In Serie A, Juventus ranks second after playing 12 matches and accumulating 29 points, trailing by a narrow margin of two points from the top-ranked Inter, who has 31 points. Given the team’s turbulent situation in the previous season, this constitutes a relatively satisfactory beginning due to sanctions and point deductions.
Juventus’ defence is good this season, and we all know that as they conceded only seven goals in 12 matches, making them the second-best defensive line in Serie A after Inter, who occupies first place and conceded only six goals. However, an essential factor that puts them in second place in an excellent position to compete besides their defence is their reliance on set-pieces to threaten the opponents’ goal.
Juventus are the best in almost everything in the attacking set-pieces in Serie A, as they are the team that scored the most goals from set-pieces with five goals and have the best xG from set-pieces with 5.60 and the most goals from corners with four goals, with Frosinone, Genoa and Atalanta. It is enough to know that they have scored 19 goals in Serie A, which means that more than 26% of their goals are from set-pieces.
In this tactical analysis, we will discuss the different tactics of Massimiliano Allegri’s team in attacking corners and how they are diverse and effective.
Overloading
They prefer to make most or all of their attackers stand together in a pack on the far post near the penalty spot depending on many different principles that they will rely on later: overloading, underloading and freeing players, so let’s start with overloading.
In the first photo below, the opponent defends with four players in the first zonal line: a short-option defender, a player to defend the rebound and four man-markers.
In the second photo, they aim to target the space between the last two zonal defenders by their best four attackers overloading this area to increase the possibility of getting the first touch while asking an attacker to move toward the near post to drag his man with him.
In the third photo, the plan works, and one of the attackers gets the cross, but the shot goes above the crossbar, as shown in the fourth photo.
Underloading
In some cases, like the previous case, maybe the attacker couldn’t direct the ball well because he jumped among too many defenders, so they also used a counter idea, which is underloading; so we will explain it in the following case.
In the first photo, the opponent defends with five players in the first zonal line, four players in the second zonal line and a short-option defender, so their idea is to move toward the near post, dragging and blocking the defenders who can go to chase the ball into the targeted area, where they have started, leaving only one or more attackers to be the targeted players. Let’s explain in detail.
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