Defending Corners - Why Am I Conceding So Many

The Problem

I'm sure I am not the only player who has been getting increasingly frustrated at the inability of their side to defend consistently well from corner kicks. Although we've been poor at taking corner kicks, we have leaked far too many goals from corners, and I felt was therefore something that needed to be looked at.

What I saw at first though seemed to be sensible, with our full backs on the posts, and every attacking player in the box marked by one of our players. What I realised though was that Balanta (Heading 6), was one of these markers, and Buzsaky (Heading 8), seemed to often be up against someone with much better heading skills. The attacking team seemed to be mostly targetting the player who was being marked by one of the least capable players in my team, at heading.

When I checked the default settings for defending corners, I found that Fatih Yucel (Heading 18), was set to remain forward, and Balanta to be back. This was bad for a couple of reasons, being that Fatih Yucel is much better at heading the ball, and Balanta has a lot more pace, so better able to take advantage of any counter attack that might come from clearing the corner. Oddly Buzsaky's default was to be forward, but was in fact going back to help out at corners.

A Possible Solution

One thing was obvious, that I needed to have Balanta up front, and Fatih Yucel to come back and help out defending the corner. I was okay with the idea of Buzsaky being back, but he would need to be against someone that would most likely not be a bad mismatch.

The change between my two strikers was simple, changing Balanta to "Stay Forward". Fatih Yucel I changed to "Mark Tall Player" because, although he isn't particularly tall, he has excellent jumping and heading skills, so can challenge most players very well.

What to do with Buzsaky though, as I wanted to keep the wingers with their settings of "Stay Forward." The options available are shown in the above picture. I decided the only sensible idea might be to set him to "Mark Small Player." This way I felt he would have a reasonable chance of challenging such a player. The settings for the team ended up being:

How Well Did It Work?

So far I've only tested it in one match, that being against Tottenham. They have Crouch and Pavlyuchenko up front, both tall and good at heading the ball. Their centre backs are also fairly tall and good at heading too, so felt this would be a decent test of how well this change has worked.

Success for it would be if we are able to get to the majority of the headers first. Conceding will always be a possibility, but the idea is to try and make sure the number of chances created at corners is reduced to as few as possible.

I have to say I am happy with what I've seen. We managed to defend the majority of corners properly by getting to the ball first. The only balls they did get to first, went wide of the goal and never posed any threat. I will only know how well this has worked if we continue to defend corners this well during our next few matches. Hopefully this will reduce the number of goals we concede at corners.

Conclusion

I now realise that I really should have looked at this when I first started, and feel slightly silly for not thinking about this before. I think I'd largely ignored it because against teams that didn't have players with particularly good heading attributes, we'd been defending corners okay, they weren't able to set up the same player mismatch. I wonder how many other players have been doing the same, by being completely ignorant of the causes of this problem.

So as to give a reasonable comparison, I had saved the game under a different name before making the changes. I then played the Tottenham match with the default settings, and we were completely and utterly terrible at defending corners. Tottenham were getting to almost every corner they took and they scored from one. I only played the first half, but they got 7 corners and got a head to 6 of those scoring from one, with our keeper having to save most of the others. It definitely appears from this that the change has made a huge difference, so I encourage everyone else to look closely to see which players they have defending at corners. Such a simple change seems as though it will make a big difference through the season. Something else to bear in mind is what happens after you make a substition, because they may end up being a liability at corners.