As a corollary, you can also practice to death how you defend set pieces beforehand, which is why having a free kick on offense in the attacking third has always been a good potential situation for a team, it’s never been so prone to scoring as it is now.
The notable thing is that in recent years, and especially seen in late qualifying and now into the tournament, there is an absolute explosion in the scoring efficiency of set pieces.
Also, a chicken-and-egg thing here as well: as analytics in world cup soccer improve, managers are also recognizing the opportunity that set pieces offer, and they’re greatly improving those offensive tactics.
It’s absolutely created a kind of market inefficiency right now in that area of the game.
What’s interesting to me watching England is that they clearly have different routines for when the opposition marks zonally compared to man marking.
Against the 3-3 zone shell Tunisia played you saw England park four players at the top of the box and then run three players through the higher zones, leaving a fourth player that isn’t automatically picked up. Tunisia actually moved from zonal to man marking partway through that game.
Then there’s focus on the cute goal yesterday where Henderson pulls short off the line to spin the ball over the top that led to Stones’ second goal, but I really liked the first one. England had players run in and take their man with them, but Stones was actually about four yards outside the box and he ran around a pick set by Ashley Young, which is why he was completely free for the header.
You can see all of Panama’s defence turn and yell at the man meant to mark Stones while he yanks his own jersey and tries to explain he was impeded.
Young is the furthest player to the right here.
Then at the last second he walks in behind the player marking Stones.
The other English players run front and back post, which gives Stones wide open space right in the middle for the goal. Then all the Panamanian defenders turn to shout at #2 while he tries to explain what happened.
I’ve been reading about Southgate and it’s pretty interesting. He studied a lot of NBA film because he was curious about how NBA players make space around the hoop in a 5-on-5 game on such a small court. And he’s really focused on set pieces, which is how most of their goals have been scored. It’s difficult to engineer open space goals because the national teams are composed of players who don’t play together all that much, which really emphasizes the importance of set pieces in tournaments such as this.
Hell, he even attended the Super Bowl earlier this year because he wanted to study the American way of coaching and playing under such tremendous pressure.
https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1upheBSjU4W-yQajry_p6LBWX_2MGMupDDnx8oi7mbVU/htmlview
The newest standings. Thank you once again @rho21 for your standings. It made me realize I was a couple of games short for a couple of teams. The standings have yesterday’s games included.
Also what the hell, Poland? What the hell?
My theory is the other teams have been taught to tease them about ponies.
-xtien
“It’s been an emotional day.”
I don’t know if this is true or not, but it looks like Poland is how you divided teams up into pools. Each pool has one team that didn’t select Poland in their group, I think. Or close to that. In my pool, that’s me.
I’m not sure what Dingus is complaining about. The Murawski’s are still leading their pool even without Poland. :-P
Who wouldn’t love a person that had a pony?
I had an amazing text back-and-forth with my son last night. He was really upset about Poland. Here’s how it went…
K: But Poland are out [frowny cry faces times four].
Me: Yes. That really sucks. But you have to give it to Ospina. Dude was a rock star today.
K: [frowny]
Me: Yeah. Me too.
K: I can’t believe we were eliminated by the second choice goalkeeper at Arsenal and Yerry fricking Mina.
Me: I know. Poland didn’t show up. I’m really disappointed.
K: I mean…YERRY MINA! [more super frownies than I care to count]
Me: But James. There’s James!
K: I DON’T GIVE A CRAP WE LOST TO YERRY MINA. JAMES DIDN’T EVEN SCORE.
Me: Pretend it was James.
K: [crying frownies]
So, aside from the lesson I need to teach him about my rule about not saying “we” about a team you aren’t actually playing on–I have a thing about that–I think you can see what I’m on about. My kid has some opinions.
-xtien
Apologies in advance for all of my posts about any sports team I follow. I don’t actually see myself as part of the team, (even though I’ve been “on” the team longer than any of the players), but I do use it as a lazy shorthand, instead of having to type out their name all the time.
Ha. I have no problem with you saying “we” about Scotland. But you have to add an extra ‘e’ when you do it.
-xtien
Well he did get all three assists, didn’t he?
I don’t know. I do know he played well, and when I tried to make that point my boy replied, “Dad, I’m tired. I need to go to bed.”
He wasn’t having it.
There are a couple of players he just cannot stand. He loves James, but cannot abide Mina. Also some dude who bites people a lot. And some guy who is a dirty player named Costa or something.
-xtien
Luis Suarez (Uru) and Diego Costa (Esp).
I’m really impressed. One thing I can’t stand is when there’s players of a sport who don’t even know their own sport. Back when I was a freshman, we had a men’s tennis team in college. And when i talked to them, it was really obvious that they didn’t follow tennis at all. They knew who Agassi and Sampras were, but they didn’t follow the French Open, or know most of the top players in the sport even. So I cried no tears when the Men’s team was cut later that year so that we could have more Football players (Title IX rules meant we had to have equal numbers of men and women).
At least the women knew and followed the sport. They even used to watch the Australian and US Opens with us sometimes.
Loved this!
The vast majority of people interested in Mexico, are not watching on Fox.
What is that? A comic strip? I don’t get it.
