etc is assisted by the computer. maybe by changing these it might help you.