NATHAN JONES has attempted to explain his side’s set-piece frailties after Saints were once again punished for failing to deal with a dead-ball situation on Saturday against Aston Villa. A tight encounter at St Mary’s was decided with just over 12 minutes to play when Saints lost concentration defending a free-kick and allowed Ollie Watkins to ghost in and score the only goal of the game. Saints have already conceded five Premier League goals from set-pieces since Jones arrived in November while they lead the division in set-piece goals conceded this season, excluding penalties. And asked whether he feels the issues are due to personnel or defensive structure,
Nathan Jones responded: “It’s a bit of both. We need to be more aggressive. Are we aggressive? I mean, to be fair, before we came in, we looked at it and we knew we needed to improve it. Size-wise we’re not the biggest – we’re probably one of the smallest Premier League sides in terms of a squad. We’ve got to be really, really organised, really aggressive, really structured. Which we are in terms of the work we do. I couldn’t have been any more aggressive yesterday in the way I went about certain things but we got blocked today naively. Two people got between two centre-halves and it can’t happen. It just can’t happen. It almost cost us last week (vs Everton) where zones weren’t in the right place. So when the ball comes in, it looks like it’s a free header but it’s not. That ball should land on a zone but the zone wasn’t there. I’ve come from a level and levels below that where it’s Land of the Giants. So you have to be really good. If you to League Two, League One and Championship everyone is bigger and stronger and you have 6ft and 7ft. That’s not the case here, but we’ve got to be better. It’s just moments. We defended three or four and then we went to sleep on one. We want to be disciplined, show aggression, be bold and clinical – those are the four things we ask for constantly but it was discipline which let us down today.”
This same problem plagued Ralph Hasenhuttl’s team last season as only Leeds United conceded more times from set-pieces, excluding penalties, than Saints.
Nathan Jones said: “It’s a massive number that we’ve conceded and we shouldn’t do that. It’s not like people have been really clever – people are going against the process. If we are more disciplined and are aggressive in our zones then we won’t concede. The club I came from, we were the best in the league at it. You don’t suddenly become bad. You’ve still got to defend your box and that’s what we’re not doing.”
