Aerial Control: Harnessing the power of floated crosses and strategies for elite teams against them – set-piece analysis

A floated cross is a cross that has a higher path than the normal one. This means that the cross takes a long time across the air, starts to lose its speed at a high point, and then, the ball starts its journey to fall. You may remember many teams that use this kind of corners, and you usually feel afraid when your favourite local team faces a team using this strategy because the ball drops from a high point to the best header of the opponent who can push, jump and shoot or tries to pass the ball by his head into the crowded six-yard and the chaos begins.

At first glance, you think that this strategy is no longer a high-level one because, this time, it gives the defending teams the time to react, which means that it isnt allowable to use the modern tactics of set pieces with runs, fake runs, blocks and screens to form gaps in the defending scheme. You may be right, especially after elite teams find many ways to deal with this strategy, but there are still some effective tactics used in elite leagues, as we will explain.

In this tactical analysis, we will explain how using floated crosses is a useful and effective way to dominate the attacking corners if you have an excellent player at aerial duels in not-high-level competitions while being less effective in high-level ones because elite teams have counter ideas to use against them.

General benefits against the marker

Floated crosses can give a huge advantage to a team that has an excellent player, or more, at aerial duels because of two main reasons:

1- An isolation situation, a clear 1-v-1 conflict.

2- Orientation problems.

Starting with the first point, floated crosses give the excellent attacker a way to show his abilities of winning the aerial duel against the man marker far away from the zonal defenders or in a nearer position if the opponent defends with a man-marking defending system.  But how does this isolation situation show the ability difference?!

When the ball reaches the highest point and starts to fall away from the zonal markers, the two competitors start to measure when and where the ball lands, and this measurement is an ability that can make a difference, so it is the first conflict.

The second conflict is that the attacker has also time during this long journey of falling to push the defender using the power mismatch or by measuring the highest point he can jump to from a steady estate. In contrast, the defender cant, because of the ability difference at jumping or at power, as we have mentioned, by using his hands to fix the defender down.

As an example, you can find Lewis Dunk, highlighted in the first photo below. He pushes the marker and moves a bit to the right when the taker moves and then moves to the left when his marker is busy with the ball in the air, in yellow, as shown in the second and third photos.

In the fourth photo, when Dunk measures that the ball becomes nearer, he pushes the market away, then jumps putting his hand on the marker to fix him down.

He wins the duel, but a zonal defender comes back to the near post to save the ball, as shown in the two following photos below.