Cross Balls

[Spiritof62]

In the modern game chucking balls in the box is regarded as the easiest tactic to defend against.

It was obvious on Saturday that this remains our biggest weakness, at least one ball in three had us really stretched.

Clean sheets are massive for us in the run in, however it looks like we some way from achieving this and it's bloody frustrating.

[gedee]

Spirit I can understand the point you are making & I am no' doubting it's validity. But are you no ' being a wee bit to hard on yourself (& the players)

Maybe better at this time to just enjoy the moment? NM had only a few days to turn around seven  defeats into a winning game ...

He did it. Do you know think he saw the game on Sat & tightening up the defence will be part of his plans?

[Wattie Rojas]

It is definitely a weakness of ours. However we also scored our 3 goals from crosses.

I always felt ph played too narrow and hardly any of our goals came from out wide.

Look at how many of Aberdeens goals come from crosses to see how effective it can be.

[Cobra]

Against Motherwell, we conceded two goals in that second half, they had another goal wrongly chalked off and Bain was in top form. Seems we cannot protect our goal.

You look at Partick. Since Christmas they have conceded 11 goals in 15 games (same as Aberdeen and just one more than Celtic). What's their secret? Are they trained better than us or do they just have better defenders?

 

[blueboy]

1 hour ago, Cobra said:

Against Motherwell, we conceded two goals in that second half, they had another goal wrongly chalked off and Bain was in top form. Seems we cannot protect our goal.

You look at Partick. Since Christmas they have conceded 11 goals in 15 games (same as Aberdeen and just one more than Celtic). What's their secret? Are they trained better than us or do they just have better defenders?

 

Motherwell did nothing first half apart from that cross cum shot, and neither did we, apart from score. Bain had to make maybe three good saves overall, one especially. They were unlucky that goal wasn't given, ha ha.

Don't agree about cross balls being easy to defend, quite the opposite. Surely the trick is stopping the crosses come in.

[Billy Campbell's Ghost]

We have been dire at dealing with crosses all season. Fact.

[WoodStein]

I managed to convince myself that our failure to deal with crosses was largely due to (i) Bain being told not to come out for them, and (ii) using 'zonal marking' but failing to get players to attack the ball in their 'zone'. McCann highlighted the latter bit on one of our Sky games.

I was anticipating that this was one of a few things McCann would change, but we still seemed to be failing to attack the ball on Saturday....though I think Bain seemed to be back to coming out for a few.

Killie will likely be aiming a few at Sammon, and they have a couple of very tall defenders (Ajer is 6'4"), so I'm guessing that defending crosses will be one item on this week's training agenda....as well as cutting them out.

[Dundeefc1783]

Let's give McCann a chance to sort the defence he's not a miracle worker it will take time 

[chomp my root]

11 minutes ago, Dundeefc1783 said:

Let's give McCann a chance to sort the defence he's not a miracle worker it will take time 

What...

NM OOOOOT !

[EastLothianBlue]

1 hour ago, chomp my root said:

What...

NM OOOOOT !

1st of May and this already wins the post of the month!! Brilliant! 

[Edin_Dee]

When Ghadz doesn't play we don't have a centre half who is dominant in the air. Gomis did well on Saturday but I'd still rather have Ghadz for that reason.

The other thing of course, as someone pointed out above, is we don't stop the crosses coming in enough. You're not going to stop every cross but we should be able to block more than we do.

 

[Cobra]

You'd think with modern technology we could just solve our defensive problems by cloning Brian Irvine.