Okay so that makes sense. A problem is knowing when to apply speed. Everyone knows that you need to stop sprinting to make a 100% perfect contact with the ball but what not everyone knows is that you can use no-touch to modify the angle of your approach to the ball in quite fine detail versus using LT+RT for a fully manual (and often freakishly bad) attempt at the same.
The trick then is to let the ball cross your path and then sprint as it passes your player's foot so that you run onto it at full speed. If there's space ahead of you you can instead take a light first touch and then tap it on for a burst.
The real key here is that the way to run quickly and effectively with a football is often not to just sprint as fast as possible but to time those bursts of pace carefully. You can avoid chasing defenders entirely just by not sprinting at the right time, with a slight change of direction - their momentum can carry them right on by.
I play with fast players out wide (and rarely ever buy players slower than a certain number, in fairness) but my three teams all have a slow-ish CFs (Rooney, Higuain, Martinez) in comparison. I'm not the best ever but I do pretty well and do not have any difficulty breaking away from central defenders, even faster ones like Caceres.