Leicester City have a poor record from set-pieces this season. Supporters and pundits have been bemused as a result, here is what you should know.
The 2021/22 season has been a rough one for Leicester. Despite being the sixth highest goal-scorers with 23 goals, the Foxes have conceded 27. That makes them the fourth worst defensive side in the league.
A large contributor to that has been set-pieces: including both corner kicks and free kicks. That being said, our largest weakness is not hard to analyse. Brendan Rodgers’ Foxes have conceded six goals directly from corners according to FB Ref, and possibly more in the direct aftermath of corners.
So, what are pundits saying about Leicester?
Leicester City keep ‘spoiling’ it
According to Micah Richards, the King Power side have played really well this season from an attacking standpoint, creating plenty of good opportunities from patient attacking play. However, this is being spoilt by our defensive play.
"“For all of Leicester’s good play, they’re spoiling their game with set pieces” ~ Richards via LeicestershireLive"
It is also not hard to see how a pundit could say this. Everyone is saying this. It is no secret how the Foxes try to defend set-pieces, and this is perhaps part of what makes it so easy to circumvent or break apart.
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.
This could have been a short pass routine which was received by a player outside the penalty box, then passed into a near perfectly positioned player for a shot, or a short pass leading to a cross from a different angle.
In either scenario, pundits and supporters cannot help but laugh at how easily the zonal system can be utterly destroyed and how easily a routine can completely ignore the space our defenders take up in defence of set pieces.
It is so laughable that corner kicks are now considered more dangerous to the King Power side than penalty kicks. The Foxes have conceded from corners multiple matches in a row, which is ridiculous.
Now imagine what the world would be like should the defensive structure be reasonably competent from corners. Let us assume we still concede one or two corners, even then we concede five less and are level with Arsenal for goals conceded.
There has got to be changes to the way Leicester defend, because listening to pundits like Richards demote us to the mid-table scrap is honestly frustrating. Frustrating even more when the previous two seasons saw us challenging for Champions League as this time of the season.