Zenit’s free-kick goal vs. Rubin Kazan

Our set-piece analysis this week comes from Russia, with a goal from Zenit St. Petersburg’s match against Rubin Kazan. The example is a simple, but very effective and rare, routine from a free-kick.

We can see the routine starts with the player on the nearest zonal marker taking up an offside position to begin with, while a player stands over the ball showing an outswinging delivery. The target player starts much deeper, and, due to Rubin Kazan’s lack of staggering in their zonal structure, he is unmarked.

When the referee blows his whistle, this triggers the near post attacker to move from his offside positioning, and now get on the far side of his marker. He takes up this position and then plants his feet and widens his feet, indicating the creation of a block on this near post player. The target player can make a free movement from deeper into the space in front of this blocked zonal player, and so Zenit can score an easy goal.

We can see the original target player is able to just tap the ball home completely unmarked, and Kazan’s original positioning is slightly too far over, meaning this space is made even larger. The deep positioning of the target player allows them to escape traffic and to also build up some momentum in order to reach the ball first. That’s all there really is to it. A simple, yet effective, routine.