I don’t agree with your interpretation mate, going man to man, doesn’t mean you are necessarily stuck to a man, it means you defend your area regardless of the man, you play the tactic in your role regardless of the player, but the player in your area is your responsibility, if it flips you compensate. It’s also not as dogmatic as you present, as I said above before their was ever a zonal marking system, their was always the scope in a man marking system, to attack the ball instinctively - we all know is you don’t stick with your man rigidly, the decision making peices is the art of defending. But also if you aren’t in the phase you are contributing by minimising the breakdown or the second phase.
That is also the premise of zonal, but puts more emphasis on attacking the ball, but on the more emphasised scope, difficulty is leaves gaps and as we see week after week, it’s leading to goals. Our players aren’t comfortable with it. It can be effective but I don’t think we have the players to utilise it properly, nor the players to manage the breakdown or transition, especially if the transition needs to go through central midfield.
I didn’t think either of their forwards was very good today. I thought we created our own problems today, set peices and crosses are a disaster in this system as it proved. Personally I would have have had our players right to a man, our players are far better defending man and ball rather than just ball. We struggled with the over load on the new lads side, I would have changed the blend in midfield in the 25 min stage the new lad struggled, deployed Alan a sweeper to that side and shut down the threat. Like they deployed Docherty on Gordon after the first 25 mins in the first half when he was roasting this full back.
