It’s one of the age old questions of football: how do you set up your team’s defence? Do you opt to utilise a system of man marking, zonal marking, or perhaps our seemingly preferred method (especially last season) of praying that the opposition’s players possess no ability to move, pass or shoot?
Before I get into the crux issue of this piece regarding our club’s defensive ineptitude at times, I’ll take a moment to briefly explain how each of the aforementioned systems work for those who are unsure.
Man Marking: This system is based around the idea that each player on one team is assigned to a player on the opposing team, and is thereby near solely responsible for defending against the man who they have been assigned to.
Zonal Marking: The difference between this system and man marking is relatively self-explanatory. Instead of being assigned a man to mark, each player carries out their defensive duties in a set area of the pitch and at times is therefore responsible for defending against multiple opposing players at once.
So let’s now talk about Norwich’s defensive setup. On paper we utilise the zonal marking system, however there are some key issues with our implementation of this method when on the pitch. The most salient of these in my opinion is that we often show seemingly no desire whatsoever to actually close down the man on the ball. Time and time again last season we saw opposing players run obscene distances (sometimes 30 yards or more) near completely unobstructed and create a chance that was totally preventable.
Chris Hughton had the team playing in a heavily regimented manner, which was useful in terms of not getting caught out at the back, but utterly pointless unless players were willing to put in a tackle. In addition to this, playing in such a rigid fashion is massively detrimental to any consistent form of expressive attacking football of our own, and as result we often find ourselves huddling in and around our own box desperately attempting to see off the barrage of shots from the opposition.
Do I think man marking is the answer to our defensive fragility? Not entirely, but I do think that it has some significant advantages, especially to our attacking play. Regardless of which defensive system we elect, we have to close down the man on the ball at the first available juncture – that’s a given. If we can get that sorted then I believe that man marking could offer us some key benefits.
Firstly, it would allow for our players to move more freely meaning that once we have possession of the ball, counter-attacks could be started far quicker as players wouldn’t be constrained by having to stay in their own zone. Furthermore, player communication would be less important as individuals would only have to worry about the man they’ve been assigned to, and since our back line is ever-changing it’s difficult to build understanding between the players. Conflictingly, zonal marking does come with the benefit of allowing players to provide cover for a teammate who has lost the man they were assigned to, and therefore often preventing easy goals. It’s also the better of the two systems when it comes to defending against over the top/through-balls due to the fact that our players would be defending their zone and wouldn’t be on their man’s shoulder, although we would perhaps suffer less with this problem than other teams due to us having mobile defenders at our disposal such as Olsson and Bassong.
In conclusion, I’m not massively for or against either of these methods as my issue isn’t so much with the zonal marking system, but with our implementation of it. It’s clear to me that alterations to our defensive side of play are very much necessary. Given the state of the team currently, with a defence that is far from set in stone, I wouldn’t mind trialling the man marking system – it could well be a small change that has a huge impact. There were many teams in the BPL with poor defensive records, but unlike our club at the time, a lot of them found it far easier to score goals and scoring goals is crucial to success.
