Team for Sunday

[pass the football]

I think you underestimate the ability of an attacking team to create dangerous zones by their own movement, you can't dictate to them what the dangerous zones are they create the dangerous zones as they control where the ball goes and where the best headers go. Man marking is a much more effective way of reacting to the movements of an attack. The second ball will be lightning fast and if the zones aren't well set and the ball falls to an attacker there's a strong chance that he will be in too much space.

This makes little sense to me. The dangerous zones are places which can be scored from. A header outside this area is not "dangerous" by that definition. If the ball subsequently comes into a dangerous zone it is dealt with by the defender in that zone.

You say "if the zones aren't well set and the ball falls to an attacker there's a strong chance that he will be in too much space". Well, yes. And in a man-marking situation, if the attacker loses his marker there's a strong chance he will be in too much space. In either case the system is being poorly implemented, that's not the fault of the system itself.

I see you agree our defence of set-pieces is bad. DO you think that we should persist with the current system as it clearly isn't working? Its possible zonal marking is a better system but I think it is being implemented very badly by pochettino and he would be better off man marking dangerous runners.

I don't know, but I would argue (and have done) that it's probably not the system which is at fault but the players. If after a period of time it becomes clear that these players will never adapt to this system, then it would probably be prudent to change it. But I have my doubts whether they would implement any system with total competence!

The same could be said of many other teams by the way, this is why set-pieces are dangerous for any team, no defence is perfect (though ours could certainly use more work than most).

 

[Lff]

Only two yellow cards for all that, equal top of the fair play table, early days though.

Obviously the fouls are spread throughout the team!

 

[pass the football]

Obviously the fouls are spread throughout the team!

Judging by what I've seen, most of them were committed by Lallana in one match