Brendan Rodgers
Leicester City’s set-piece woes have been caused by a lack of willpower as much as a lack of organisation, manager Brendan Rodgers has said.
Brendan Rodgers said: “Defending corners is about organisation, but it’s primarily about wanting to put your head on it, that’s the reality of defending. You can go zonal, you can block, you can go man-to-man. In defending a corner, you have to have that will to head it. If not, you’ll suffer, and that’s unfortunately what has happened to us too often this season. It’s something we’ll keep talking on, we’ll keep looking at, we’ll keep analysing. We’ll get out of the rut that it is, and the anxiety that has built up around it. We have shown over enough games that we can defend them well. That was deflating to concede from a set-piece, when we were set up with good numbers and good height to deal with it.”
Rodgers had introduced Jannik Vestergaard for the final few moments of the game, but the big Dane could not deal with the injury-time corner. His job was to marshal the six-yard box, Rodgers said.
Brendan Rodgers said: “We had numbers. Everyone was marked up. The guys were fine. He (Vestergaard) was to go in and be around that six-yard box. The guys had coped well with that, Daniel and Wilf, so there was no need to change. It was really then going back into the six-yard box. For us to concede in that moment was very disappointing. We obviously made the changes to have that extra height in there and deal with that static position, so for them to get the header inside the six-yard box was bitterly disappointing.”
