Zonal marking gets blamed because it is legible on television

When a corner is conceded, the camera shows a player standing in a space, and standing in a space looks like negligence.

A ball goes in from a corner and the replay shows a defender near the six yard line who did not jump with anybody. The studio has its answer within four seconds. Nobody was picking him up. That is the trouble with zonal marking, they say, and the manager gets asked about it in the press conference on Friday.

Now run the same goal conceded by a man-marking side. A defender is beaten by a runner. The camera shows a duel, one player getting in front of another, and the verdict is that a good header beat a defender. Same goal, same delivery, entirely different attribution, and the difference is not tactical. It is that a lost duel looks like sport and an unoccupied zone looks like an error of organisation.

Which means the two systems are not being judged on the same evidence, and the one that photographs badly has been retreating for years partly because of it. I think that is a poor reason for a tactical decision, and I have watched coaches who prefer zonal defending go hybrid purely to reduce the noise after a bad Saturday.

The actual argument for zonal defending is about attacking movement rather than defending. A man-marking system can be manipulated. Blockers, crowds at the near post, runners crossing each other to force switches, all of it exists to drag defenders out of the places where the ball is going to land. A zonal system cannot be dragged, because nobody is following anyone. You lose the guarantee that every attacker is accounted for and you gain the certainty that your best headers of the ball are standing where the ball usually goes.

Neither is right in the abstract. It depends on whether your squad has three genuinely dominant aerial defenders, in which case put them in zones, or one, in which case you had better mark the dangerous men individually and hope.

What should stop is treating one of them as a philosophy and the other as common sense. Both are bets. Only one of them gets a caption on the replay explaining that nobody took responsibility.