Chelsea's Zonal Marking Tactics; Would This Be Frank Lampard's Achilles Heel?

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Some four days ago Frank Lampard's Chelsea played against Lille in the Champions League and over and over again you could sense the disastrous defending against set pieces. It is almost as if any time the French team were on a set piece there is bound to be a shot on target or a threat to the goal post and is becoming too extreme. Time and time and over again it has completely worsened and you could see a disastrous outing against Liverpool of which Chelsea could have drawn if they were able to defend just a set piece brilliantly converted by Arnold Trent and the young English manager Lampard seems satisfied to just outscore his opponents.

In my opinion this is a wrong tactics in football coaching. His zonal marking hasn't really been working and they have conceded more goals to set pieces in this current campaign. I will agree that he is very young and still lacks the experience but even as at this, i see zonal marking as a lack of discipline in the defense and even if it helps you cover more ground it makes the defenders very lazy and lacks purpose as to what to do in a defence line during defending of a set piece and the fact that lampard has failed to understand this yet is infuriating ad well as disappointing based on the fact that he played in Chelsea where rigidity and defensive strength wins you the league.

first of all, Chelsea is equipped with very physical defenders and this would make it bad to adopt zonal marking the truth is that zonal marking works when you don't have very physically strikers competing for the ball on the air in a less physical league and when you currently look at the Chelsea defense line you'll see players like Zouma and Alonso and most times they often tend to get overzealous and forget themselves when defending and sometimes I think you need to study the abilities and the weaknesses and also the strength of your players in order to know how to fully utilise them and this is what Frank Lampard is currently not doing. As a football player myself zonal marking makes for errors and when these errors happen you can't individually place a finger on the player that is culpable and because of this you can't certainly punish the whole defence line knowing that it was a collective mistake and this is a real bummer when it comes to coaching.

I am still surprised that a coach would still keep using a tactic of zonal marking in the EPL where we have individual players that are brilliant on set pieces, even when you look at Antonio Conte's squad of 3-5-2 it was based on individual marking and makes it easier to identify a culprit that makes a lot of defensive errors. That said Frank Lampard is playing to the gallery with a tactical approach that's not suitable for a team like Chelsea. Without a doubt, this is the real reason why they keep conceding goals even after the attack line has made or done a decent job of scoring this isn't really the Spanish League when you don't worry about the defence but only outscoring your opponent because when your opponent discovers this tactics they only tend to defend and hit you on the counter-attack and how do you have answers to this?

At Derby County zonal marking worked a lot for Lampard but we have to understand that that is the championship anything goes. the truth was that The Rams were one of the team that conceded the most goals last season and yet they were also a high scoring side only outdone by Aston Villa in the EFL playoffs. Truth is Derby could have been promoted had they conceded lesser amount of goals but this is really a tactical aspect that the futuristic effect isn't really calculated and an experienced football manager should understand the essence of keeping clean sheets and this isn't really the Englishman. In essence, this might be Chelsea's on doing this season and until the new approach is taken towards defending set pieces it may come back to haunt them. Zonal Marking is a negative for me in Chelsea and isn't working one can tell that the defence line is shambolic and without a player like Antonio Rudiger the Chelsea fans might be so quick to forget that Lampard was once their legend if this preposterous display keeps continuing without a solution to it.



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