Leicester’s set-piece defending is making the team a laughing stock

Here is an example from the Chelsea 0-3 defeat: when the Blues had a corner, the Northern Irish gaffer placed his team in an awful zonal marking structure designed to fill the danger areas with our defenders. What Thomas Tuchel did was plainly obvious.

There are two ways to best a zonal marking system, one is to pull players out of space, or to create an opportunity from without the danger zone around the six yard area. Tuchel used the former option.

For Antonio Rudiger to find free space to attack into, another player began to make movement from the danger zone to outside the danger zone. This movement forced a Leicester defender – lacking awareness of Rudiger – to move into the space to pressure that player. However, by leaving his previous space, the scorer simply walked into that space and receive the corner kick to net a free header.

That is laughably obvious as a way of breaking a zonal marking system and it has been used against us multiple times. The latter option, the circumvention, was used against us by Aston Villa and Southampton. In both matches, cute short routines broke the shape of the zonal defence and used other free space to create the opportunities, rather than just whipping the ball straight into the box.