Poor defense of set pieces

[dww]

The other day I was commenting on how we had seemingly got much worse in this area despite not radically changing personnel but I have been thinking about it and I have a feeling that the change in the balance of the team has had a big effect.

It is interesting that we seemed to be better last season when Agger was playing more than Hyypia. There would appear to be two possible explanations for this:
1/ Teams have found the flaws in our system
or
2/ Our system put a lot of emphasis on the other members of the team defending their zones correctly and the change in players in other areas has had a bigger than might be expected effect.

I tend to believe that other than a few specific instances (the United goal from the corner in their 1-0 win) it is point 2. The key changes for me were that we played a less settled back four that saw more games for Aurelio and Arbeloa at fullback and the lack of games for Sissoko and I don't think Babel is as diligent as other players in this area either.

The question then arises how we will improve again next season? I'm not sure that we wouldn't benefit more overall from having fullbacks that were good in the air (and provided decent crosses) than the more popular, at least on here, marauding attacking wingback types.

On a related note is Gareth Barry any good in the air defensively?

[Exiled_red]

I tend to agree with you it's mostly point two new players coming into the system last season we more or less never changed the back four (Finnan, Carragher, Agger and Riise) you would assume all the defenders would be in the most important zones.

This season with alot of changes to the players in that system people have been moved about to different zones and new players have come in who aren't used to the zonal system (Skertel, Aurelio, Arbeloa etc) Also I think we've lost a bit of height and presence in the box which doesn't help either

[BFG]

When Hyppia plays we also tend to defend a lot deeper which means that more free kicks are going to be conceded around the box and therefore are harder to defend.

Playing a higher line with Agger in the team means that teams don't get as much of the ball round our box, pressure doesn't build in the same way and we have less set pieces to defend. I don't have any figures to back this up but it seems to make sense to me.

I also think the fullbacks that have featured prominently this year (Aurelio and Arbeloa) aren't quite as good in the air as Finnan and Riise and also Crouchey hasn't been on the pitch much to add his height to out defending of set pieces.

[El Jefecito]

I thought we got better towards the end of the season.

[Parm]

I thought we got better towards the end of the season.

so did I, Skittles seems to have picked up on the system quite well now.

[ronanm]

We conceded a phenomenol number of goals from set pieces this season - cannot remember how many but at one stage of the season some commentator we had conceded about 3 goals from open play and the rest (about 17) from set pieces. Don't quote me on that though (or I'll sue you sory a$$)

[Jack D Rips]

I thought we got better towards the end of the season.

Agree entirely. In fact in the past few weeks I was starting to think that we had dropped the zonal marking system

[PLY]

I think Arsenal tried to get around our system by 'flooding' one particular zone

[leftpeg]

And down the other end we are still terrible at taking corners and free kicks.