As we've seen all year, Pep Guardiola has not played with anything approaching a consistent starting eleven. And it's indicative of one of the main issues with zonal marking in general that being the concept of familiarity. Kroos does his best impression of a statue. Müller doesn't respond as Ramos enters his zone allowing a completely. Boateng and Mandzukic both focus on guarding out Benzema allowing Pepe au uncontested near post run. What's really poor though is the rest of the set piece. While Modric's cross was fantastic, it was Ramos' run that gave him the necessary perspective to judge the flight path and correct while Ronaldo's almost herculean leap was just enough to fool the Bayern Munich defense as both Dante and Schweinsteiger challenged him. Marking the central space are Kroos, Schweinsteiger, and Müller. Straight across the 6-yard box, Bayern Munich used it's main aerial threats in Mario Mandzukic, Jerome Boateng, and Dante. In Tuesday's game, leaving players unmarked was the same final problem, only the fundamental issue was failed zonal marking itself. That ultimately culminated in both the Manchester United set piece goals as players, were left uncovered. The main issue there was the prevalence of aerial targets and the dearth of aerial defenders for Bayern Munich. In the Manchester United match Bayern Munich used a hybridized system which was a good option given their lineup selection. After the initial clearance, the defensive style relies on secondary clearances to clear zones. While they're the one's we remember the most vividly, it's often times the second ball that's killer and what zonal marking is aimed to prevent. The vast majority of goals scored directly after set pieces aren't scored from the initial shot. It's a balanced formation and with his increasing reliance on technical players to retain possession in lieu of aerial options like Javi Martinez, covering all the areas of the box is the major concern. While the jury stills out on whether man-marking or zonal marking is more effective at preventing goals from set pieces, as Michael Cox noted in a fantastic review on set piece zonal marking, "the major benefit of a zonal system is that it is proactive it covers space evenly across the danger zone, meaning players don't get dragged out of position or blocked off by opponents." That's the big key to why Pep Guardiola uses it. Zonal marking in this context is all about team play and team structure. It's archaic, wrong, and not how Bayern Munich played set piece defense this year.
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Most announcers we as English speaking denizens on this planet are going to hear, prattle on about who marked the runner, doesn't this idiot know how to defend set pieces, blah, blah, blah. Classical English football and many pundits are schooled in the philosophy of man-marking. It's one of the biggest battles still to be fought in modern football (thankfully, open play man marking went the way of the dodo a long time ago). The first thing that should immediately pop out is the insistence on zonal marking during the set piece.