Here is a terrific article on medium.com that explores the fascinating question of whether Liverpool’s defenders are intentionally avoiding blocks of long shots. The writer (and I) are making inferences here — no one at LFC is coming out and telling anyone what they’re doing. But, if you’d asked me even before I read this whether LFC are doing this, I would have thoughtfully scratched my head, and then I would have said, “I think they probably are.” AFTER reading it, I’m almost completely convinced.
The only thing I would emphasize differently than the author is that I think this is less about avoiding blocks and more about pushing the attacker into a low-quality shooting position. Don’t get me wrong. I wholeheartedly agree that the LFC defenders have been trained to avoid blocking bad shots. But I believe the LFC defenders (mostly the CBs, but also the fullbacks) are concentrating mostly on forcing the opponent into an area/angle where, if the attacker shoots, he will be taking a lower value shot. When one-on-one with a ball carrier, LFC defenders very rarely slide in, and they don’t even step in to tackle very often. Instead, they “jockey.” The defender backs up against the approaching attacker, and the defender shades one side or the other, to push the ball carrier to the position that the DEFENDER wants them to be in. Then, if the ball carrier wants a shot from that (bad) angle/position, they can have it.
One added thought: the fullbacks are more typically defending against wide attackers who are carrying the ball from the wing toward the center of the box. Most of the time, those wide attackers are in a position where the biggest threat they pose comes from PASSING angles, not SHOOTING angles. While watching LFC I have paid far less attention to this point, because it involves scenarios with much less scoring threat in general. Nonetheless, I would bet a fair amount of money that, just as the CENTRAL defenders are trained to shepherd the ball carrier into low-value shooting positions, the LFC wide defenders are similarly trained to shepherd the attacker into low(er)-value passing positions. Of course, that’s a whole other set of data.
