Zonal marking gets blamed because it has no name attached

Set-piece systems are judged by which errors are legible on television rather than by how many goals they actually prevent.

A corner comes in, an attacker heads it home from six yards, and the commentary is immediate. Nobody picked him up. That is what happens with zonal marking.

Notice what nobody says when a team marks man to man and an attacker beats his marker at the near post. Nobody says that is what happens with man marking. They say the defender lost his man, which is a criticism of a person rather than a system, and personal criticism is somehow easier for a manager to absorb than an accusation that his whole method is naive.

This asymmetry is the entire reason zonal marking has a bad reputation, and it is a reputation built almost entirely on how blame reads on television rather than on what the goals-conceded column says.

The mechanics are worth being clear about. A zonal system defends the space where the ball is most likely to arrive, with defenders facing the ball, moving forward onto it, and attacking it with momentum. That is a genuine advantage: a defender coming forward beats a defender backpedalling almost every time. Its weakness is that a well-timed run from a blind angle can arrive into a zone at speed while the defender there is stationary, and the resulting goal looks like nobody was doing anything.

Man marking has the mirror problem. Defenders face their man rather than the flight, they can be dragged anywhere the attacker chooses, and the attacking side gets to design blocks and screens to create the separation they want. A goal conceded that way looks like one player's failure, which is why it hurts a manager less.

Almost every serious side plays a hybrid now, which tells you the argument was settled by practitioners a while ago even if it is still running on phone-ins.

What actually decides set-piece defending is duller than either label. The height and aggression of the first contact, whether the goalkeeper claims anything at all, whether the delivery is allowed to be good in the first place. A team that lets an unpressured specialist swing an outswinger onto the six-yard line will concede regardless of scheme.

So when a pundit blames the zone, ask a follow-up question. How many of the goals came from a run into space, and how many came because the cross was perfect and the second contact was never contested? I know which answer usually comes back.